1 Sleeve X 1000, by Nikko Snyder

(Originally published in good girl magazine No. 1, Spring 2001.)

Sewing was a natural, unquestionable part of my mother’s life. She grew up in a house with six boys, three girls, one mother and no father, and she sewed her own clothes because she wanted something to wear other than hand-me-downs. When she grew up, she went to art school to study textiles.

At some point my mother stopped sewing. Maybe becoming a single mom was the reason, or maybe she figured out that there were other, "higher" forms of art for her to make. At any rate, sewing was gone. For my part, I sewed a few things in home ec and then never thought about it again.

That’s about as far back as sewing and I go. I’ve thought of sewing only rarely and as something with little value in the real world, a waste of time and talent. I’ve thought vaguely that it’s somehow offensive that mothers and grandmothers spent all that time doing unpaid labour, and that they didn’t have the opportunity to do anything better. When I was alerted to the fact that other women, who I don’t know and who live far away, get paid my pocket change to sew my khakis, it made me think vaguely that sewing was even worse than I thought.

When I became aware of and embarrassed by this oversimplification, it was like something startling came out of the blue that caused me to do a double take and then remove the ViewMaster that society gave me to look through as a child. Suddenly I was looking through the eyes I was born with, the eyes I used before the propaganda came. What I suddenly saw clearly was this: sewing is a complicated part of my history and a profound symbol, not just for the women that sew, but for women’s history.

Sewing has been defined historically, by a male dominated society, as nothing more than domestic labour, and thus intrinsically without the value and creativity of “real” work. This historical definition has been so ingrained in my generation of women that I, for one, feel that I have almost completely internalised the idea that the practice of sewing is worthless and something to be rejected without regret. In essence, I’ve turned away from this piece of history and have been ploughing ahead determinedly toward my better, freer, more creative life.

For most women who still sew (namely the women who work in the factories that manufacture the first world’s mass produced garments), the creative elements of sewing have been similarly dismantled by industrialisation and globalisation - better known as progress. In a factory, sewing is reduced to a technology that’s only goals are economy and efficiency. One sleeve times one thousand. Every day.

I don’t want to argue that sewing isn’t a symbol of the devaluation of women’s work both historically and in the present. What I want to talk about is how sewing can simultaneously exist as a symbol of women’s creative process, a process that has, throughout history, involved community, communication and collaboration: in other words culture. I want to understand how the erasure of creativity from this symbol has come to pass, and I want to challenge the idea that the rejection of this aspect of women’s history has gone largely unnoticed and unquestioned. In fact, many women are starting to reassess sewing as a potentially creative practice, redefine our own assumptions, and reclaim it on our own terms.

I was recently hit over the head with sewing as a symbol of creativity at an exhibit I visited with my mom, a show that elicited an emotional response from me that I neither expected nor understood. “Fabrications - Stitching Ourselves Together” is an exhibit currently showing at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto. The show, curated by sociologist Dr. Kathryn Church, documents the life and work of her mother, Lorraine Church, who has been the local, unpaid seamstress of a small Alberta town for over 50 years.

The exhibit consists of wedding dresses that Lorraine sewed for family and friends between 1950 to 1995. It also includes Lorraine’s biography (put together by Kathryn) as well as commentaries from the brides on their relationship to their dresses. I don’t think I could describe the show in any way that would come close to doing it justice, so all I’ll say is that I cried thinking that Lorraine’s work was almost never documented for me to see.

Lorraine’s life’s work represents a piece of history that came close to fading away into oblivion without ever being recognised for it’s importance. The show documents the practice of sewing as a creative process, one that contributed to the cultural fabric of the entire community. Her work represents personal expression and collaboration for Lorraine and all the people she sewed for: together, Lorraine and the bride/neighbour/collaborator would co-create a unique expression of both the woman’s self and the larger culture, in the form of a wedding dress. As with all great art, the essence of humanity is captured and represented in a created object.

The thing I find most remarkable about this documentation is that it redefines and gives value to sewing, something that has historically been devalued and dismissed, along with so many other aspects of women’s lives and contributions. It was Kathryn’s own rejection and subsequent gradual acceptance of her mother as a creative being that inspired her to redefine and celebrate sewing as a meaningful element of her mother’s life. She almost went through her entire life thinking that her mother’s life had no meaning.

How did it happen that I have been so effectively indoctrinated to believe that sewing is without worth? Why have I rejected this aspect of women’s history instead of incorporating it into my much freer present, using the tools of feminism to define it as I like? It seems to me that globalisation and industrialisation have efficiently stripped me of a positive, creative link to my history. Since I need to appreciate something before it’s possible to feel a sense of loss, sewing slips away easily. It was never valued in the first place.

Ironically, this silent and invisible theft of culture and history was facilitated, in part, by technology’s promise of the liberation of women from drudgery and toil, in the form of the sewing machine. From the time of its invention, the mechanical sewing machine has evolved from society’s solution to world poverty straight though to a symbol of the exploitation of the (mostly) women working in the world’s sweatshops (1). Over time, sewing has been removed from the home and inserted into the factory, an environment with little to no potential for creative thought or work, and where the stagnation of a woman’s creativity is probably the least of her worries. Meanwhile, back home in the western world, I have someone else sewing my clothes so that as a free woman I can have more time for higher pursuits, and so that as a consumer I can have unlimited choices when I go to the mall.

Although the mall is designed to overwhelm and impress with lights, signs and hundreds of stores, I never actually feel like I have much choice there. In fact, I would argue that my choices have all but vanished without me even being aware they were slipping away. I’ve been nearly perfectly indoctrinated to believe that handing over my personal expression to the Gap makes me a free woman, the corresponding belief being that anything else is without value. And so I turned away from my history, glancing back just long enough to blame it for the oppression of my mother and grandmother, just long enough to tell it I have better things to do. It was at this moment that something caught my peripheral vision and made me turn back and take the ViewMaster off for a better look.

I imagine it was similar for Kathryn Church. She couldn’t stand the idea that her mother had sewn all those wedding dresses for all those years for nothing. No money, no career, no independence. Kathryn never learned to sew because she had better things to do, and besides, she didn’t want to be reminded that her mother had wasted her life like that.

Judge. Forget. Move on.

But something made Kathryn look at her mother’s life again, from a different perspective, and start to see something worth celebrating. She began to see her mother as a creative being and reclaim sewing as a part of her history.

It may have been something similarly peripheral that made my friend Lesley start sewing pillows and knitting scarves. Something about self-sufficiency. And creativity. And history. All together.

Or my friend Amy starting to fantasize about sewing herself sundresses this summer, or my friend Janice sewing Christmas scarves. Or me, getting all weepy looking at Albertan wedding dresses; day dreaming about the Barbie scarf I knit when I was 7; mourning the home-made outfits that elicited teasing from schoolmates; and feeling uncomfortable because I fit in so well on the subway and in the mall that it makes me wonder who I am.

Sometimes when something important nearly slips away, things start to change. Maybe that’s what it takes to start really looking, looking so hard that we realise something’s actually impeding our vision and that’s why it’s so damn hard to see anything clearly. And when you take away the thing that’s blocking your view it’s possible to start peering into uncharted territory, where women define what they like how they like. This new territory might not be inhabited by billions of sewing women, but it would necessarily transform women’s relationship with our history.

1 The Real World of Technology, Ursula M. Franklin, 1990, Anansi Press Ltd., Canada.

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