Needle's Eye
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Introduction : early American artisanry : why gender matters1Ch. 1Clothing and consumers in rural New England, 1760-181025Ch. 2Needle trades in New England, 1760-181056Ch. 3Needlework of the rural gentry : the world of Elizabeth Porter Phelps89Ch. 4Family, community, and informal work in the needle trades : the worlds of Easter Fairchild Newton and Tryphena Newton Cooke114Ch. 5Family, artisanry, and craft tradition : the worlds of Tabitha Clark Smith and Rebecca Dickinson134Ch. 6Gender, artisanry, and craft tradition : the world of Catherine Phelps Parsons163Ch. 7Women's artisanal work in the changing New England marketplace185Conclusion : the romance of old clothes211
\ Journal of Social HistoryThis is a book that does justice to its subject. The Needle's Eye is a meticulous, nuanced account fo the many varities of needlework that engaged the energies of women in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century rural New England. Indeed, it demonstrates that its author is as talented a practitioner of her craft (history) as the most skilled of her protagonists were of theirs. Marla R. Miller combines impressive expertise in material culture with smart reading of fragmentary docmentary exidence to recover a vibrant social and economic world rendered largely invisible by nostalgia for an imagined colonial past.\ \ \ \ \ Journal of the Early RepublicThis is an impressively - indeed, beautifully - researched book.\ \ \ New England QuarterlyIn this impressive book, Miller brings together the insights of women's, labor and social history to make her readers think anew about topics we thought we already understood. . . . Miller does a stellar job of complicating the history she tells, and she almost never loses the reader in the complex story she weaves.\ \ \ \ \ Technology and Culture["The Needle's Eye is] witty, highly readable, and meticulously documented study. . . on the whole Miller accomplishes what she set out to do: show 'how assumptions about gender and work evolved during a period of remarkable flux.'\ \ \ \ \ The Journal of American HistoryIn the process, argues Miller, we have lost our appreciation of the true nature of eighteenth-century women's craft work. Lucky for us that she has painstakingly and elegantly recaptured that world, revealing complex rural networks of sewing and labor that reshape our understanding of women's place in the developing Atlantic economy.\ \ \ \ \ William and Mary QuarterlyThe Needle's Eye' reveals the previously overlooked work of women in the clothing trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though Miller grounds her study in the particulars of the upper Connecticut River valley, she connects the local evidence to larger historical questions. . . . In reconstructing the 'communities of practice,' Miller furnished wonderful insights into the world of clothing. . . . 'The Needle's Eye' is a clear, well-written account of female needlework in the late colonial and early national periods. . .\ \
