| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. By Marla R. Miller. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. xvi, 302 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 1-55849-544-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-55849-545-2.)

The ease with which we buy clothes today makes it difficult to grasp how much time early Americans spent on making and maintaining their apparel. In her study of garment production in western New England's Connecticut River valley from the 1760s to 1812, Marla R. Miller deepens our understanding of the growing importance of clothing in a rapidly evolving consumer society and of women's pivotal role in meeting the demand for everything from basic work clothes to elaborately quilted petticoats. The core of this book is a microstudy of six women whose sewing skills have survived through accounts, memoranda, diaries, letters, and the clothing and embroidery that were the products of their needles. In the tradition of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Miller gives a detailed analysis of this written and material evidence that builds on and significantly expands the scholarship of New England women, American craft production, and the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of clothing in early America. Miller makes a strong case for the need to rethink eighteenth-century American artisanal traditions by including women. Needlework, like cabinetmaking or weaving, had many levels of training, skill, and practice that fit nicely into the fluctuations of a rural economy, providing needed income, a way to a better life, or an important means of social networking.

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