In 1845, after almost a dozen years in business, Rebecca Goodwin Major closed up shop. She was the very last Boston woman to call herself a mantuamaker in the pages of the city directory. Most of her competitors abandoned the 17th-century term for the more up-to-date nomenclature, dressmaker. Marla Miller, assistant professor of public history at UMASS Amherst, will look at how one of the most prestigious occupations available to American women since the 17th century, faded from the Boston scene.
Marla Miller's primary research interest is U.S. women's work before industrialization. Her book, The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, appeared from the University of Massachusetts Press in August 2006, and won the Costume Society of America's Millia Davenport Publication Award for the best book in the field for that year. Related articles have appeared in the New England Quarterly (1998), the proceedings of the Dublin Seminar on New England Folklife (2000), and the William and Mary Quarterly (2003). She is presently completing work on a microhistory of women and work in Federal Massachusetts, and diving into a new project that she is especially excited about: a scholarly biography of that most-misunderstood early American craftswoman, Betsy Ross. As Director of the History Department's Public History program, Marla also teaches courses in Public History, American Material Culture, and Museum and Historic Site Interpretation, and continues to consult with a wide variety of museums and historic sites.