Saving the Free Market’s Victims

By the mid-nineteenth century, the seamstress was a well-established urban type of industrial society. Presented as a pitiful, helpless figure who cannot prosper, she was marked in both popular imagery and texts as the primary victim of urban industrialization and the free market economy. Though never a persistent theme in U.S. fine art, the sentimental seamstress held a consistent place in the nation’s popular visual culture, most frequently in a pair of images presented as a narrative foil, juxtaposing the seamstress’ destitution against the comfortable affluence of the middle class. First employed as a capitalist critique in Britain, the seamstress pendant was reconfigured in the United States. Drawing on examples from Godey’s Lady’s Book, Harper’s Weekly, and sewing-machine trade literature, this essay explores how pendant imagery used the sentimental seamstress paradigm to spin stories of loss, possibility, and, ultimately, the triumph of U.S. capitalism and the White middle-class ideal.