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I have just hit episode three of Bridgerton, where a modiste — that’s a fancy dressmaker — scoffs about the upper-class women “simpering over their needlework, or whatsoever it is these debutantes must do to pass the time”.
MADAM YOU MAKE FANCY DRESSES! BY HAND!
MADAM YOU MAKE FANCY DRESSES! BY HAND!
Bridgerton talks a lot about women’s precarious position and restriction in Regency society. And one of the most common ways to express that in modern romance novels is for someone to disparage needlework and embroidery. Sewing is supposedly proper, and boring, and limiting.
I have lost count of the number of historical romance heroines who hate needlework. It comes up a lot. https://twitter.com/mizzelle/status/1066017416604540928
But this is an incomplete view of reality. Roszika Parker’s excellent The Subversive Stitch shows how historically women and girls both lived up to *and* rebelled against gendered limitations through needlework and sewing crafts. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-subversive-stitch-9781848852839/
According to Parker, the question of whether embroidery is limiting or liberating for women is an old debate, going back to Wollstonecraft versus Maria Edgeworth, and before. There is no one real answer, because the context is always important.
So: Bridgerton is set in the days before sewing machines: making a dress, especially a debutante’s evening gown, was an incredible effort. Every stitch of every seam, every ribbon, every flower, every single sequin was put on by hand.
Even in the lower classes, making family clothes by hand was a ton of work. You could buy secondhand and alter things, which was faster and cheaper — and which meant decorative embroidery was vital as a way of making something old seem new and special.
Ladies’ maids often received their mistress’ cast-off clothing as part of their wages. Not because they were going to wear it, but because they could sell it to the secondhand dealers who sold it to the people rich enough to want to show off, but not rich enough for custom work.
Austen shows us Lydia Bennet buying a bonnet only to take it apart and make it up more to her liking. This is your gentlewoman’s compromise between taste and thrift: cheaper to tweak something than order it custom-made, but buying even a bad bonnet saves time/trouble.
We have a thousand lovingly recreated maps of Waterloo, practically step by step, but I have yet to see one decent map of the secondhand clothing trade in England, even though that affected far more people’s lives overall. And oh, have I looked.
One reason why museums are full of fancy-ass court gowns and not so much everyday clothing is that the everyday stuff was resold, altered, cut down, repurposed, rehemmed, made into quilts, sold to ragmen or papermakers, etc. Clothing is a resource.
The fact is that the upper classes are easier to research because we keep more of their stuff: clothing, jewelry, letters, diaries, houses. If you keep rich people’s things you’re a collector or expert; if you keep poor people’s things you’re a hoarder or an eccentric.
This means when you’re writing about a time you haven’t lived through, your research is biased in favor of what survives. Fancy court gowns, the lives of people with money and power.
So when we say “women in the Regency,” a lot of times we really mean “white straight wealthy upper-class women in the Regency.” Because the evidence skews that way. And the incompleteness gains force and apparent truth by repetition.
For instance: “Women in the Regency were only allowed to sit at home and embroider, boringly.”
Except for all the working women who were bakers, factory workers, midwives, stationers, engravers, booksellers, shopkeepers, etc. Women with business cards: https://georgianera.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/18th-century-business-women-trade-cards/
Except for all the working women who were bakers, factory workers, midwives, stationers, engravers, booksellers, shopkeepers, etc. Women with business cards: https://georgianera.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/18th-century-business-women-trade-cards/
The incomplete picture becomes such an overriding cliché in the genre that someone can now write a working modiste, standing in front of a dress worth weeks of her own handiwork, talking about how boring and useless needlework is. It is completely absurd!
Things she could have said for the same effect:
-“Debutantes who dab at needlework like children playing in a paintbox.”
-“Three weeks’ of work for me, three hours’ wear for her.”
-about the silk, how far it had to travel, how it shows every flaw, how finicky to embroider on
-“Debutantes who dab at needlework like children playing in a paintbox.”
-“Three weeks’ of work for me, three hours’ wear for her.”
-about the silk, how far it had to travel, how it shows every flaw, how finicky to embroider on
But no, we get yet another variation on “frivolous, oppressive embroidery,” from someone who could not possibly seriously think it’s a waste of time when it’s how she earns what appears to be a fairly impressive-for-the-time income (she has jewelry and her own shop).
There are definitely historical romances that do wonderful things with embroidery, cloth, and dressmaking! EE Ottoman’s The Craft of Love has an adorable new cover and is the story of a trans silversmith and a quiltmaker: https://acosmistmachine.com/my-books/the-craft-of-love/
Alyssa Cole’s divine novella That Could Be Enough is a Hamilton-inspired f/f with Black heroines, one a seamstress: https://www.thelesbianreview.com/that-could-be-enough-alyssa-cole/
Carrie Lofty’s Starlight has an astronomer duke hero and a factory labor organizer heroine, in old-timey Glasgow: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Starlight/Carrie-Lofty/9781501107184
Tessa Dare’s The Duchess Deal has a seamstress heroine: https://tessadare.com/bookshelf/the-duchess-deal/ Ditto Maya Rodale’s Duchess by Design: https://www.mayarodale.com/duchess
Loretta Chase has a whole series with dressmaker heroines: https://lorettachase.com/blog/tag/Dressmakers
And my own Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics is an f/f between a lady astronomer and a bi countess who comes to think of her embroidery as art: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-ladys-guide-to-celestial-mechanics-olivia-waite
Upcoming: The Hellion’s Waltz is an f/f historical heist between a (bi) piano tuner and a (bi) silk weaver. My thoughts on fabric workers in historicals spilled into multiple books, lol: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-hellions-waltz-olivia-waite
