Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States

"Only the Clothes on Her Back is an illuminating book-one likely to refashion our understanidng of American economic, legal, material and social history." -- Eva Sheppard Wolf, Journal of Southern History

"Reading Only the Clothes on Her Back is a unique experience because Edwards (Princeton Univ.) makes economic history enjoyable...Edwards has written an analysis of aspects of fabrics that this reviewer did not know existed and written it very well indeed." -- Choice

"A masterpiece....well-written, deeply thought-provoking....Edwards has clearly poured her expertise into this account of the history of textiles in the USA and their unique legal standing. Using elements of microhistory, Edwards presents detailed case studies to cement her argument and emphasizes the importance of garments to women who otherwise had little to no legal standing. Marginalized people, largely women and slaves, could own textiles, trade them, and expect courts to maintain their claim to the items.... Edwards teases out the strands of this tangled web of textile history and excellently portrays the connection between fabric and burgeoning globalization....While focusing almost entirely on the USA, the global nature of the subject makes excellent reading for historians of all nations." -- Caroline M. McWilliams, Twentieth Century British History

"Reading Only the Clothes on Her Back is a unique experience because Edwards makes economic history enjoyable. Looking at the implications of women's roles in cloth production, she argues that textiles and finished garments constituted a rare commodity that even married women, unmarried daughters, and/or enslaved women controlled apart from their husbands and masters. Each chapter begins with a well-researched anecdote about some aspect of the trade, which does double duty, imbuing what otherwise might be just dry facts with humanity and also infusing the book with humor--the stories are often hilarious....Edwards has written an analysis of aspects of fabrics that this reviewer did not know existed and written it very well indeed. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty." -- Choice

"Laura Edwards has produced a masterpiece that forever changes how we see the nineteenth century's ubiquitous textiles and the women who worked, stole, hoarded and wore them. Only a scholar like Edwards, with insights that go beyond conventional notions of property and ownership, could recover the astonishing stories about how those without rights still exercised legal dominion over fabric and their economic lives. Only the Clothes on Her Back smartly debunks simple cultural truisms about women and their adornments, revealing how ordinary Americans, even those marginalized in public law, connected to global markets and remade those forces by their own terms in the local courthouses of the early Republic." -- Martha S. Jones, author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

"With elegance, creativity, and a fitting touch of wit, Laura Edwards unfolds the world of early American textiles in this brilliantly original study of gender, race, material exchange, and the law. The seemingly small arena of gowns, sheets, and hosiery as revealed through her careful research proves massively impactful to those who were marginalized by society as well as to merchants and manufacturers. While enslaved people, free Blacks, and white women could not claim personal rights, they could and did own all manner of fabrics, which they saved, traded, and defended in a complex legal culture that defies our modern expectations but would not last. The Clothes on Her Back transforms our understanding not only of lace, looms, and law, but also of nineteenth-century American lives." -- Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

"In Only the Clothes on Her Back, Laura Edwards combines daunting archival research with a brilliant synthesis of generations of scholarship to put women, both Black and white, at the heart of American legal and economic history between the Revolution and the Civil War. Laced with wit, and knitting race, class, and gender into a seamless fabric, Edwards poignantly and powerfully brings home what was gained and lost when America became 'a nation of rights.'" -- Dylan C. Penningroth, University of California, Berkeley

"In this revelatory book, Laura Edwards explains the extraordinary significance that textiles once held in the American economy and legal system. A book of scrupulous research and a profoundly revisionist account of the workings of property, gender and the law in America between the Revolution and the 1860s." -- Deborah Cohen, Northwestern University

"This is a book about textiles and the people who owned them. It is also a book about rights and the people who lacked them. Sound intriguing? It is. In her wide-ranging and intricately argued book, Only the Clothes on Her Back, Laura F. Edwards explains how ordinary people participated in the American economy and the legal system before the Civil War despite the fact that most of them lacked formal rights to do so. What made it possible? Textiles. Edwards has written an engaging if complex book that reminds us that there is more to legal history than formal rights."-Marjoleine Kars, The Washington Post