Educating the seamstress: studying and writing the memory of work

Abstract

In August 1922 a young woman was writing a letter to her comrade and colleague in a New York garment shop. The sender was Rose Pesotta, writing from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she had just completed a summer school for women workers. Short as it is, the letter brings together a cluster of themes, ideas and practices that were crucial in the way women garment workers shook and changed the world in the first half of the twentieth century in the US and Europe. Taking Pesotta’s epistolary trace of her educational experience at Bryn Mawr as my starting point, in this paper I want to look into a rather grey area in the field of gender and education: women workers’ intellectual lives and their dynamic intervention in the socio-historical and cultural formations of the twentieth century.