Evidence suggests that in many middle- and upper-class households it was common to have a local dressmaker come to the house twice a year or so to make up on the premises things that were needed for the coming season. This practice, widespread in the pre-World War I years, probably continued for much longer than has previously been understood. Carolyn B. Reed, chairman of the Arlington branch of the American Red Cross in 1946, wrote a memoir of a day's shopping in 1910 for the Boston Herald. She recalled that "nearly every home had its dress form...and its semi-annual family dressmaker, augmented by a bi-weekly seamstress. These faithful visitors moulded and worked on the necessary and serviceable blue serge dress, or the broadcloths and silks to wear to church, as well as the beautiful satin brocades and moirés for evening wear. Dress materials such as these were the object [of the shopping trip]."(26) Ladies" Home Journal carried an advice article in 1917 with the pointed title "Sewing in Other People's Homes."(27) One North Carolina woman, now in her eighties, recalled having had dance dresses made up by her mother's favorite local seamstress as late as the early 1930s. A New England woman recalled from her childhood in the early 1910s that only basics -school skirts and blouses, nightclothes, and flannel undergarments -issued from the needle of the woman who visited twice a year, while special clothes were commissioned from Boston or a local dressmaker who kept a shop.(28)

Women could also sew for themselves and their families. Mary Brooks Picken's Woman's Institute ran correspondence courses in sewing and provided paperbound booklets containing instruction on the principles of design, advice on choosing patterns or reproducing simple garments, and illustrations showing the proper methods of putting the garments together. In addition, the final page of the booklet contained a list of examination questions, which the correspondent answered on a special sheet of paper and sent in for grading [fig. 82]. How-to-sew books and wardrobe-planning books were commonplace commodities: for example, Dress and Look Slender, and Designing Women: The Art, Technique and Cost of Being Beautiful.(29) Home-economics textbooks for high-school and college students also focused on sewing, choosing, and caring for clothes. One such book, Textiles and Clothing by Ellen Beers McGowan and Charlotte A. Waite, was first published in 1919, but revised by the authors in 1931 to keep up to date with the increased use of synthetic fibers. Another textbook, The Arts of Costume and Personal Appearance by Grace Margaret Morton, was published in 1943. It should be remembered that home-economics classes were required for girls (and only for girls) in public junior and senior high schools until fairly recently and also that when higher education for women was still controversial, choosing home economics as a college major was one way to defuse the argument that attending college was unfeminine as well as unnecessary.