Reviewed by Edward S. Cooke Jr. | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3

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Reviewed by Edward S. Cooke Jr. | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Edward S. Cooke Jr., Yale University

The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. By Marla R. Miller. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. 319 pages. $80.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper). Labor and Laborers of the Loom: Mechanization and Handloom Weavers, 1780–1840. By Gail Fowler Mohanty. New York: Routledge, 2006. 290 pages. $75.00 (cloth).
Within the past decade, there has been a dramatic shift in the study of American textile production and consumption during the colonial and early national periods. The older, traditional paradigms that celebrated domestic self-sufficiency in the production of everyday textiles and decontextualized surviving examples within the constraints of connoisseurship or as antiquarian icons have finally given way after a run of more than a century. Recent studies on production have problematized the notion of homespun, drawn out a more complex topography of the imported and locally made textile markets, broadened the definition of technology to include social and cultural habits, and depicted a changing roster of weavers dependent on region and time. Studies of surviving cloth have shifted away from formal analysis of individual examples to closer study of the circulation of cloth, exploration of available choices, analysis of surviving objects made from cloth to tease out shop practices, and attention to the maintenance or reuse of textile goods.¹ Conceived with foundations in economic, cultural, and gender history, this new scholarship has shifted the issues of spinning, weaving, and sewing from the background to center stage.	1
Marla R. Miller's The Needle's Eye reveals the previously overlooked work of women in the clothing trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though Miller grounds her study in the particulars of the upper Connecticut River valley, she connects the local evidence to larger historical questions. Evidence of female craftwork has been difficult for other scholars to highlight, but Miller carefully sifts through account books, diaries, and surviving objects to sketch in the various economic relationships among women. Close attention to the handwriting in one account book thought to be that of a man, for example, reveals that the man and his wife each recorded their transactions in the same volume. Correlation of different sources also proves essential to uncovering the web of female sewing. A description of the same job in two account books demonstrates that married women did not stop sewing but rather had their accounts settled in their husbands' names. In effectively arguing for the importance of female craftwork in preindustrial America, Miller blends Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's notion of "female economies" and my own notion of artisanal "social economies" to furnish a richer picture of the production, consumption, and circulation of clothing.²	2
For women working in the clothing trades, Miller describes a spectrum of possibilities dependent on class or life cycle: ornamental needleworking, such as embroidered pictures or quilted petticoats, which supplied opportunities for gentry women to reaffirm their social exclusiveness through shared aesthetic sensibility or fashion knowledge; informal needleworking that occurred irregularly and often simply settled debts or generated household income as needed; consistent skilled needleworking, in which women cut and constructed simple garments, assembled more complex garments cut out by tailors, or mended and altered garments; and mantua-making, in which women cut and assembled the most complex clothing. For each of these categories, Miller offers protagonists whose lives she fleshes out, explicating backgrounds and activities to shed light on opportunities and motivations. Elizabeth Porter Phelps, who kept a daily journal, pursued ornamental work. Working like Phelps in the Hadley, Massachusetts, area were Easter Fairchild Newton and her daughter, Tryphena Newton Cooke, who took in impromptu needlework in addition to tavern keeping and other sporadic jobs. Women such as Tabitha Clark Smith and Rebecca Dickinson, the former married and the latter single her entire life, were skilled needleworkers in the community. Catherine Phelps Parsons, the preeminent gownmaker of the region, dominated women's and men's tailoring in the Northampton area.	. . .

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