"The works of women are symbolical": The Victorian seamstress in the 1840s.
Item
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Title
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"The works of women are symbolical": The Victorian seamstress in the 1840s.
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Identifier
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AAI9732923
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identifier
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9732923
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Creator
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Harris, Beth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Linda Nochlin
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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In an era (the "hungry forties") when government commissioners, religious reformers and novelists examined every aspect of the living and working conditions of the working class, concern and anxiety focused on one type of worker in particular: those women who earned their living with the needle. Richard Redgrave exhibited the first painting of this subject in 1844, and illustrations of lonely shirtmakers in garrets and young women sewing in crowded workshops frequently accompanied articles, pamphlets and stories. This dissertation examines some reasons for the prevalence of the figure of the distressed seamstress during two specific periods: 1843-1844 and 1848-1851. Virtually every source one consults (from parliamentary reports to melodramatic fiction) tells the same fairy-tale-like story: a story in which a happy, healthy and virtuous young woman from the countryside leaves her home to become a seamstress in the big city where she encounters an evil employer and/or seducer, and begins an irreversible decline leading to death and/or prostitution.;The sense of urgency evident in the constant repetition of the narrative of the seamstress's decline, as well as its use of one-dimensional characters and a melodramatic plot, suggests that it performed important ideological work: to secure definitions of "femininity" which had become increasingly unstable. Women and work became a hotly debated issue during the tense decade of the 1840s and seamstresses and sewing (in part, because of tremendous changes in the clothing industry) figured prominently in those debates.;The narrative of the seamstress's decline worked to provide solutions to the grave problems which faced England in the 1840s. The seamstress became an especially visible figure during periods of working-class unrest, and corresponding upper-class fears of revolution. An extremely sympathetic figure, the seamstress was used to envision the problems of the 1840s in ways which were unthreatening and workable.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
