Supporting the Family: Invisible Ancestors

I read many biographies---unfortunately none about women making a living off needlework. Important people merit biographies. But I do make notes on the women behind some of those important people---women who supported those some-day-to-be famous families by an occupation related to needlework.

For example:

Agatha Miller Christie Mallowen (1890-1976)

 & mother Clarissa Boehmer Miller (1854-1926)

Author Agatha Christie, according to an online biography, was born in 1890 in Southwest England "into a comfortably well off middle class family." Her mother was not so fortunate. Clara Boehmer Miller was born in 1854 to Mary Ann West and Frederick Boehmer. Nine years later Frederick died leaving Mary Ann with four children. Unable to feed them all she let her sister adopt only daughter Clara. Mary Ann supported her sons (until they could support her) "by embroidering pictures and screens, slippers, pincushions and the like...."

One might embroider a picture like this Berlin-work

piece in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum

but the well-to-do could also buy them finished and framed 

at fancy goods shops like James Bishop & Co. in London.

Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888-1869)

Bostonian Joseph Kennedy was father to an American political dynasty. His grandmother Bridget Murphy Kennedy (1821-1888), an Irish immigrant, was also left a widow with four children in 1858.

Doris Kearns Goodwin in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys notes that Bridget "went to work in a small notions shop at the foot of the ferry landings in East Boston....A strong-willed woman, Bridget kept her family together and eventually became the owner of the tiny shop."

Irish neighborhood in Boston, about 1900

Caroline Petigru Carson (1819-1892) 

after a painting by Thomas Sully, 1841.

Caroline Petigru Carson achieved a small amount of fame in her own right, but she is better remembered for her politically outspoken father (a Unionist in Charleston during the Civil War---outrageous!) and her equally outrageous sister, novelist Susan Petigru King. Caroline was born to Charleston money but somehow they frittered it away. When the Civil War broke out Caroline decided she was better off in New York City due to the pro-Union sentiments she learned from her father. A widow with two boys, she tried supporting herself with needlework and tinting tintypes.

I'd imagine some of the piecework embroidery

that women did for money was for elegant clothing

like this hand-embroidered gown worn by Dolley Madison in the

collection of the Smithsonian.

But much of it was probably more mundane

such as this white work cotton collar.

Caroline taught herself to paint and tried portrait painting too. Fortunately, Caroline and the Petigrus were enough of a symbol of anti-secessionist South Carolina that friends in New York saved her from poverty by buying her a house and giving her a sum of money. After the war she moved permanently to Italy and painted watercolors.

Illustration from George Reynolds's novel

Seamstress or the White Slave of England

Reynolds was only one author decrying the lives of seamstresses who labored for the luxury of the elite. It's hard to know what the underlying motivation was.

Mary Lincoln spent a fortune she didn't have in New York on

hand-embroidered silks during the Civil War.

The Shirt Maker

Supporting a sick husband

Theoretically the political sentiment was for a higher wage, but the many references to her misery were probably underlined with a disdain for any kind of working woman.

Sewing at night while the children sleep

 Sewing at home for a reasonable wage was a practical and not unpleasant solution to an age-old circumstance, the single mother.