Access provided by your local institution [Access article in PDF] Engendering the Guilds: Seamstresses, Tailors, and the Clash of Corporate Identities in Old Regime France Clare Croston Louis XIV established the Parisian seamstresses’ guild in March 1675, provoking a groan of protest from the city’s tailors, the women’s closest trade rivals. Inspired by fiscal, economic, and social considerations, the royal government had created an independent and exclusively female guild for the first time in over two hundred years. The trade rights granted the female artisans consisted of the capacity to make and sell women’s and children’s clothing, a prerogative they held in common with the tailors’ guild. Their statutes forbade them, however, from producing men’s clothing.
The royal government explicitly reserved this sphere for the tailors, along with the right to make dresses worn by court women. 1 The corporate status accorded Parisian seamstresses served as a model for the reorganization of the garment trades in the provinces. In December 1675, seamstresses in Rouen acquired their own guild, as did those of Le Havre in 1721. Seamstresses entered the corporate system in an additional fifteen towns and cities across France after 1675, not as independent guilds women but as subordinate members of local tailors’ guilds. In each case, the female needleworkers’ trade rights echoed the Paris model; they could make women’s and children’s clothing in competition [End Page 339] with tailors, but they could not produce men’s clothing or the fanciest ladies’ wear. 2 Once they entered corporations, seamstresses wielded their privileges aggressively, often against the tailors and their pre-existing trade rights.
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Deprived of their monopoly over made-to-measure clothing, the tailors did not easily accept women’s ascension to guild status. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, conflicts erupted between tailors and seamstresses in many cities and towns where women had gained corporate status. In Paris they engaged in legal battles from the moment the royal council authorized the female guild’s creation in 1675. In Caen, they argued throughout the first half of the eighteenth century over matters ranging from financial administration, to the inspection of guild masterpieces, to the behavior and attendance of tailors at the burial of mistress seamstresses. In Clermont-Ferrand, the two groups were still fighting in 1778, a year after the city’s seamstresses were excluded from the guild system by post-Turgot reform legislation. 3 The conflicts arose in part from fears of economic loss.
Tailors who had previously monopolized women’s clothing now had to compete with a large pool of female needleworkers whose lower prices and sexual identity strongly appealed to female customers. For their part, seamstresses were impatient with the remaining restrictions on their rights to clothe women. The grudge between the two groups, however, did not lie in economic considerations alone. Indeed, according to a 1675 Paris police report, the seamstresses’ incorporation could cause no further damage to the tailors, because so many women were already working illegally in the trade. 4 In the provinces, tailors sometimes brought seamstresses into the guild on their own initiative, stating that there were too few masters to meet the demand for women’s clothing.
5 Granting corporate privileges to the seamstresses thus formalized their existing participation in the production of women’s garments. In addition to the economic stakes, the conflicts between seamstresses [End Page 340] and tailors resulted from two opposing models of corporate membership and the social identity, honor, and gender roles associated with them. The tailors saw their status as guild masters as imbricated with their role as male heads of household. As masters, they believed, they were entitled to offer employment to their family members and to endow them with the benefits of mastership, including the right of their widows and daughters to work in the trade as long as they did not marry outside it. In contrast to the tailors, the seamstresses viewed guild membership as a mark of independence from the patriarchal family.
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Their guild was composed not of family units but of individual women who enjoyed unusual legal and economic privileges. In their view, women were not only capable of becoming full-fledged guild members and holding corporate offices, they could also become exemplars of the moral conduct expected of-but so often lacking in-the corporate sphere. Guild membership thus held substantially different meanings for tailors and seamstresses. After 1675 an older, family-based model of the corporate world competed with a new model based on women working independently of their families.
These two visions of corporate status clashed over one issue in particular: the status of tailors’ female relatives. Should tailors’ wives and daughters be identified as family members, and thus as protected members of the tailors’ corporation? Or should they be viewed primarily as women, and so as individuals under the jurisdiction of the seamstresses’ guild? Each side felt sure of the answer to these questions; at stake was their economic, social, and cultural definition as guild members and as men and women. This article, by elucidating the significance of guild membership for the seamstresses and tailors of Paris and Caen from 1675 to 1776, will contribute to an understanding of the ways these artisans perceived guild membership-an issue of current historical debate. The renewal of interest in Old Regime guilds over the last fifteen or twenty years has divided historians over the extent to which mastership conferred a distinctive social or cultural status or was merely another resource to be manipulated in the struggle for economic survival and social advancement. 6 The significance of mastership for male merchants and artisans [End Page 341] remains unclear, while the issue is only beginning to be addressed for the small number of women who possessed independent guild privileges.
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Questions of what female “mastership” entailed and how it was understood need to be explored much further. 7 Conflicts between tailors and seamstresses underline the imbrication of material and nonmaterial factors in shaping corporate identities. Male and female artisans drew their vision of corporate membership from everyday practices of work, guild regulations, and their own gendered conceptions of labor, family, and honor. They did not draw clear lines between economic and social or cultural capital; nor can the historian easily distinguish material self-interest from concerns with pride and honor.
The existence of two models of corporate identity among seamstresses and tailors challenges existing studies of women’s guilds, which have emphasized the extent to which female privileges followed the male model. As one scholar has remarked, “Where [women] were entitled to a corporate identity of their own-as was the case in Paris and Rouen in particular-their corporations enjoyed privileges that were entirely comparable to those possessed by the masters of other corporations.” 8 I shall argue, however, that beyond the formal legal parity enshrined in guild statutes, male and female privileges were constituted in subtly different forms and understood in a strikingly distinct fashion. [End Page 342] Gender was bound up in tailors’ and seamstresses’ guild identities in complex and variable ways. Women clearly experienced their gender in a more self-conscious and restrictive way than men did.
Their female sex circumscribed their legal and economic opportunities to a larger extent, and it also afforded them opportunities denied to male workers. Nevertheless, gender identity was essential to male notions of mastership as well. When seamstresses challenged the privileges of tailors’ wives and daughters, tailors responded by elaborating a notion of mastership based on their masculine roles as fathers and husbands. Among women, sexual difference was perhaps most influential-and most useful-for those who, like the seamstresses, worked in predominantly female trades for a female clientele. For other women, an alternate set of affiliations could be more important, in particular the family and the prerogatives in formal institutions acquired through kinship ties to men.
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Ultimately, these case studies suggest that women’s experience in female corporations helped to propagate the notion of gender itself and the use of gender as a tool of social organization throughout the eighteenth century.
