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A Sewing Rant
Dec. 28th, 2020 03:30 pmUtterly by coincidence, this year, I have read no less than FOUR books – all by women, all of them aimed at young readers – in which the main character’s saving skill, the skill for which she is recognized, and on which her future hangs, is dressmaking.
As I began the last one my heart sank. I actually wailed aloud, “Oh, not ANOTHER book about SEWING!”
I’ve read 75 books in 2020. Of those, ten were recent young adult fiction. The four books that inspired this rant are all brand new young adult historical fiction, all published within the span of one year, all by respected and award-winning authors. The stories take place over a seventy-five year time span in the 19th and 20th centuries, in four different countries. Each book has its own merits and an overarching plot that has nothing to do with sewing, and each is valuable reading for different reasons. But forty percent of the new YA fiction I read this year, FOUR good books by respected YA authors, were about seamstresses? What’s going on?
My personal complaint about Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, a beloved book which we can all acknowledge has serious flaws, is that its heroine, Wendy, is sewing in every single scene in which she appears. Go check. Even sitting on the Mermaids’ Rock in Neverland, she’s mending the Lost Boys’ clothes. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized this, on one of many multiple re-reads. I vowed, at the time, that I would never, ever use sewing as a way to give a female character a skill, or use it as a plot point. Ever since I noticed Wendy Darling’s interminable mending in Neverland, I have thought of Sewing as a Trope Representative of Demure Womanhood whenever it appears in fiction.
My mother made most of my clothes when we lived in Jamaica in the early 1970s. She used a 1960s electric Sears Kenmore “portable” sewing machine that weighed at least 15 kilos, and it did not have a “buttonholer.” My mother refused to sew buttonholes by hand, so when I begged for a dress with buttons down the back, she taught me to sew my own buttonholes at the age of eight. Five years later, when I learned dressmaking in Home Economics in junior high, I used the same machine to make my own clothes; and did so, still sewing my own buttonholes, until I moved to England at thirty-ish and bought a more up-to-date sewing machine.
I like making my own clothes. I’ve become an adept dressmaker and have some skill at designing. I can’t tell you how much fun I have making skating dresses for my daughter.
Sara as Anna, 2015. The dress was made using this pattern as a base and a number of online images of Anna's coronation dress in Frozen!
But although some of the other skating moms were so impressed they offered me commissions, I do not consider dress design to be part of my career skill set. It’s just something I can do, like making an angel food cake, or wiring a bedside lamp, or hanging wallpaper. I am pretty good at a lot of useful things that need doing.
It doesn’t mean I find them interesting to read about.
One of the authors of these four recent seamstress books put a great deal of effort into her historical research for her character’s sewing efforts, and seemed to know what she was talking about in general. As for the other three authors – well, speaking as an amateur needlewoman, it was patently obvious to me that none of them knew anything whatsoever about dressmaking in particular and sewing in general. This in itself irritated me – if I had made similar errors writing about horses, or engines, or baseball, a fact-checker would have been called in. Copyeditors would have made inquiries. Reviewers and critics down the line would have called me out.
To my mind, the only thing worse than a book about sewing is an inaccurate book about sewing.
I would also like to point out that up until about 1960, most ordinary women throughout the world were pretty good at sewing. It was a standard and straightforward domestic task, like cooking meals and doing the laundry. So being able to make your own dress, or embroider, or quilt, didn’t automatically make you special or give you a marketable skill. (Most of those ordinary women would have noticed the sewing errors in these books, too.)
But never mind the sewing errors. Never mind that sewing is even more boring to read about than it is to do. What I find truly alarming in these four books is the trend for enlightened, intelligent, modern women writing about enlightened, intelligent role models, to fix on sewing – this menial, domestic, womanly chore - as the single safe, acceptable talent and career option that they feel their historical setting offers to their female heroines.
I wouldn’t have noticed one book. Two was a coincidence; three was funny. But the fourth made me angry.
I have two requests.
First of all, consider other options for your historical heroines. Historically speaking, how about telegraph or switchboard operators, nurses or midwives, post-office workers, musicians or music teachers or even composers, social workers, farmers, actresses, x-ray technicians (yes), painters, photographers, horsewomen? I don’t know, make something up. Please. Pull back on the seamstresses.
Sewing isn’t just stereotypically feminine in the context of a career choice or talent bestowed by an author on a character: it’s far too easy. As someone who knows how to sew, I am offended by the assumption that it doesn’t merit the same amount of attention to detail and accuracy as, say, carriage-making or lighthouse-keeping.
Next: Think about your assumptions. I get why a writer would make her character a seamstress: it’s a skill readily available and straightforward to practise in a time when other skills might be difficult to acquire. But I feel that it’s just as much of a dangerous stereotype as making your nerdy male character a computer geek. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” As a writer of historical fiction, I know all too well how hard it is to see beyond our own familiar boundaries.
Our ancestors had different skill sets to ours, and that in itself is frustrating as well as fascinating. But they didn’t live in a cloud of darkness, waiting for the enlightenment of the 21st century. Many of them thought of themselves as pretty progressive. They tried to stay informed. They were creative too. They fixed things, or tried to, just as we do. They weren’t involved in their own world; they were involved in our world.
