Using a broad historical lens, this panel examines how women workers used apparel—that which they made and wore—to enhance their identities and carve out greater workplace privacy and autonomy from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. As employers across time and space tried to control women’s movements as they traveled to, from, and inside the workplace, women pushed back in a variety of ways. The interdisciplinary historians on this panel investigate the specific ways in which women used clothing to contest the gendered, socio-economic, and spatial subordination in which they found themselves at work. In examining a wide array of spaces and places, ranging from enslaved women in colonial New England, immigrant apparel workers at factories in early 1900s New York, to twentieth century seamstresses in West Africa, these scholars use visual, material, and oral histories in order to reveal new understandings of how women used dress to improve their circumstances. More specifically, Caylin Carbonell, Kathleen Casey, and Elizabeth Fretwell will examine how domestic and apparel workers used clothing to gain a measure of mobility, both physically and economically, in and outside the workplace. The panelists ask how women workers used clothing to hide what they did not want employers to see, thereby carving out small preserves of privacy in public spaces. As a result, employers were often suspicious of what women workers literally hid up their sleeves in these private preserves. Finally, the panel explores the connections between clothing and the politics of respectability in the workplace. In addition to the audience, Michelle Haberland, author of Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930-2000, will offer comment.