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Forgotten Entrepreneurs

If they were living today, many of our female ancestors would be considered successful entrepreneurs and small business owners with a home-based business. A few generations back it was more commonly thought that women were just “bringing in a little extra money to help the family out.” The men in the family were considered the bread-winners. This was not always strictly true. Many of our female ancestors made significant financial contributions to their families, although often this contribution was not considered valuable enough that recognition of our grandmother’s business accomplishments passed down in family history. In my own family, I nearly missed knowing about the business savvy and technical expertise of my maternal grandmother. Having started my own business in the past few years, it made a tremendous difference to me discovering that my grandmother had done the same.

My grandmother, Emma Groeger, had a treadle sewing machine that sat in the corner of her kitchen facing a west window. The kitchen was the heart of my grandmother’s house. Not only did we all spend a lot of time in her kitchen when we visited but when we were gone she spent her days in that sunny west-facing corner sewing for her neighbors.

I had a deep nostalgia for that sewing machine. As children my sister and I were allowed to sit in the chair and work the pedals. We watched the sharp little needle flashing up and down. We got to go through the drawers looking at the spools of colored thread, the tiny embroidery scissors, worn thimbles, cards of rick-rack and ribbon, and other sewing paraphernalia. Best of all, the middle drawer on the left was full of rescued buttons, cut from clothing before it went into the rag box. Big buttons, baby buttons, cloth covered buttons, pearl buttons, special buttons, plain buttons… every shape, color and size filled the drawer. My sister and I would pour them all out and take turns picking until we had divided the pile. Grandma then gave us each a needle threaded with a long thread and a button at the end and we made ourselves button necklaces.

When my grandmother died very suddenly her sewing machine came to live at my parent’s house. It got tucked away down in the basement in a corner. It could be seen, but no one could work the pedals any more and that special middle drawer on the left was blocked by one end of the sofa.

One afternoon, 20 years after my grandmother died, my mother and I were reminiscing about her and I suddenly said “Do you suppose the buttons are still there in the sewing machine drawer?” My mother said she didn’t see why they wouldn’t be; nothing had been touched or moved since Grandma last used the machine. In a flash, we were down in the basement pulling the old sewing machine out into the middle of the room where we could look at it.

It was different sitting at Grandma’s sewing machine now that I was an adult. It was amazing to sit where she had sat so many hours of her life and know that her machine was just exactly as she had left it the day that she died. Yes, the buttons were all there! And, as we opened the rest of the drawers, I smelled once again a faint scent of my grandmother’s perfume and house and clear evidence of her life right down to the pencil stubs she sharpened by razor blade, and the little spiral notebooks she used to keep track of her sewing jobs.

Most importantly, we found something that day that completely changed my view of my Grandmother. We found, tucked into the most current of her little spiral notebooks, the final, canceled check she used to pay for her house from all her little 10 cent, 50 cent, and one dollar sewing jobs. The check was dated 1945 and my Grandmother died in the late 1960s. Clearly she had transferred that cancelled check from job book to job book over the years to remind herself of what she had accomplished with her work.

I had never thought of my grandmother as a business woman. My family referred to Grandma as a “housewife who took in a little sewing on the side.” However finding this canceled check prompted my mother to tell me the real story. My grandfather was sick, hospitalized, and unable to work for many years during the Great Depression. At times the family was so poor they lived on tomatoes and bread for weeks. My grandmother gardened and made all the family clothes but still times were so tough my mother had to quit taking her beloved piano lessons because the family couldn’t afford the 50 cents per week they cost.

Eventually my grandmother was hired to run a youth center in her town for the WPA and later, when the center closed, she boarded students from farm families during the school week, often getting paid in chickens, eggs and vegetables which kept her family fed. She began ”taking in sewing” (which should really read “Began her own custom sewing business”) during a time when other job opportunities were not open to women and at a time when small town families could not afford “store-boughten” clothes. (Read that “She found a great niche for her services which was in high demand in her community!”) She was so talented that she had only to look at a picture of a dress cut from the newspaper and she could make it herself. All during the Depression she not only kept clothes on her family’s back and food on the table but she managed to set a little money aside each week until she had enough to purchase a lovely two story house, the very house she had dreamed of owning for years. It cost her $6,000 in the 1940s but she paid for it with the pennies, nickels and dimes she earned with her sewing.

Had I not sat at my Grandmother’s sewing machine I might never have known she was an extraordinarily talented seamstress, entrepreneur and business woman or that she was so proud of herself that she kept a reminder of her success inside the sewing machine she used until the day she died.

Article Source: http://www.familyhistoryarticles.com

Dhyan Atkinson is a Consultant, Business Skills Trainer, and the Family Historian for her family. Although she works with all kinds of small business owners, she specializes in helping people start their own personal history business. Over the past 5 years, she has helped over 200 personal historians learn the skills they need to find clients. Dhyan can be reached at Dhyan@SatisfactionByDesign.com or on her website at www.SatisfactionByDesign.com

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