Over the last twenty years, archaeologists have become increasingly interested in gender as a topic of research. Among the questions that recent works have raised, the most central concerns how to incorporate gender into analysis. The key to a more complex and nuanced view of gender roles is to be able to identify artifacts that directly correspond with known gender related roles or activities. One potentially interesting possibility, which I explore in this study, is the archaeology of sewing. One of the assumptions I examine is whether the material culture associated with sewing can reveal some of the minute details of the activity that could be gender and class specific.

I examine the role of sewing through a combination of documentary research and the analysis of archaeological evidence from colonial period Boston, Massachusetts. My study is unique due to the household circumstance from which the artifacts were recovered: a household in colonial Boston, headed by a divorced/separated woman who had been documented as a victim of domestic abuse, Katherine Nanny Naylor. I look at whether Katherine Nanny Naylor’s artifacts represent her home as an example of ‘polite society’ in colonial Boston or one of a divorced woman who resorted to sewing to supplement her income.