Product Description

Among the enduring stereotypes of early American history has been the colonial Goodwife, perpetually spinning, sewing, darning, and quilting, answering all of her family s textile needs. But the Goodwife of popular historical imagination obscures as much as she reveals; the icon appears to explain early American women s labor history while at the same time allowing it to go unexplained. Tensions of class and gender recede, and the largest artisanal trade open to early American women is obscured in the guise of domesticity.

In this book, Marla R. Miller illuminates the significance of women s work in the clothing trades of the early Republic. Drawing on diaries, letters, reminiscences, ledgers, and material culture, she explores the contours of working women s lives in rural New England, offering a nuanced view of their varied ranks and roles skilled and unskilled, black and white, artisanal and laboring as producers and consumers, clients and craftswomen, employers and employees. By plumbing hierarchies of power and skill, Miller explains how needlework shaped and reflected the circumstances of real women s lives, at once drawing them together and setting them apart.

The heart of the book brings into focus the entwined experiences of six women who lived in and around Hadley, Massachusetts, a thriving agricultural village nestled in a bend in the Connecticut River about halfway between the Connecticut and Vermont borders. Miller s examination of their distinct yet overlapping worlds reveals the myriad ways that the circumstances of everyday lives positioned women in relationship to one another, enlarging and limiting opportunities and shaping the trajectories of days, years, and lifetimes in ways both large and small. The Needle s Eye reveals not only how these women thought about their work, but how they thought about their world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3275249 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 302 pages

Review
This is an impressively -indeed, beautifully- researched book. --Journal of the Early Republic, Summer 2008

"Explores women's work in the textile and clothing trades of the Revolutionary and early Republican eras through the lives of six women who lived in and around the village of Hadley, Mass." -- Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2006

"(P)rocess argues Miller we have lost our appreciation of the true nature of the eighteenth-century women's craft work. Lucky for us that she has painstakingly and elegantly recaptured that world, revealing complex rural networks of sewing and labor that reshape our understanding of women's place in the developing Atlantic economy." -- The Journal of American History, June 2007

In this impressive book, Miller brings together the insights of women's, labor and social history to make her readers think anew about topics we thought we already understood. . . . Miller does a stellar job of complicating the history she tells, and she almost never loses the reader in the complex story she weaves. -- New England Quarterly, Dec. 2007

Marla R. Miller's The Needle's Eye reveals the previously overlooked work of women in the clothing trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though Miller grounds her study in the particulars of the upper Connecticut River Valley, she connects the local evidence to larger historical questions. ... In reconstructing the "communities of practice," Miller furnishes wonderful insights into the world of clothing. ... The Needle's Eye is a clear, well-written account of female needlework in the late coloinal and early national periods and frames Miller's argument convincingly within the nostalgic tendencies of the twentieth century, during which all needlework was telescoped into a singular sort of pleasurable leisure, stripped of its economic function or varied hierarchies. --Edward S. Cooke Jr., William and Mary Quarterly

Review
["The Needle's Eye" is] witty, highly readable, and meticulously documented study. . . on the whole Miller accomplishes what she set out to do: show `how assumptions about gender and work evolved during a period of remarkable flux.'

Review
Many of the relevations of Needle's Eye are startling, not least among them the weeks of labor required to make a man's coat from start to finish in the late 1700s.

Customer Reviews

a most welcome addition to the history of America and the history of women
At the core of this wonderful work are six rich and evocative portraits of fascinating women from the early history of Massachusetts, each involved in the clothing trades. In her research, Miller has called upon diaries, contemporaneous journalistic accounts and public records, seeming to have left no scrap of historical cloth on the floor. Her careful attention to detail is as remarkable as it is welcome. For all this, the narrative is paced quickly and efficiently, and the result might have been fashioned--miraculously--from a single piece of cloth. Miller's vivid prose brings to life us an important and much-overlooked chapter in American history.