The first attempts to make sewing machines failed, largely because inventors (all of whom were men) tried to make machines that could mimic the motions of hand sewers. For thousands of years, people – mostly women – were forced to sew slowly and laboriously by hand. But the sewing machine itself is a fairly recent invention, less than 200 years old. They began using bone needles with eyes to stitch animal skins together at least 2,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age started making needles from iron about 4,000 years ago, at the very beginning of the Iron Age and first used thimbles in China about 2,000 years ago, during the Han dynasty. This article is intended to accompany the Windham Textile and History Museum’s sewing machine collection, which focuses on sewing machines manufactured in the state of Connecticut.
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Widely available a half century before typewriters or automobiles, more than any other machine the sewing machine came to symbolize American women’s work in the modern machine age. By appealing to middle class homemakers, it facilitated the Cult of Domesticity and provided middle class women with the opportunity to prove that they could master complex machinery. By changing the way that clothing was manufactured, it spelled the end of cottage industry and the old putting out system and ushered in the age of the sweatshop. By making possible the manufacture of inexpensive clothing, it greatly speeded up the pace of American industrialization (which had begun only a few decades earlier with the inventions of the drum carder, spinning jenny, power loom, and cotton gin) and led to the building of newer, larger, and more modern textile mills, such as the Willimantic Linen Company’s great granite Mill Number Two and modern brick Mill Number Four.
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The patenting of the sewing machine by Massachusetts native and Connecticut transplant Elias Howe in 1846 touched off a technological, industrial, and social revolution in the United States.