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Gender, Artisanry, and Craft Tradition in
Early New England: The View through
the Eye of a Needle
Marla R. Miller
| In 1769, tailor Robert Robinson reproached the gentlemen of Hartford, Connecticut, for allowing their clothing to be made by women. Placing a notice in the advertising columns of the Connecticut Courant, he urged readers to "count up the cost / and see how many pounds you've lost / By hiring women to cut your cloaths." Observing that any man of "wit ... loves to see his coat cut fit," Robinson suggested that employing women in the tailor's trade necessarily meant compromising quality.1 The disgruntled craftsman would have been no happier upriver. In that year, Catherine Phelps Parsons (1731–1798) was among those thorns in Robinson's side; she had a thriving tailor's trade in the growing commercial center of Northampton, Massachusetts, instructing so many apprentices that many of the town's early nineteenth-century needlewomen would owe their training to her.2 Parsons's career, obliquely captured in partial transcriptions of Catherine and Simeon Parsons's account book as well as oral histories taken in the early nineteenth century by Northampton antiquarian Sylvester Judd, holds a number of lessons for historians interested in gender, artisanry, and craft tradition in eighteenth-century New England. Careful consideration of the artisanal world of this female tailor of men's clothing contributes to a larger effort to unsettle and rethink the categories that have long shaped studies of artisans as well as scholarship on rural economies and women's work. Looking at the careers of Parsons and women like her helps refine further our understanding of the shifting gender divisions of labor in the early modern Atlantic world.3 |
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Among historians of women and work, a principal aim over the past twenty years or so has been to comprehend better both change and continuities in gender divisions of labor, generally as part of a larger effort to puzzle out why, despite enormous economic and social change, women on the whole continue to be relegated to the least remunerative, least secure, and least desirable jobs. One of the key insights to emerge from this collective effort is the extraordinary elasticity that the cultural construction of gender divisions of labor exhibits, demonstrating persistence as well as transformation.4 Within this scholarship, the study of the domestic economy of early American women has flourished and significantly advanced our understanding of the "female economy."5 We now understand, with considerable depth and sophistication, how gendered divisions and definitions of labor in housework, in healing occupations, agricultural labor, and other early American employments shaped early American lives vis-á-vis ever-changing economic, social, cultural, and political landscapes. The economy and society of eighteenth-century New England, as elsewhere in the Atlantic world, witnessed constant and dynamic change, including the feminization of some tasks and occupations and the masculinization of others. The acquisition and application of craft skill among early American women has garnered comparatively little attention in this literature, however.6 |
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