Seamstress’ Workshops, Clothing, and Autonomous Space in Urban Benin, West Africa, 1960s–80s

This paper explores how seamstresses crafted workshops as spaces of women’s autonomy and respectability in the burgeoning cities of postcolonial central Benin. In the mid-twentieth century, this part of West Africa was overwhelmingly rural, and both tailoring and fashion were largely the domain of men. Beninois women wore wrapped and draped fabric with few sewn items, and only a small number of women engaged in needlework. These seamstresses, few in number, were often the wives of middle-class men and traced their craft knowledge back to missions and colonial programs that sought to “domesticate” women. However, by the 1970s, “orphans,” poor, and peasant women began to enter the craft in astonishing numbers, thoroughly feminizing both tailoring and fashion in interior Benin. These women utilized the materiality of their own bodies, those of their apprentices, and especially the interiors and exteriors of urban workshops to assert their aspirations to middle-class respectability and their newfound independence from fathers, husbands, and other men. The history of seamstresses’ workshops reveals how women carved out feminine spaces in an increasingly anonymous postcolonial city and how they enacted feminine futures through the discussion, design, and production of clothed bodies, despite rampant economic insecurity sparked by global economic transformations and by Benin’s 1975 adoption of Marxism-Leninism. This paper draws upon over 80 oral histories collected from Beninois women and men, newspapers, and material and visual sources.