Female chores or labor? Women who sew in Buenos Aires, 1852-1862

Abstract

The present article proposes to focus on experiences related to sewing that did not necessarily imply being member of a trade, that only occasionally were remunerated, or that involved the transmission of needle craft knowledge considered feminine, in the city of Buenos Aires in the mid-nineteenth century. At a time of intense political and economic change, the aim is to look into the trajectories of women who were dedicated to mending their family’s clothes and occasionally sewing pieces for money, who worked in other people’s homes as maids and maids and whose ability to sew it was specifically required by their employers, elite girls who embroidered in their free time and women employed in teaching girls how to sew in some of the city’s schools. With the tools of social history and through the analysis of the local press, population censuses and municipal documentation, I try to reflect on what was considered work (and what was not) at that time and place, what were the ideas of qualification and what marks of gender, race and class impregnated those senses, for these women and for their contemporaries.