Shirts, Shifts and Sheets of Fine Linen: British Seamstresses c.1600-c.1900: British Seamstresses from the 17th to the 19th centuries

Shirts, Shifts and Sheets of Fine Linen explores how the jobs of the ‘seamstress’ evolved in scope, and status, between 1600-1900. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, seamstressing was a trade for women who worked in linen and cotton, making men’s shirts, women’s chemises, underwear and baby linen; some of these seamstresses were consummate craftswomen, able to sew with stitches almost invisible to the naked eye. Few examples of their work survive, but those that do attest their skill. They took apprentices and generally made a good living by the standards of their time. However, as the ready-to-wear trade expanded in the 18th century, women who assembled these garments were also known as seamstresses, as were women employed by families to keep the household linen and in good order. By the 1840s, most seamstresses were outworkers for companies or entrepreneurs, paid unbelievably low rates per dozen for the garments they produced, notorious examples of downtrodden, exploited womenfolk. This book explores the seamstress’s change of status and the reasons for it, and hints at the resurgence of the trade today because so few 21st century women are now individually skilled at repairing and altering clothes.