Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan

Brown Bag Lecture Co-sponsored with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Center on Japanese Economy and Business.

Lecture Information:
In this talk, Professor Gordon considers the selling, buying, and the using of the sewing machine in the early-to-mid twentieth century. On the demand side, the focus is on women users in the home, with attention as well to home-based commercial production by seamstresses or dressmakers. On the supply side the main actors are Singer Sewing Machine Company and then its Japanese competitors. An extraordinary variety of meanings and experiences attached to this object, which allows us to study the modern transformation of daily life with its continuing harshness, its new opportunities, and its new imposition of discipline on both the men who sold it and the women who used it.

Lecturer Information:
Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan. Professor Gordon has published numerous books and articles, including several important works on the history of Japanese labor, and the widely used textbook A Modern History of Japan (2002).