Women have played a unique role in the history of clothing
manufacture in the United States. During the American
Revolution, white women—and, in the case of slaveowning
families, black female slaves—wove homespun clothing in order to
sustain colonial boycotts on manufactured English goods. Female
slaves were an integral part of the cotton cultivation and
harvesting that produced the raw materials for textile
production during the antebellum period. After emancipation,
black women continued their integral role in cotton production
as sharecroppers, either working the fields alongside their
husbands or providing the childcare and cooking that sustained
their husbands and children in the fields. Black women also
worked as laundresses throughout the South and in other areas,
since it was one of the few paid occupations considered "low"
enough for black women. In 1840, lower- and middle-class women
made up almost half of manufacturing workers in the nation, and
two-thirds of those in New England.172 These young wo