The Representation of Sewing Women in Godey's Lady's Book

Abstract

Godey's Lady's Book was the most popular women's magazine in 19^<th>-century America. Although the magazine enjoyed great popularity due to articles on fashion and manners of the upper social class, the impoverished seamstress and sewing housewives had suddenly described from the late 1840s. In this paper, I examine the characteristics and meanings of the representation of sewing women between the late 1840s and early 1850s in the magazine. Since launching, the magazine had printed the articles on embroidery as ladies' accomplishment, not needlework. However, with the expansion of national land and development of cities, the increase of subscriber, popularization of journalism, it is provided greater value to the sewing for domestic works and side jobs as "women's work." The single-mindedly sewing women came to function as the new symbol of femininity instead of the spinning and weaving women who had disappeared as a result of the development of textile manufacturing. The sewing women, which had been depicted for a little more than five years and disappeared along with the dissemination of paper patterns and sewing machines, visualizes not only the fluctuation of the division of housework and labor in American society, but also how the women became sutured into their home.