Lynn M. Alexander
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 29-38

This essay turns to mid-century Victorian England to reconsider the ways in which women, and women seamstresses especially, were routinely selected by women and men writers alike to represent the working classes and to illustrate the hardships and possible social repercussions of industrialism. Women and children were preferred as workers in factories and mills for a number of reasons, but because the seamstress was associated with domesticity, she presented a far more appealing image to middle- and upper-class readers, who were inclined at this time to associate factory workers with violent uprising and immoral abandonment of the home. Writers like Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Elisabeth Stone, Frances Trollope, and Mary Gaskell could deploy the figure of the seamstress to urge their readers to intervene on workers’ behalf. Paradoxically, it was the seamstress’s seeming lack of power that made her powerful as a symbol.