Clothing and Fashion in Southern History

Ted Ownby, Becca Walton, Ted Ownby, Becca Walton

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496829528
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Contributions by Grace Elizabeth Hale, Katie Knowles, Ted Ownby, Jonathan Prude, William Sturkey, Susannah Walker, Becca Walton, and Sarah Jones WeickselFashion studies have long centered on the art and preservation of finely rendered garments of the upper class, and archival resources used in the study of southern history have gaps and silences. Yet, little study has been given to the approach of clothing as something made, worn, and intimately experienced by enslaved people, incarcerated people, and the poor and working class, and by subcultures perceived as transgressive. The essays in the volume, using clothing as a point of departure, encourage readers to imagine the South's centuries-long engagement with a global economy through garments, with cotton harvested by enslaved or poorly paid workers, milled in distant factories, designed with influence from cosmopolitan tastemakers, and sold back in the South, often by immigrant merchants. Contributors explore such topics as how free and enslaved women with few or no legal rights claimed to own clothing in the mid-1800s, how white women in the Confederacy claimed the making of clothing as a form of patriotism, how imprisoned men and women made and imagined their clothing, and clothing cooperatives in civil rights–era Mississippi. An introduction by editors Ted Ownby and Becca Walton asks how best to begin studying clothing and fashion in southern history, and an afterword by Jonathan Prude asks how best to conclude.

WPA SEWING PROJECTS

A Case Study in Southern Encounters with the New Deal Welfare State

SUSANNAH WALKER

The September 1936 issue of the Louisiana Works Progress Administration’s monthly bulletin described the state’s sewing projects, active in fifty parishes, as “‘bee-hives’ … humming with activity” in which “3,000 women are happily at work making clothing and household articles for the needy of their communities.” The article noted that “the sewing units make garments as nearly as possible to fit the individuals for whom they are intended,” emphasizing that the women on the project not only earned a living, and learned “the arts of sewing,” but also attended lectures each week in homemaking, childcare, and personal hygiene.¹ The piece was typical of promotional writing about sewing rooms in the South and the nation, a message often echoed in the local press. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and its predecessor program under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) were conceived by their administrator, Harry Hopkins, as a way to provide breadwinners with employment rather than the dole—“work relief” instead of “direct relief.” Hopkins also imagined WPA projects as a way to keep sharp, and improve, workers’ skills. The director of women’s work for FERA and for the Women’s and Professional Projects (WPP) division of the WPA was Mississippi native Ellen Woodward. Woodward fought, with variable success, to ensure women eligible for work relief found opportunities in the WPP that matched their skills, and she supported the idea that projects like the sewing rooms, set up primarily for women without work experience, should provide training to make these women more employable in the private sector. In practice, however, most local sewing-room administrators emphasized the points in the Louisiana article: the usefulness to needy families of the items produced, the wages sewing-room workers earned, and training that emphasized female domesticity.

Women, on average, made up 15 percent of WPA workers between 1935 and 1942, reaching a peak of over four hundred thousand in 1938. More than half of the women who held WPA jobs worked in sewing-rooms, repairing and manufacturing clothing and household linens for families on relief. Sewing projects were also the largest category of nonconstruction WPA projects, both in terms of cost and numbers employed.² Sewing projects were a highly visible part of the WPA work-relief programs in all the southern states.³ Writing about the development of the welfare state in southern history, Elna C. Green points out that the New Deal era represented a time when southern states were playing catch-up with the nation to build their social welfare infrastructures. At the same time, because of its disproportionate power in the Democratic Party, the region played a decisive role in shaping what the American welfare system would be like, a situation that resulted in a decentralized structure that allowed, among other things, for state and local governments to control how the system would (or would not) work for their poor populations, and more specifically, how it would (or would not) work for African Americans.⁴

The work-relief sewing projects illuminate these and other aspects of implementing the New Deal welfare state in the South. Women’s project administrators throughout the region promoted the sewing rooms, with some success, as more than just a source of income for needy women, but as providers of attractive and functional clothes for people on the welfare rolls. In the context of a national narrative and New Deal rhetoric that portrayed the South as the ultimate example of Depression-era American destitution, supporters noted that garments made in sewing rooms helped people on relief to not look as though they were. This helped to promote a positive image for sewing projects, but it did not ensure their untroubled existence. The federal government did not operate projects directly; state WPA offices did that, and projects required partial funding from local sponsors, usually state, county, or municipal governments. In the South, many counties and states built their welfare infrastructures virtually from scratch in the 1930s, often in places with few resources and limited commitment to building them.⁵ Newspaper records suggest that sewing rooms in the region were constantly in danger of being shut down, even where they were popular, because city and county welfare boards (usually the sponsors of sewing projects) could not secure adequate funding from local governments. Furthermore, federal goals for the sewing rooms, as places to rehabilitate and train unskilled women for jobs that would make them economically independent, were unevenly implemented, in part due to lack of adequate resources, and in part due to the competing perception from local governments that the sewing rooms were only supposed to be a temporary source of income for needy female-headed households.

