Sewing stories from oral history and autobiography
THE POINT OF THE NEEDLE Why sewing matters
BARBARA BURMAN 288pp. Reaktion. £15.95.
BARBARA BURMAN became interested in the stitch “as perhaps one of the smallest things a historian could think about” during research for her book The Pocket: A hidden history of women’s lives, 1660–1900, written with Ariane Fennetaux (TLS, September 6, 2019). Tie-on fabric pouches formed a subcutaneous layer to women’s clothing for centuries and were a way of keeping useful, if sometimes surprising, things close (more often than not money, keys and “husswifs” – a roll containing a basic sewing kit – but in one case a live duck). Some pockets were elaborate, others workaday, but all were personal. Women mostly made their own, and Burman discovered just how variable the stitching could be:
“I could see botched stitches, I could see hasty stitches, I could see ... beautiful 18th century stitching, and really, really bad stitching”. Whatever the quality, makers left something of themselves in the fabric. In 1785 a victim of theft recognized her own handiwork, saying, “One of the black coats I know particularly, by having a little darn of my own darning, I am quite sure of it”.
The Point of the Needle: Why sewing matters is based on two surveys. The first is an oral history project conducted in 1995, Home Dressmaking Reassessed, in which Burman persuaded the oldest women she could find to tell their sewing stories. The second project, Our Sewing Stories (2020–2), is a collection of more than 100 stitching autobiographies, collected by Burman during Covid. They form a bank of tacit knowledge from determined sewists who for all sorts of reasons, whether personal or political, refuse to abandon hand work in the name of progress.
The author is interested in the lives of ordinary people and their untold stories. The freshness of the needlewomen’s recall in the first part of the book is striking, reinforcing the relationship between material culture and memory that so fascinates Burman. Although many of the tales are bathed in nostalgia, the recollection of a recalcitrant buttonhole wet with a schoolgirl’s tears reflects the brutality of early sewing education. Today home sewing is a matter of choice and pleasure, at least in time-rich societies, but in the past it was often a matter of drudgery, particularly for poor families where the mending basket never seemed to be emptied.
The second half of the book expands from the personal (the “emotional” needle) to the social tissue of clothing and its making, taking in the “political” needle and the “radical”
