Sewing is an ancient craft involving the stitching of cloth, animal skins, furs, or other materials, using needle and thread. Its use is nearly universal among human populations and dates back to Paleolithic times (30,000 BC). Sewing predates the weaving of cloth.
Sewing is used primarily to produce clothing and household furnishings as curtains, bedclothes, upholstery, and table linens. It is also used for sails, bellows, skin boats, and other items shaped out of flexible materials such as canvas and leather.
Most sewing in the industrial world is done by machines. Pieces of a garment or the edge of a cloth are firstly tacked together. Some people sew clothes for themselves and their families. More often home sewers sew to repair clothes, such as mending a torn seam or replacing a loose button. A person who sews for a living is known as a seamstress, dressmaker, tailor, or garment worker.
"Plain" sewing is done for functional reasons: making or mending clothing or household linens. "Fancy" sewing is primarily decorative, including techniques such as shirring, embroidery, or quilting.
The seamstress replied that her thimble had fallen into the water and that she needed it to help her husband in making a living for their family.
The seamstress replied, "Yes." The Lord was pleased with the woman's honesty and gave her all three thimbles to keep, and the seamstress went home happy.
Some years later, the seamstress was walking with her husband along the riverbank, and her husband fell into the river and disappeared under the water.
In most stories, the seamstresses' only choice was to succumb to vice (prostitution), or to retain her "virtue" and die.
The problem involved (depending on who was asked): a lack of communication between the rich and the poor (Disraeli's "two nations"), unemployment among men while women were working in increasing numbers, and the related breakdown of the working-class family, the New Poor Law of 1834, and not enough decently paid work for women.
The impoverished seamstress became, for early feminists, a symbol of the consequences of a hypocritical society that circumscribed women's lives, preached that they should not work (and consequently made almost no occupations open to them), while forcing them, at the same time, to work.
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