The role of states in administering the WPA, and of local governments in funding them, also facilitated racial discrimination, and impeded African Americans’ efforts to seek redress. All southern sewing projects were segregated, and the WPA’s Washington office routinely rerouted discrimination complaints it received to state WPA administrators to investigate. Such investigations usually exonerated sewing-room supervisors and local welfare boards of any wrongdoing.

WPA Clothes and Combating the “Look” of Poverty

Because the garments and other articles made in WPA sewing rooms were distributed to families on local relief rolls, the look and quality of the clothes was important to administrators, sewing-room supervisors, and sewing-room workers. The clothes were supposed to be attractive and up-to-date, a goal that reflected the New Deal emphasis on WPA projects that did not just employ people, but were useful to, and appreciated by, the communities that benefitted from them. As a magazine published by the Department of Agriculture observed in a 1939 profile of the sewing projects, “Realizing that badly made clothes that stamp their wearers as welfare recipients would not build the morale of people already hard put keeping up spirits, WPA sewing projects have placed particular emphasis on making good clothes from attractive patterns.”⁶ Reports and press releases from state WPA offices in the South indicate that sewing projects, even in the smallest and poorest communities, strove to meet these ideals.

In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt famously characterized the South as “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.”⁷ This assessment was not necessarily welcomed in the South, where some continued to deny or romanticize rural poverty.⁸ And yet, the South was, for many New Deal administrators, a primary example of the kinds of social and economic deprivation, exacerbated by neglect and outmoded ways of doing things, that were fixable by modern government programs and interventions. One of the most visible examples of this was the Photography Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), whose director, Roy Striker, sent photographers across the country to take pictures of New Deal aid recipients. The Photography Division exhibited photos, and made them available to the press with the goal of documenting poverty, arguing for the necessity of New Deal programs, and invoking public sympathy for the poor. In the South, much of the Division’s task involved photographing the rural poor (most of them recipients, specifically, of FSA aid), as a way of critiquing the tenant farming and sharecropping systems the agency was working to reform.⁹ The photographers who took these iconic pictures, and the FSA who publicized them, have provoked criticism, then and since, for exploiting and embarrassing their subjects.¹⁰ Thus reports on the attractive clothing made in WPA sewing rooms offer an interesting, if not explicitly articulated, dialogue with the rhetoric of southern poverty such as that expressed in poignant images of ragged families in FSA photographs.

Many internal WPA reports and newspaper articles from southern communities praised local sewing projects for making garments that looked as though they were store-bought. “The overalls and pants we make can hardly be distinguished from ready made ones,” said one narrative report from a rural area in North Carolina in 1938.¹¹ A reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, writing in 1938 about clothing made on a New Orleans sewing project in a factory-like operation, observed that the clothing was professionally made without looking generic: “Not only is each piece finished in such a way that it cannot be told from a ‘store bought’ article but there is such variety of treatment and material that standardization is eliminated.” Dozens of sewing projects hosted open houses, participated in exhibitions, and put on fashion shows to proudly show off the garments they had created. At the same time, most of the projects in southern states did not really operate under factory conditions or use factory equipment. Even in large cities, most sewing rooms employed a mix of sewing machines and hand sewing, and many used patterns produced for home sewing. So, it is not clear that the majority of the clothing made on the sewing projects looked “factory made” or “store bought,” but it seems that project administrators almost considered it more important that it looked as good as store bought, and that it not make the wearers look like they were on relief.

Many proud descriptions of the clothing in state reports actually emphasized uniqueness and handcrafted details. A North Carolina WPP Report from 1938 observed, in describing a sewing room’s work on school clothes for local children, that “we have had an unusually varied supply of material for girl’s clothing and no two dresses have been made alike of any one material in any one county.” The same report remarked on boys’ clothing as well, emphasizing the importance of boys not having to wear the same clothes to school as they might wear to do chores at home: “We are making an effort to get enough pants and knickers made for boys so that we will do away with little fellows having to go to school in overalls. Our slogan is, ‘No overalls at school for children of relief families.’”¹² Projects consistently emphasized making school clothes for children, and project reports often made references to parents who had kept their children out of school for lack of decent clothes, before receiving WPA garments. “It is in the manufacture of children’s clothing that the sewing centers produce their most impressive results,” reported one Maryland newspaper. “The gayer-colored textiles are made into charming dresses that any little girl would be proud to wear.”¹³ In St. Louis, Missouri, the School Relief Fund, a charitable organization funded from the contributions of teachers and Board of Education employees, sponsored WPA sewing workers to produce clothing to be distributed directly to schoolchildren.¹⁴ A report from the South Carolina WPA was among many from other states in its assertion that their sewing projects had “supplied clothing for a large number of school children in acute need of it,” and that the children who previously were kept home from school for lack of decent clothes were now able to attend.”¹⁵ A 1939 report from North Carolina claimed that, according to school attendance officers, the sewing program had “increased school attendance by forty per cent (40%) and that children who wear garments made on WPA sewing projects are the best dressed children in school.”¹⁶

