'Reduced to Science': Gender, Technology, and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860—1910

摘要

"In Germany," writer-reformer Virginia Penny mused in 1863, "many dress makers are men, and there is one on Broadway, New York." Penny's observation—one of many such comments sprinkled throughout her massive Cyclopedia of Woman's Work—reveals much about cultural distinctions between men's and women's work in 19thcentury America. The very incongruity of a "man dressmaker" affirmed a rigidly decreed sexual division of labor that assigned the making of feminine apparel to women; indeed, "man milliner" was an epithet leveled not only at men who made women's dresses and hats but at all who deviated from established norms of "masculine" behavior. On the surface, at least, there was little conflict between ideology and reality. Women constituted 98 percent of the nation's "milliners, dress and mantua makers" in 1870, a proportion that remained largely unchanged as the century drew to a close.