Abstract

"Rhode Island “Ready-Made,” Women’s Outwork Sewing, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy of Plantation Provisioning"

Seth Rockman, Brown University (seth_rockman@brown.edu)

This presentation considers the lives and livelihoods of rural New England women who sewed ready-made clothing for enslaved men and women to wear thousands of miles away on southern plantations. The rhythms of outwork were familiar in small communities where wives and daughters had long incorporated paid sewing into their domestic responsibilities, and in the process, brought a rising material standard of living to their families. As they mobilized women’s labor in the service of remote consumers, New England’s merchant-manufacturers found few opportunities as enticing as the prospect of furnishing a literal “captive market” with trousers, jackets, shirts, shifts, and dresses. That prospect came to fruition in 1830s New Orleans, along an expanding plantation frontier where slaveholders sought to maximize field labor by purchasing garments that enslaved people had previously sewn for themselves. As a result, countless men and women picked cotton and cut cane in clothing stitched by New England women who rarely saw themselves as complicit in the violence of slavery. Such women were, however, the outsourced workers of the American plantation regime, and the low-quality textiles they produced for enslaved wearers gave a different texture to their encounter with market relations, industrial transformation, and consumer opportunity. Payroll records from the southern Rhode Island textile firm that pioneered ready-made for the New Orleans market make it possible to gauge the impact of outwork sewing on communities whose fortunes were intimately tied to plantation agriculture. These entanglements were neither obscured, nor hidden in plain sight; as incontrovertible facts, they infused ordinary sewing and women’s understanding of skill with questions of moral responsibility that few chose to confront as they produced clothing for the nation’s most exploited laborers, degraded consumers, and politically controversial populations.