Sewing, Embroidery, and Patterns

Sewing was a common denominator of women’s experience throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Girls as young as five were taught to stitch at home, around the same time or before they were taught their letters. Those who went to school refined their skills in the context of their broader education. So central was sewing to the day-to-day realities of women’s lives, from childhood to old age, that it was most commonly referred to, and naturalized as, “work.” Yet the singular noun is misleading. “Work” encompasses a multitude of needlework practices that were undertaken in different contexts and for various purposes. The catch-all also masks a wide range of cultural and individual attitudes to needlework. Romantic women writers – all of whom were schooled in needlework themselves – reflect these multiplicities of practice and perception. Female characters are commonly seen “at work” in Romantic-era novels, and particular needlework practices or worked objects often serve as an authorial shorthand to convey a maker’s character. These same novels often rely upon readers’ tacit understanding of needlework hierarchies that value “fancy” work – from the making of samplers to stitched pictures and surface embroidery – above the plain sewing all women learned or that prize the needlework undertaken by leisured women above the paid work of milliners, haberdashers, and dressmakers. As Romantic-era women novelists, playwrights, essayists, and polemicists lean on or challenge these hierarchies, they intervene in pressing cultural debates about the status and value of women’s work and female education.