f ‘It was just something you did’: Mothers, daughters and sewing in the 1960s

This article uses family photographs to discuss the labour of home dressmaking in Australia in the 1960s. These images reveal the products of this domestic labour in garments of economy and style and allude to the affective labour associated with the socialization of girls. The clothes produced by mothers for their daughters can be viewed as a performative act of mothering at that time. Drawing on conversations, discussions and interviews with their mothers and other women from the 1960s, the authors demonstrate the value of personal narratives, beyond individual subjectivity, as a way of opening out the broader and more complex historical and social process of their everyday lives.