| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Marla R. Miller. The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 302. Cloth $80.00, paper $24.95.
Moving from the celebrated upholsterer and legendary flag maker Betsy Ross to Mattel's Colonial Barbie, complete with eighteenth-century garb and quilt work, Marla R. Miller asks readers to reconsider the place of women's needlework in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After evoking such mythologized and fabricated figures, this careful, richly detailed study unravels and reconstructs the working lives of unknown and unsung real women who plied the needle in the midst of multiple revolutions. In examining how women artisans experienced the clothing trades against the backdrop of early consumer and industrial transformations, Miller discovers "the extraordinary tenacity, and elasticity, of cultural constructions surrounding women and work, which have responded to economic exigency as circumstances demanded" (p. 6). As a focus for understanding women's work, the clothing trades present a good choice, employing more women in early New England than any other line of work outside of domestic service, and embracing a variety of occupational titles and activities.	1
Miller organizes her study into three parts. Her debt to and appreciation of the work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich are clear. In the first section, Miller concentrates on clothing consumption and production, displaying an impressive ease and familiarity with terminology and techniques that will make this study a useful reference for anyone interested in changing fashions, material culture, and consumer experiences in the period.	. . .

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