‘Ease to fit’ : Managing the intersection of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in dressmakers lives in Australia

This paper explores a little studied area of women’s lives; the experiences of managing paid work alongside of family responsibilities, when the ‘work’ of earning an income was undertaken within the home, the domestic space. Focusing on the postwar years in Australian society I investigate the experiences of one group of women who worked as self-employed dressmakers, making clothing in exchange for payment within their own homes. A key focus of this paper is the coming together of the public and the private spheres through the intersection of paid and domestic work, and how this created a unique ‘space’ in which the dressmakers sought to manage their combined responsibilities within the boundaries of dominant gender ideologies. Drawing on contemporary understandings of space and temporalities to examine the physical and ideological conditions of their workspace, identifies a range of factors that affected their success in negotiating their location and reveals the individual and collective choices they made about how they did this and the associated outcomes they experienced.