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Dissertation Information for Wendy Gamber

NAME:
- Wendy Gamber
- (Alias) Wendy E. Gamber

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Brandeis University (USA) (1991)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected

Title: The female economy: The millinery and dressmaking trades, 1860-1930

Abstract: "This thesis examines the custom production of women's clothing, a practice that endured until the twentieth century. It explores how millinery and dressmaking, socially construed as ""feminine"" pursuits, gave women access to skilled work and self-employment. It combines women's history, labor history, business history, and the history of technology to delineate the workings of a ""female economy"" in which almost all participants--proprietors, workers, and consumers--were women.

To be sure, the women's world of custom production was far from ideal. Hampered by limited capital, many milliners and dressmakers found entrepreneurship to be a temporary venture that lasted a few years at most; the precarious circumstances of proprietors often had dire consequences for those in their employ. Relationships between producers and consumers, although highly personal, frequently were contentious and exploitative. But for all their faults, dressmaking and millinery held out unique opportunities to women of the working classes: relatively high wages, creative labor, and the chance, perhaps, to open a shop of one's own.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological innovations, commercial transformations, and changing fashions challenged women's control over the making of feminine apparel. New inventions, many of them manufactured and marketed by men, threatened female craft traditions; more stringent credit policies, new imperatives of display, and the increasing dominance of the department store placed often insurmountable burdens on tiny female-operated concerns. Perhaps most important, the advent of simpler, looser styles made mass production feasible, replacing millinery and dressmaking shops with hat and garment factories that employed women, but were operated by men.

If ready-made clothing promised untold advantages to consumers, it posed a grim future for fashion's erstwhile producers. Factory work offered women few outlets for creativity or advancement; the single-sex shop gave way to the ""mixed"" workroom where male workers monopolized the most desirable and remunerative positions. In sum, the ""democratization of fashion"" was nothing less than a gendered transformation, one that replaced highly skilled crafts largely controlled by women with unskilled processes largely controlled by men."

MPACT Scores for Wendy Gamber

A = 1
C = 1
A+C = 2
T = 1
G = 1
W = 1
TD = 1
TA = 0
calculated 2010-09-22 19:10:52

Advisors and Advisees Graph