Only the Clothes on Her Back

Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States

By: Laura F. Edwards

Narrated by: Stephanie Richardson

What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American society? In the hands of eminent historian Laura F. Edwards, these textiles tell a revealing story of ordinary people and how they made use of their material goods' economic and legal value in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War.

Only the Clothes on Her Back uncovers practices, commonly known then, but now long forgotten, which made textiles - clothing, cloth, bedding, and accessories, such as shoes and hats - a unique form of property that people without rights could own and exchange. The value of textiles depended on law, and it was law that turned these goods into a secure form of property for marginalized people, who not only used these textiles as currency, credit, and capital, but also as entree into the new republic's economy and governing institutions. Edwards grounds the laws relating to textiles in engaging stories from the lives of everyday Americans. Wives wove linen and kept the proceeds, enslaved people traded coats and shoes, and poor people invested in fabrics, which they carefully preserved in trunks. Edwards shows that these stories are about far more than cloth and clothing; they reshape our understanding of law and the economy in America.

©2022 Oxford University Press (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Interesting perspective

I didn’t realize there was a whole legal system based on textiles but it does explain customs like a hope chest and the emphasis put on learning to knit and do “fancy work”.

Dry and Repetitive

I’m disappointed. First the performance was poor, with mispronounced words and awkward phrasing. Then the story lacked the details to make it interesting. Even worse, ideas about law were not developed into big ideas. What a missed opportunity!

Can’t recommend the reader

The historical analysis is fascinating, identifying patterns that repeat and showing when they changed. But the mispronunciation of basic words (“adjudicate,” which appears roughly a million times, becomes “adjugate,” for instance) makes listening a tedious chore.

The devil is in the details

A great account into the details of the legal system, as a means to marginalize different groups of people prior to the Civil War. The author laid the groundwork to explain how loose rules brought from ingenious uses of property on hand, then became codified, and eventually used against the very people, who gave that property value. While very focused on the law, personal stories come through and help the reader visualize the situation at hand for millions of Americans.

Interesting but…

Important and interesting information. It did feel repetitive at times and poorly organized. Because a lot of the information is so interconnected, dividing it into clean sections proved challenging. I’m not sure if reading it would have been more helpful for me. The reader’s voice felt choppy, disconnected. It seemed as if she didn’t know what was coming next on the page.