American soldier in Cuba in 1898 doing a sewing repair.
We posted this the other day:
Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, December 10, 1922. War Surplus.: Rather, I posted it for this big war surplus store advertisement on page 2. This is the earliest example of this I've seen.Surplus stores were a feature of my childhood and even young adult years in a major way. The "War Surplus Store" on 1st Street, on the Sandbar, was a somewhat disorganized collection of stuff guaranteed to fascinate a boy for as long as the boy's parents would allow him to wonder around in it, full of stuff dating back to World War Two. It's now closed, of course, and instead is the outdoor clothing store Gear Up.
That wasn't Casper's last surplus store, however. Yates, outside of town, fit that description, and was again fascinating. It probably closed fifteen or so years ago when its owner relocated to Australian with his Australian wife, figuring that, even as a younger man, that with his savings and Australian social services, he'd no longer have to work.
I hope that worked out.
Laramie had a really small surplus store when I first lived there, but it closed while I lived there in the 80s. Examples still exist, however. Jax in Ft. Collins keeps on keeping on, although that's only a small part of its large collection of wares, and Billings retains a good surplus store to this day.
This location is a parking lot today:
A sharp-eyed person (not me) noticed the item about "Government Housewives".
What on earth was that?
It turns out to be a sewing kit issued to soldiers.1
That reveals a set of interesting things.
First of all, sewing repairs were regarded as "women's work". I frankly don't know, to the extent that anyone does them today, that they still aren't.
I know how to sew for repairs and minor matters. My mother taught me, and from a young age if buttons needed to be put on my clothes, I did it. My father knew how to sew as well. And I'd note that from a military prospective, soldiers had to know how to sew. I was single while a Guardsman and all the badges, etc., that went on my uniform were put there by me, and they had to be right.
I suspect that the ability to do this was common knowledge while it also being the case that, if women could do it, in the divided labor system that predated the 1970s, they mostly did.
Sixteen-year-old Boston seamstress Helen Anderson, 1917. She was employed in a commercial shop at this early age. The good old days.
My mother also knew how to darn socks, which is something that nobody does now, and how to make clothing via a pattern on a sewing machine. She always had a good sewing machine. When she died, as I don't know how to use a sewing machine, I gave it to my mother-in-law, who is an excellent seamstress. The interesting thing here is that my mother gave up making dresses, which is what she had done for herself at one time, when I was pretty young. My mother-in-law used to make shirts for my father-in-law, but hasn't done that for quite some time.
When I was young this sort of work, seamstress work, was something associated with women. Now it's practically simply a lost art, by my observation. When my kids received letters in high school athletics, I had to hunt high and low to find somebody to put the letters on. I did, but interestingly the woman who did it was a Mexican immigrant, and likely learned the craft in her native country.
When I had to have a zipper installed on my Carhartt coat, which of course indicates that I'm too cheap to replace a coat that's otherwise serviceable but which has a broken zipper, I had a canvass shop here in town do it for me.
That's interesting for a couple of reasons, one being is that I had to think outside the box to get the repair done. My mother's sewing basket had zippers in it, which means that she was making that repair from time to time. That's beyond me, quite frankly.
I learned that it's beyond me as I tried to find a zipper for a pair of Army field pants. I like field pants, which are pants that go over other pants, although I usually just press Army trousers into that role. Somewhere I found a pair of genuine field pants of the old OD type and bought them. But the zipper is shot. It probably broke when the trousers were new, as they're nearly new. I thought I could replace it, but finding the right size zipper has been a chore. It didn't use to be.
Anyhow, I don't know how many clothing repairs people actually make anymore. Fewer than they used to.
Another sewing occupation, that of tailor, seemed to be a male job. When I was first practicing law, there was an elderly tailor here in town with a small shop right next to the Federal Courthouse. Now, that's closed and given his age, 30 years ago, he's almost certainly passed on. With the closure of the shop, the craft here closed with him.
Isidore Rubinoff, 1943, tailor for a Greyhound bus lines garage. Greyhound kept a series of such shops in an era when formal dressing was more important than it now is. Rubinoff is wearing a Greyhound tie chain.
The degree to which people had clothing tailored has changed enormously.
It's not as if I frequented tailors at one time, to any great degree, but it did used to be the case that if you bought a good suit, it probably received some "alterations" to fit just right. That was the difference between going into a good men's shop and buying a suit and getting one "off the rack". An "off the rack" suit isn't going to fit quite right. There's a real difference.
Places like Brook's Brothers had tailors working in the stores. Now, it tends to be the case that somebody will take your measurements, and it'll be shipped off somewhere. And this with suits.
Even into the 1970s, as odd as it may seem now, tailoring was so common that even enlisted soldiers used to have Class B and fatigue uniforms tailored on occasion. Not all by any means, but quite a few. I recall my uncle noting that about his induction cycle in 1958, noting that a lot of the same soldiers couldn't fit in those uniforms several months later, as the physical activity of basic training passed away. I don't know when this became a thing of the past for the Army, but it nearly, but not completely, was when I was a Guardsman in the 1980s. It was more common in the Marine Corps. I'll bet it's gone nearly completely now.
So here we have an interesting trend, or rather several trends.
And one of them again has to do with the division of labor. Back in an era when clothes were more expensive, mending them was more common, and while both sexes did it, it fell more to women than men. This wasn't part of the "patrimony", it had to do with the tightness of resources.
But more than that was going on, and to we really need to take a look back even further to really appreciate the change.
Which we'll do next. . .
Footnotes:
1. Apparently they were still issued into the 1970s, although by that time they'd required an off color nickname.
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