The whole point of historical fiction, it seems to me, is to highlight the connection between the past and the present, not to examine the past as preserved in amber.
And honestly, do we really want Wendy Darling as our role model?
As I began the last one my heart sank. I actually wailed aloud, “Oh, not ANOTHER book about SEWING!”
I’ve read 75 books in 2020. Of those, ten were recent young adult fiction. The four books that inspired this rant are all brand new young adult historical fiction, all published within the span of one year, all by respected and award-winning authors. The stories take place over a seventy-five year time span in the 19th and 20th centuries, in four different countries. Each book has its own merits and an overarching plot that has nothing to do with sewing, and each is valuable reading for different reasons. But forty percent of the new YA fiction I read this year, FOUR good books by respected YA authors, were about seamstresses? What’s going on?
My personal complaint about Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, a beloved book which we can all acknowledge has serious flaws, is that its heroine, Wendy, is sewing in every single scene in which she appears. Go check. Even sitting on the Mermaids’ Rock in Neverland, she’s mending the Lost Boys’ clothes. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized this, on one of many multiple re-reads. I vowed, at the time, that I would never, ever use sewing as a way to give a female character a skill, or use it as a plot point. Ever since I noticed Wendy Darling’s interminable mending in Neverland, I have thought of Sewing as a Trope Representative of Demure Womanhood whenever it appears in fiction.
My mother made most of my clothes when we lived in Jamaica in the early 1970s. She used a 1960s electric Sears Kenmore “portable” sewing machine that weighed at least 15 kilos, and it did not have a “buttonholer.” My mother refused to sew buttonholes by hand, so when I begged for a dress with buttons down the back, she taught me to sew my own buttonholes at the age of eight. Five years later, when I learned dressmaking in Home Economics in junior high, I used the same machine to make my own clothes; and did so, still sewing my own buttonholes, until I moved to England at thirty-ish and bought a more up-to-date sewing machine.
I like making my own clothes. I’ve become an adept dressmaker and have some skill at designing. I can’t tell you how much fun I have making skating dresses for my daughter.
Sara as Anna, 2015. The dress was made using this pattern as a base and a number of online images of Anna's coronation dress in Frozen!
But although some of the other skating moms were so impressed they offered me commissions, I do not consider dress design to be part of my career skill set. It’s just something I can do, like making an angel food cake, or wiring a bedside lamp, or hanging wallpaper. I am pretty good at a lot of useful things that need doing.
It doesn’t mean I find them interesting to read about.
One of the authors of these four recent seamstress books put a great deal of effort into her historical research for her character’s sewing efforts, and seemed to know what she was talking about in general. As for the other three authors – well, speaking as an amateur needlewoman, it was patently obvious to me that none of them knew anything whatsoever about dressmaking in particular and sewing in general. This in itself irritated me – if I had made similar errors writing about horses, or engines, or baseball, a fact-checker would have been called in. Copyeditors would have made inquiries. Reviewers and critics down the line would have called me out.
To my mind, the only thing worse than a book about sewing is an inaccurate book about sewing.
I would also like to point out that up until about 1960, most ordinary women throughout the world were pretty good at sewing. It was a standard and straightforward domestic task, like cooking meals and doing the laundry. So being able to make your own dress, or embroider, or quilt, didn’t automatically make you special or give you a marketable skill. (Most of those ordinary women would have noticed the sewing errors in these books, too.)
But never mind the sewing errors. Never mind that sewing is even more boring to read about than it is to do. What I find truly alarming in these four books is the trend for enlightened, intelligent, modern women writing about enlightened, intelligent role models, to fix on sewing – this menial, domestic, womanly chore - as the single safe, acceptable talent and career option that they feel their historical setting offers to their female heroines.
I wouldn’t have noticed one book. Two was a coincidence; three was funny. But the fourth made me angry.
I have two requests.
First of all, consider other options for your historical heroines. Historically speaking, how about telegraph or switchboard operators, nurses or midwives, post-office workers, musicians or music teachers or even composers, social workers, farmers, actresses, x-ray technicians (yes), painters, photographers, horsewomen? I don’t know, make something up. Please. Pull back on the seamstresses.
Sewing isn’t just stereotypically feminine in the context of a career choice or talent bestowed by an author on a character: it’s far too easy. As someone who knows how to sew, I am offended by the assumption that it doesn’t merit the same amount of attention to detail and accuracy as, say, carriage-making or lighthouse-keeping.
Next: Think about your assumptions. I get why a writer would make her character a seamstress: it’s a skill readily available and straightforward to practise in a time when other skills might be difficult to acquire. But I feel that it’s just as much of a dangerous stereotype as making your nerdy male character a computer geek. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” As a writer of historical fiction, I know all too well how hard it is to see beyond our own familiar boundaries.
Our ancestors had different skill sets to ours, and that in itself is frustrating as well as fascinating. But they didn’t live in a cloud of darkness, waiting for the enlightenment of the 21st century. Many of them thought of themselves as pretty progressive. They tried to stay informed. They were creative too. They fixed things, or tried to, just as we do. They weren’t involved in their own world; they were involved in our world.
The whole point of historical fiction, it seems to me, is to highlight the connection between the past and the present, not to examine the past as preserved in amber.
And honestly, do we really want Wendy Darling as our role model?