Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century

by Harris,Beth; Harris,Beth

• ISBN13: 9780754608714
• ISBN10: 0754608719
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The fifteen articles in this book address the appearance of the nineteenth-century seamstress as a 'real' figure in the changing economies of nineteenth-century Britain, America, and France, and as an important cultural icon in the art and literature of the period. It assembles the work of leading American, British and Canadian scholars from many different fields, including art history, literary criticism, gender studies, labor history, business history, and economic history to draw together recent scholarship on needlewomen from a variety of different disciplines and methodologies. Famine and Fashion will therefore appeal to anyone studying images of work in the nineteenth century, popular and canonical nineteenth-century literature, the history of women's work, the history of sweated labor, the origins of the ready-made clothing industry and early feminism.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	vii
List of Tables	ix
List of Contributors	xi
Introduction	1	(12)
Beth Harris
PART I: READING OUT
1 "Weary Stitches": Illustrations and Paintings for Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and Other Poems	13	(28)
Susan P. Casteras
2 Workers' Compensation: (Needle)Work and Ideals of Femininity in Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen	41	(12)
Arlene Young
3 "Let herself out to do needlework": Female Agency and the Workhouse of Gender in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit	53	(14)
Joellen Masters
4 The Retailoring of Dickens: Christmas Shadows, Radicalism, and the Needlewoman Myth	67	(20)
Ian Haywood
5 Chartism and Gender Politics in Ernest Jones's The Young Milliner	87	(12)
Ella Dzelzainis
6 The Melodramatic Seamstress: Interpreting a Victorian Penny Dreadful	99	(16)
Rohan McWilliam
7 All that Glitters is not Gold: the Show-Shop and the Victorian Seamstress	115	(26)
Beth Harris
PART II: WRITING IN
8 Business or Labor? Blurred Boundaries in the Careers of Self-Employed Needlewomen in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany	141	(16)
Susan Ingalls Lewis
9 Scarlett's Sisters: Spinsters, Widows, Wives, and Free-Traders in Nineteenth-Century North Carolina	157	(14)
Pamela J. Nickless
10 "Thinking and Stitching, Stitching and Thinking": Needlework, American Women Writers, and Professionalism	171	(14)
Jacqueline M. Chambers
11 "Furnishing Girls with Self-Supporting Trades": Custom Needlework and Vocational Education, 1890-1920	185	(16)
Wendy Gamber
12 Virtue, Vice, and Revolution: Representations of Parisian Needlewomen in the Mid-Nineteenth Century	201	(14)
Judith DeGroat
13 "A Heavy Bill to Settle with Humanity": The Representation and Invisibility of London's Principal Milliners and Dressmakers	215	(14)
Nicola Pullin
14 "Wanted: 1000 Spirited Young Milliners": The Fund for Promoting Female Emigration	229	(14)
Jo Chimes
15 "To Be Poor and To Be Honest...Is the Hardest Struggle of All": Sweated Needlewomen and Campaigns for Protective Legislation, 1840-1914	243	(16)
Sheila Blackburn
Select Bibliography	259	(8)
Index	267