Is new technology that replaces a worker a good thing? We have a tendency, it seems to me, to believe that most previous inventions turned out to have overall net social benefits, but to be worried that all future inventions will instead have overall net social costs. Philipp Ager and Davide Coluccia tackle the question of how the arrival of the sewing machine affected women in the second half of the 19th century in “Liberation Technology? The Impact of the Sewing Machine on Women” (CEPR Discussion Paper 21496, May 2026). Tim Phillips interview Philipp Ager about the research in “Did the Sewing Machine Liberate Women?” (VOXEU Talk, June 12, 2026). I’ll quote here from their discussion.
The sewing machine was expensive enough that it was only used by industry up to about 1860. At that point, Isaac Singer introduces a much less expensive machine for household use. Sales to households rose into the hundreds-of-thousands per year, and by the end of the 1870s, about half of all US households had their own sewing machine.
To set the stage for what happens, Phillips offers some context from the time when the sewing machine arrives. The New York Times apparently wrote in 1860: “No one invention has brought with it so great a relief for our mothers and daughters as these iron needle women. Indeed, it is the only invention that can be claimed chiefly for women’s benefit.” Also, Phillips notes: “In 1860, the American magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book — the most widely read women’s magazine in the US at the time — did the arithmetic for us. A man’s shirt, it reckoned, took 20,620 stitches and 14 hours 26 minutes.”
How did all those new sewing machines affect work for women? Ager and Collucia mostly focus on detailed US census data for women in Massachesetts, which they can supplement with some Massachusetts-based data. More specifically, they have individual-level data on “occupation, fertility, marital status, place of residence,” as well as household wealth. They don’t have individual-level data on who owned a sewing machine, so Ager explains how the tackle the question of “exposure” to the new sewing technology:
[T]here are two sort of exposure to sewing machines — one is like an industrial exposure to sewing machine, and the other one is an exposure to sewing machines as a household tool. So, like basically we have information on industries where we know that they widely adopted the sewing machine during our sample period. And so, like basically we expect that in these towns where these industries were initially located that there is a higher impact on female employment, for example, in these industries. So, like you know, we expect a stronger effect in these locations where more of these industries were initially located before the sewing machine was widely adopted. And for the sewing machine as a household tool, we actually digitized information on retailers from business directories. So, we have information about sewing machine retailers that sold this appliance to households, and we use as a primary measure whether, like, you lived in a town that had access to the first sewing machine retailer in that town. And that’s our primary way how we capture exposure to sewing machine as a household appliance.
Their analysis suggests that the sewing machine increased overall employment for women, and in turn led to a lower overall marriage and fertility rate. However, these effects were strongest for women from poor and working-class households, and look quite different for woment from middle-class and high-income households.
[T]he sewing machine overall increased the employment opportunities of working-class women in these industries that widely adopted the sewing machines. Right, this was not only the garment industry, but you can also think about, for example, the boot and the shoe production — where many of these women were pulled into the factories — but we also find some impact on, for example, general merchandise stores that started to sell ready-made clothes, and they needed seamstresses and dressmakers in their departments. … [W]e find that for these working class or poorer women that they started to reduce fertility. Why is that the case? This is consistent with the argument that there were better employment opportunities, and this basically increased the opportunity costs of having children. … We find for poor women that — if they live before the rollout of the sewing machine really happened at scale — if they lived in towns with high industrial exposure, they were less likely to be married when they were young adults. And we can even follow them a bit longer when they completed fertility, and we also find that they had fewer children, and many of them remained unmarried when we look at them, say, as 50- or 55-year-olds. … [M]iddle class women that had access to a sewing machine were less likely to work as an adult because they used their free time for earlier family formation. They married earlier, and they also started to have children earlier, and that’s consistent with the general notion at that point in time that there was a strong stigma associated with women working outside the home once they were married.
The new sewing machine technology thus changed the time use of women, but certainly didn’t lead to “free” time. Instead, the technology interacted with class and gender norms. For poor and working-class women it opened employment opportunities to satisfy the demand for low-cost machine-sewn clothing, although these jobs often involve long hours, low pay, and sweatshop working condidtions. For middle-class women, it led to earlier marriage and more children. Like so many technology stories, there isn’t simple good-or-bad bottom line here, but a broader economic and social evolution. However, I find it impossible tor regret the “loss” of the earlier seamstress jobs that took 20,000 stitched and 14 hours of work for a single shirt.
