Home dressmaking, marginalized in economic terms because of the cheapness of factory-produced garments, was pursued primarily for pleasure rather than income. The craft became so wholly the province of teenage girls that Singer, the sewing machine manufacturer that had pioneered mass marketing a hundred years earlier, focused its advertising primarily on this audience, through publications like Seventeen (launched in 1944 and often credited with molding the mainstream image of the teenage girl). Singer’s promotions presented sewing as a means of attainment, recalling the “domestic
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