Category: Women’s Trade

Bonnet, 1860-1865

Headwear was a budget-friendly way to update your wardrobe. Every community boasted at least one milliner, and many made a decent living. Seasonal slumps could make income erratic: women usually bought hats twice a year, often re-trimming them at home. Milliners’ creativity, taste, and skill at nevertheless made them indispensable resources.

Straw, silk, and flocked cotton flowers. Gift of Sarah Hawkes Thornton 91.126

Milliner’s Model Head, French, 1838-1845, gift of Alice Staples Lane accession 778

2: Mme. Walsh’s Fashionable Millinery and Dressmaking, 1860s.

Some businesses combined dressmaking and millinery. Madame Walsh would probably have had a workroom in the back or upstairs, employing numerous cutters and seamstresses. Boston, 1860s. American Antiquarian Society.

Silk Dress Made by Rebecca Cram, 1853

Luckily and most unusually, we know the name of the maker of this dress. Rebecca was highly skilled: she cleverly cut and padded the bodice to minimize the appearance of her customer’s apparent curvature of the spine. Like many dressmakers, Rebecca was not listed in the census as such; her business would have relied on word of mouth among her neighbors.

Made for Sarah Ann Gault, Pembroke, New Hampshire. Silk with cotton lining and wadding, steel boning. Gift of Augusta Rand 3213