There is also evidence that local sewing rooms, rather than solely adhering to the latest factory-made, store-bought fashions, adjusted their production for local tastes. Many, many reports described embroider, smocking, and other handwork on children’s and infant clothing that reflected the individual skills and aesthetics of the maker. Several reports noted making clothes specifically to fit the intended wearers. A sewing room in Assumption Parish, Louisiana, reported in 1936 that it had completed over two thousand garments of different types made especially to fit the needs and tastes of various recipients: “For instance style was disregarded in garments made for the old country women who, in spite of more modern examples brought forth for their approval, insistently preferred the old fashioned, loose-wasted, full-skirted, ground-length top garment and long, full chemise with round, built-up neckline for an underslip.”¹⁷ Some sewing projects in western Virginia, perhaps taking a cue from some of the folkways-preservation projects in other sections of the WPA, experimented with local dyes, and enthusiastically reported on them to Ellen Woodward.¹⁸ A Louisville newspaper reported in 1937 about a sewing project in southeastern Kentucky making buttons using native materials. In this case, the motive was initially financial: the sewing room did not have the funding to supply store-bought buttons and turned to cross-sections of hickory nuts and corn cobs, as well as covered bottle caps, to serve the purpose.¹⁹ Necessity may have driven these material choices, just as the lack of industrial sewing machines surely affected the look of the clothes. Still, it seems that the net result of this effort was often clothes that were unique, made to order, and that sometimes featured fine handiwork, regional techniques, and local materials—clothes, in other words, that looked not like they came from a store or the Sears and Roebuck catalog, but rather, that looked like they came from where they were made.

WPA Sewing Rooms and Implementing a Welfare State in the South

In order to participate in New Deal programs, many southern states had to establish welfare infrastructures and bureaucracies where few or none had existed before. In communities across the South, newly formed county welfare bureaus sought to sponsor sewing rooms, first under FERA between 1933 and 1935, and then under the WPA.²⁰ Sewing rooms offered a number of benefits to underfunded local welfare offices that were often hard-pressed to meet clients’ needs. On WPA projects, sponsors paid for materials and equipment, and provided locations, while the WPA paid workers’ wages. In the case of sewing rooms, the WPA also provided textiles and occasionally, but less consistently, equipment, such as sewing machines. Welfare agency-sponsored sewing projects created jobs for women on relief rolls that paid more than they could receive in direct relief, and these wages were paid for entirely with federal dollars. The finished clothes would be distributed to relief families. The cost of all this to the sponsors was relatively small: rent on the necessary buildings (though this could be free if public buildings were used, or spaces were donated), and the cost of “findings” such as thread, pins, scissors, buttons, and the like.²¹ Nevertheless, even though they were relatively cheap, sewing rooms were vulnerable in communities with minimal welfare structures and resources. Small as they were, the sticking point was material costs. Unlike more high-profile WPA infrastructure projects in which city and county investment in materials (to build roads, bridges, public buildings, etc.) ostensibly served the entire population, the sewing rooms provided clothes only to families on relief.²² The fact that the WPA paid for materials used in sewing rooms, when it did not do so on most WPA projects, may point to a lack of local commitment to fully sponsoring sewing projects. However, this proved controversial in Washington. As Ellen Woodward pointed out in a 1936 memo to Harry Hopkins, sewing rooms received criticism for spending too much federal money on materials.²³ In the memo, she acknowledged the need for sponsors to contribute more, but when the WPA set new policies requiring this, it tended to lead to sewing-room closures and layoffs.

Sewing projects across the South appear to have been constantly on the brink of being shut down. Many were established on short-term timelines and welfare agencies had to reapply every few months to keep them open. Almost always the problem was limited funding. The sponsor’s share of expenses for most sewing-room projects was 7 percent in 1936, but county welfare agencies consistently found getting that funding difficult.²⁴ Following broad cutbacks in New Deal programs in 1937, the WPA mandated that the federal government would pay only 10 percent of what it paid out in wages for materials on any project, a policy that cut federal contributions to sewing-room materials by more than half.²⁵ A couple of years later, local sponsors were required to fund 25 percent of the cost of sewing rooms, a policy that caused a new round of threatened closings and layoffs.²⁶ In most cases where the issue was covered in the press, it seems county and city governments were unwilling or unable to put up the extra money.

In October of 1937 a dispute ensued in Jacksonville, Florida, over the additional $500 a month needed to keep the local sewing-room project going. According to the Jacksonville Times-Union, the Duval County Welfare Board cited its need to fund existing direct...