New Art Journal Page project - The Dressmaker

As you may have read, if you follow this blog, I have my Great Grandmother Catherine Sandman's 1929 sewing machine. As a young child, I actually met her, although at the time, she was suffering from a catastrophic stroke and my Grandmother Mabel was taking care of her in Ocean City, New Jersey. She has fascinated me ever since. I am fortunate enough to have a series of photographs of her from the ages of 16, 20's, middle age, and just before she died in her 80's.

During the time that I was focused on family history I found CAtherine in Phildadelphia on the Federal census living with her family, German Catholics just south of center city. Catherine was listed as a seamstress and I had the oral history from her daughter, my Grandmother Mabel, that they both sewed uniforms for the Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia. Most of my ancestors grew out of the fertile fields of South Philadelphia, which is where I, in fact, was born and raised until age 11.

My German ancestors in Philadlphia worked in traditional trades: brewers, bakers, dressmakers, watch repair. The tradition of sewing was passed down to me in the form of the quilts my Grandmother Mabel sewed for all of her grandchildren, one of which I passed on to my own daughter, Lavinia.

I didn't realize it at the time, by the course in sewing that was given to girls in high school in my youth, was to play a contual part in my life. From those early introductory lessons I lerned to make a skirt from a pattern. The paper patterns were a thin tissue of a pale cream/coffee color. I learned to use a device with a spoked wheel and colored carbhon paper to trace darts and other details from the pattern onto the fabric. Thanks to the Simplicity Easy to Sew patterns, when I was 18, working in Philadelphia at a publishing company, I could buy fabric in the many fabric stores and sew a simple stylish sheath dress in less than an hour for less than $5.00. It took about 1 and a half yards of fabric which I could buy on sale from a remnants table, and since I had been taught how the patterns worked, even such arcana as finding the direction of the weave of the fabric (not really that important in the kind of basic sewing I was doing), I had no trouble learning how to make up the simplest garments. Later, I used that skill to make my toddler's adorable little cotton overalls. These could also be made in under an hour for under $5.00 which was a great help as I was living on very limited income until the 1990's when I was able to supplement my meager income with part-time jobs. By the time my daugher was school aged, I was buy clothes because I had no time to sew. For all those years, I used my mother's Singer sewing machine. I have written about that machine in an earlier post this year. According to my sewing machine repair-man, Chuck McGowan, it is the best model Singer that was ever made. I would have to agree as it has been sewing for me for over 60 years and for my mother before me.

My high school education prepared me for a job in the clerical world. I guess if you put a simple, broad chronology to Women's Work, the kind that earned money (for the common woman), it would be housekeeper, seamstress, nurse, clerk, schoolteacher. All of my friends in my age group - 70's, were carried by the stream of current culture into the last three of those career choices. The generation of women that I knew from my mother's period were almost all home=makers, although one or two had jobs in offices as clerks, or saleswomen in department stores. In my Grandmother's generation all the women I knew were homemakers, housekeepers, or in my Grandmother Mabel's case, saleswomen. She worked in Stainton's Department Store in Ocean City on Asbury Avenue.

Her mother's generation were housekeepers, seamstresses, bakers, cooks.

The important point to me, however, is that they had a way to earn a living. My interest has also shown me that many women in my Grandmother's and Greatgrandmother's time worked in factories as well which I saw in photographs of the early textile mills. I guess the one thing I left out because it was outside my experience was farm work. I do know that many women from the lower economic class in Philadelphia were transported by bus to do farm work during harvest seasons in New Jersey. Many brought their children who also worked in the fields during harvest. Now that work is done by immigrant labor and by machine.

To get back to the tools of the trade, however, which is what my next pages in my Art Journal will be about, I have a deep fondness for these things which made it possible for women to free themselves, by however so small a degree, from total economic dependence and domestic servitude: the sewing machine, and this trade, dressmaking, seamstress, was a SKILLED trade! It also involved beautiful resources, fabrics, laces, buttons and beads, and creativity, at the same time that it demanded backbreaking labor and exactitude. Take a look at those dresses in the next museum you visit and the painstaking details of pleating and beading and fitting. Those dresses were a creative and a tormenting process, and a kind of prison for the wearer.

Recently I came across an interesting detail about the white dresses worn by the famous poet Emily Dickinson. They ahve always caused a bit of mystery in those familiar with the life and work of the great America poet. She 'took' to wearing the simple white garment at some point in her life and stayed dressed in them until she died, a recluse.

What I learned recently was that the style of dress was a common "house dress" worn by women in that time, loose fitting and relaxed and most importantly NOT REQUIRING A CORSET! Can you imagine spending your days laced up in a suffocating torture chamber of a corset restricting both your movement and your breathing? I can't. No wonder Emily opted for the house-dress.

Even this simple garment however, had many tiny pleats and lace trim on collar and cuffs. Lace, remember, was hand-made from about the 1500's to the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800's and early 1900's in factories. Lace was imported from such centers as Italy and Belgium where it was handmade by skilled craftswomen.

Even in my own childhood, women plied some ancient fiber arts such as crocheted doilies and tableclothes, as well as the yarn arts of knitting. I have sample of each of these arts and they are magical - to be able to take a length of string and turn it into a lacy filigree! But these skills are dying out in my generation. We all have too many jobs to juggle along with housework and childrearing.

Many years ago when I was in Mexico, I bought a shopping bag finger woven from cactus fiber! I wish I still had it, it was unbrakeable but I have long since lost it. It is a long thread from those early women taking a fiber and figuring out how to turn it into a frabric, to the seamstresses making shirtwaists and ballgowns and the factory workers keeping eh bobbins loaded and the machines running.

Happy Trails along the thread that runs so true! wrightj45yahoo.com