Women Behind the Work: Materiality and Identity Formation on and off the Eighteenth-Century English Stage

Abstract

Eighteenth-century Britons witnessed unprecedented growth in garment production. As modes of production moved away from a small-scale domestic model toward increasing mechanization and steadily growing fabrication of clothing for the middle classes, the period’s new methods of production relied heavily on the labour of women. Despite the considerable participation of women in the proto-industrial workroom, narratives of women employed in the garment trades remain largely understudied. One of the primary reasons garment trades women have received relatively little critical attention is that they are epistemologically slippery. Unlike the more affluent women of the period whose lives were often meticulously documented, garment workers are largely absent from the historical record. Beginning with popular and well-documented characters and persons in the eighteenth-century socio-cultural lexicon, this project traces networks of female labour that run between the playhouse and the workshop to illuminate the lives of women who have previously been relegated to the margins of discourse. Whereas intellectual history often focuses on garments and fashion as particularly important to female networks of communication, I argue that there is much to be gained by examining the women who made these items and the ways in which they are represented in literary accounts and historical records.