In particular, the late-seventeenth-century introduction of a new style of dress called the manteau or mantua, and its increasing popularity, offered female seamstresses a "wedge " to loosen the tailors' monopoly over the production of more formal, elite, and expensive women's fashions. This new product and more generally the exploding market for clothing, in particular women's clothing, provided seamstresses with the income and market niche from which to expand their numbers and to organize politically within the previously male-dominated trade. Furthermore, they could generally rely on the French state, with its agenda of economic development, to aid in this expansion and organization.
In contrast with much of the prevailing historiography, Crowston demonstrates that when it was in the interest of the French state, authorities were happy to work with and encourage women workers as autonomousproducers and not merely as family appendages to guild patriarchs. Crowston thus reinforces Hesse's claim that market expansion brought new opportunities for some women, but she locates these expanding opportunities in the political economy of the late Ancient Regime, rather than in the Revolution's overthrow of it.
In Crowston's history, the seamstresses of Ancien Regime France emerge as relatively powerful and autonomous figures whose work, civic, and gender identities drew upon many sources, but were institutionalized in important ways because of the existence and practices of their guild. The destruction of the guild system during the Revolution thus represents a critical moment in the history of women's work and gender relations—from the perspective of women working in the garment trades, the "freeing" of the market from political constraints brought a largely negative transformation. A closer look at each of these works helps to reveal the origins of the tensions between these two interpretations.
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