‘Ease to fit’: managing the intersection of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in dressmakers lives in Australia

Abstract

This paper explores a little studied area of women’s lives; the experiences of managing paid work alongside of family responsibilities, when the ‘work’ of earning an income was undertaken within the home, the domestic space. Focusing on the postwar years in Australian society I investigate the experiences of one group of women who worked as self-employed dressmakers, making clothing in exchange for payment within their own homes. A key focus of this paper is the coming together of the public and the private spheres through the intersection of paid and domestic work, and how this created a unique ‘space’ in which the dressmakers sought to manage their combined responsibilities within the boundaries of dominant gender ideologies. Drawing on contemporary understandings of space and temporalities to examine the physical and ideological conditions of their workspace, identifies a range of factors that affected their success in negotiating their location and reveals the individual and collective choices they made about how they did this and the associated outcomes they experienced.

Keywords:

• Dressmakers
• private
• public
• space
• time
• women’s work

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all the dressmakers who participated in this study for their time, and their generosity, in sharing their personal stories and recollections with me. Their interest and willingness to do so has contributed to building knowledge of women’s social and cultural history in Australia by providing a window into the often ‘hidden world’ of women’s daily lives. I would also like to thank Dr Kerreen Rieger for her support and supervision throughout the course of this research and beyond, and the journals reviewers for their constructive and encouraging feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenny-Lynn L. Potter

Jenny-Lynn Potter is a Melbourne based Academic with experience in teaching and research across the fields of Sociology, Health and Behavioural Sciences, and Gender and Sexuality. This article draws on material taken from Jenny-Lynn’s doctoral research, ‘For Fun or Profit’: Women Working as Home Based Dressmakers in Post War Australian Society, (La Trobe University, 2014), bringing together her Academic interests with her first great love – the making of clothing and fashion.