Sewing & Reading

"Mme Hosier felt a great longing for all this beautiful lingerie, and one day she told my mother that if we would agree to make some garments for her and her daughter Lucienne, she would bring some material and do what she could to help. She made the admission she could not sew, and added that it made her even more ashamed than if she had not known how to read."

Henrey, Madeleine (1951), Seamstress and Marketwoman: Working Women in Early Twentieth-Century Paris, in Classen, Constance (ed), The Book of Touch, Berg, Oxford, New York 2005, p. 246