Milliner and Mantua-Maker

The 18th-century Milliner was responsible for making and selling the ornaments to the family's wardrobe, like cloaks, mitts, aprons, ruffles, gentlemen's neckwear, and hats. Mantua-making was the separate trade of making gowns and other fitted clothing for ladies. Mantua makers typically worked by laying fabric directly against the customer's body, cutting and fitting the pieces on her while she is wearing her stays, almost like a sculptor working in fabric. Tailors, conversely, worked by measuring and patterning garments on a two-dimensional plane. Their technique was best suited to making fitted items with structure built into them, like gentlemen's suits and ladies' riding habits and stays. Milliners, Mantua-makers, and Tailors all served formal apprenticeships to learn the skills of their trade. Seamstresses or Seamsters, conversely, were considered semi-skilled labor in that their primary job was literally to sew seams; while they were capable of very fine sewing and cutting basic geometric shapes for items like table or bed linens, they were not trained in cutting or fitting customized garments.

The easiest answer to this incredibly complex question is this: a lot more than we've always assumed! One working woman, who was a nurse-midwife, had ten gowns in her possession when she passed away in 1778, while Martha Jefferson noted sixteen in a list she made of her clothing a year earlier. That small selection of Inventories like these that survive suggest that it was not so much a person's social status but rather her personal priorities that dictated the size of her wardrobe. If a person really liked fashion, she might be more willing to devote a larger portion of her income to her wardrobe than someone who had other interests. We know that people making clothing were represented in large numbers in Williamsburg; about a quarter to a third of the working population of the city was earning its living making or selling something to do with fashion. Fabric was also the largest import into the colony of Virginia, implying that people were buying it in quantities significant enough to make it worth a merchant's investment of time and money to bring it across the Atlantic.

Yes, she certainly could! An unmarried woman had all the rights of a free, white Englishman, meaning she could own property, transact business, and represent herself in court. The building in which we work was owned outright by Margaret Hunter, a single woman who operated a millinery shop there from at least 1774 until her death in 1787; her widowed sister then assumed ownership. But just because a woman could own a business by herself did not mean that she could operate it all by herself. Margaret Hunter's property also included up to ten enslaved people who assisted in the running of the business and oversaw day-to-day household responsibilities, giving Miss Hunter the ability to focus on the operation of her shop.