"I'm the product of a world which had only just discovered electricity, a world without television... Where women gathered in my childhood, serials on the radio reigned amid the whirr of Singer sewing machines."
-Argentine poet Luisa Futoransky
"It is funny how the past and the present can slide together in the shadows of an attic. That rusty pair of ice skates... the old-fashioned dress dummy... and Grandma's old sewing machine... that amazing Singer with the fancy ironwork and the funny-shaped bobbins. I can see her now, pumping her feet back and forth on the treadle, humming along with the machine..."
"When I came to know my mother...I knew her as the figure who sat at the first thing I learned to read: "SINGER", and she breast-fed my brother while she sewed; and she taught us to read while she sewed and she sat in judgment over all our disputes as she sewed..."
-For My Mother, Lorna Goodison (foremost female poet, Jamaica)
"Maman Only on Sundays was the Singer silent..."
-Another Life, Derek Walcott, St. Lucia (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1992)
Singer was the first sewing machine company to market sewing machines specifically for the home. It featured women in its earliest ads, sitting in their drawing room in front of their machine.
The invention of the sewing machine coincided with the women's movement, which arose, in part, to liberate women from housework. At a time when, in addition to making soap, chopping wood, carrying water, tending fires, cooking, cleaning, and nursing, women had to hand-sew all the clothes and linens their families needed, the sewing machine was a godsend.
The sewing machine was the first home appliance, which could provide the family income in times of need. The sewing machine often made the difference between abject poverty and survival.
...and my mother, whose limbs in the service of our tireless hunger, pedal, pedal, day and night, I am even awakened at night by those tireless limbs which pedal the night by the bitter punctures in the soft flesh of the night made by the Singer machine my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger day and night...
Aimee Cesaire (Martinique), Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal
translated by Emile Snyder
The Singer machine, says Jamaican scholar Velma Pollard, was a tremendous boon to working mothers and their families throughout the Caribbean in the first half of the twentieth century, allowing them to care for and nurture their children while earning a living. (I am indebted to Dr. Pollard for the Caribbean poems featuring the Singer sewing machine cited on this page) The demise of the home sewing industry has forced working women once again to leave their children to work in the factory system, says Pollard, to the detriment of their families and of society.
Not surprisingly, the Singer company claimed credit in its advertising for advancing the fortune and status of women all over the world:
The sewing machine quickly became a family's most prized possession, the one thing that had to be rescued when fleeing the pogroms in Russia, the revolutionaries in Mexico, or escaping floods or fires.
One irony of the success of Singer internationally is that, even as its advertising was celebrating the diversity of costumes around the world, the sewing machine was responsible for an increasing uniformity of fashion worldwide. An 1899 ad featuring Greek women in elaborate costumes acknowledges:
"The graceful national costume is disappearing throughout Greece. It is predicted that in another generation it will have disappeared in favour of French styles made on Singer Sewing Machines from English and American materials."
Women around the world could now aspire to dressing in French fashions, made on Singers from new Butterick patterns.
Singer soon faced a new problem, the growing "ready-to-wear" industry. To ensure a new generation of sewers, Singer ads started encouraging mothers to teach their daughters to sew from a young age. In 1920 Singer introduced the model 20, a tiny, working sewing machine especially for little girls.
Singer also began to advertise free sewing classes with the purchase of every machine.
By 1951, Singer Sewing Centres were teaching 400,000 women a year how to sew in the US alone. McCall's and other women's magazines advertised these centres in full-page ads which read more like illustrated stories than like advertisements.
In one advertisement, a young, newly engaged woman is crying in the first photograph; she is a poor working girl and can't afford a wedding trousseau. After she learns about Singer Sewing Centres, the last photo shows her proudly wearing her new dress, "copied from an expensive model, and fitting like a dream, if I do say it!"
Singer Sewing schools were established all over the world and were tremendously successful. Even in the smallest towns, Singer salesmen would rent a hall and organize a two-week sewing course which everyone from the town tailor to shop girls could attend. The course ended with a formal graduation dinner to which the graduates wore their new clothes. The ceremony, presided over by either the town's mayor or the local clergy, was, a former Singer agent told me, "a very big deal. It was the only graduation ceremony most of these women would ever have."
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