The social shaping of business behaviour in the nineteenth-century women's garment trades

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Stana Nenadic

Given their significant numbers, it is tempting to ask why such women failed to articulate their own presence in the world of commerce. Since many women in the food or accommodation trades were middle-aged and widowed, often with dependent children, it is easy to understand the absence of an aggressive entrepreneurial stance among this group. Indeed, securing a stable and safe income was their main objective. Among younger women, however, and particularly among dressmakers and milliners with life-long careers in business the situation was more complex, for as shown below, they did seek success, but they also engaged in deliberately cultivated strategies designed to obscure their involvement in business. This was not because they were ashamed of an active economic life or preoccupied with the damaging status-implications of being in business - indeed, most women in this sector came from an artisan or lower middle-class background and their businesses potentially represented upward mobility. Rather, it was because of the expectations of customers. Their business strategies were defined by a social and cultural agenda that de-commercialised their product; they were shaped not by the laws of the modern market economy, but by social expectations, some of recent invention, some located in rich traditions and cultural associations.

In all societies, clothing possesses rich and complex cultural meaning, and this shaped to a critical degree the business of clothing production in the nineteenth century. The products of the women's garment trades were both made by women and consumed by women in ways that stressed non-utilitarian satisfactions. This is one of the primary reasons why the sector evolved as it did, and why individual women entrepreneurs within the sector behaved in a manner that often appeared "unbusinesslike." Prior to the emergence of modern commercial society, when most clothing was made at home often from home made cloth, cloth and clothing held a special symbolic role. In western society, as elsewhere in the pre-modern world, the process of manufacture and the commodity itself were infused with spiritual value and ritual potency. The accumulation of cloth as a form of wealth, its role in gift-giving ceremonies and in the marking of rites of passage gave cloth a special semiotic meaning which was particularly constructed around the labour and culture of women.(19)

The development of capitalist cloth production ruptured the traditional associations with which cloth was imbued, and in particular robbed the female domestic spinner of a creative role in a critical area of popular material culture. With the loss of spinning, women were forced to rely on needlework as an avenue for cultural expression in the material world of goods. The Scots in the eighteenth century even had a special word - eydency - to describe the still, patient and virtuous labour of a woman engaged in domestic needlework.(20) Needlework, including lacemaking, embroidery and garment making, developed an important commercial dimension from the eighteenth century, but, unlike factory-made goods, individualised aesthetic elaboration remained a critical feature of the commodities that were made. This allowed continued scope for ritual and symbolic meaning to be invested in both the act of production and the act of consumption when made and performed by women. Some of the ritual and symbolism was traditional, some of it was newly elaborated, developing hand-in-hand with ideas about female sensibility and the nineteenth-century cult of separate spheres.(21)