By Faye S. Wolfe

Themes of constraint and invisibility figure in each of three nonfiction books about women published recently by the University of Massachusetts Press. Those themes carried over into the making of the books themselves.Two of the authors had to ferret out history from the smallest details and from between the lines, while the third delved into how her subject strained against social boundaries and how her life and life’s work have been interpreted within cultural contexts.

To write The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, Marla Miller sifted through 200- and 300-year-old documents, including legal records, diaries, letters, newspapers, and other primary sources to understand the role that American women played in clothing manufacture from colonial times into the early 1800s. Undeterred by catalog entries that erroneously listed husbands as the sole authors of account books, she found records of payments to tailoresses like Tryphena Cook of Hadley, Massachusetts, and Mehitable Kellogg, in Suffield, Connecticut. Miller scanned period newspapers for advertisements seeking the return of escaped slaves, for the telling descriptions of the garments they wore. (She even spent a day in Colonial Williamsburg making a replica of a gown and a much shorter time wearing, in her words, an “oh so snug” period jacket.)

Many of the relevations of Needle’s Eye are startling, not least among them the weeks of labor required to make a man’s coat from start to finish in the late 1700s. Many steps in that process, such as “picking” and “breaking” wool, are now obscure. By contrast, in reading the excerpt from the women’s “Economical Association” declaration from 1786, one is struck by how modern the writers’ perception is of what we call the global economy, itself an older phenomenon than we think. Miller shows us the complicated social realities behind those conventional images of colonial maids bent over their samplers or arranged around a quilting frame. She concludes by juxtaposing that complicated past with contemporary life, establishing a compelling connection between the sewing women did centuries ago and the sweatshops in which women around the world labor today, making designer T-shirts and the like.

Patricia Campbell Warner also conducted detective work; hers led her to sources 100 years closer to the present but nearly as opaque in some cases as colonial ledgers. According to When the Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear, women’s clothing reflected, evolved with, and catalyzed larger social changes for women. Under Warner’s scrutiny, Godey’s Lady’s Book (the Vogue of Victorian times), short stories, college archives, museum collections, and old photographs yielded up essential data, enabling her to tease out the story of how women went from wearing “oh so snug” jackets to gym suits, and the classic sportswear components of sweaters, jerseys, and trousers. Sportswear in its early phases was hardly activewear. For playing croquet, one of the earliest sports in which women engaged, women wore crinolines and corsets—and the first sneakers. Skating costumes hardly differed from what women wore to sip tea in drawing rooms. Hoop skirts made it almost impossible for women to see their feet as they moved across frozen ponds—but move they did. The eagerness with which women embraced physical activities, especially when they were given legitimacy in such settings as women’s colleges, gave rise ultimately to clothing that offered unprecedented mobility and comfort and contributed to greater freedom for women on other fronts. Like Miller’s, Warner’s book brings together many elements of history, from “muscular Christianity” to “rational dress,” to build a convincing argument for why we should accord those dorky gym suits more respect than we may have given them as teenagers.

It’s hard to imagine the woman whom Sara Lennox has described as a “combination of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath” wearing a gym suit, but in her writing and in her life, Ingeborg Bachmann strove for a certain freedom of movement. That freedom sometimes proved elusive. Lennox’s Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann places the poet, novelist, dramatist, and essayist in historical context. According to Lennox, professor of German and Scandinavian studies, Bachmann (1926-1973) was of a generation of women caught in a contradiction, coming of age in the post–World War II era, when domesticity was the prescribed arena for women. In central Europe, Lennox says, “in the aftermath of National Socialism, people were frantically trying to develop amnesia about it, and feeling the pressure, the impact of U.S.-dominated capitalism, as represented by the Marshall Plan.” Bachmann’s pursuit of aesthetic and personal answers through the Cold War was often in opposition to the zeitgeist of her time.

Feminist scholars, literary critics, and historians, among others who have come since, have framed her struggles in the prevailing terms of their own times. New schools of thought, variously emphasizing gender, race, or class, as well as new data, which became available in East German archives after the Berlin Wall came down, have led to new ways of seeing Bachmann. Lennox knows that she herself is not unsusceptible to such influences. In Cemetery, she examines her own investigations of Bachmann’s work over the last 30 or so years, holding to the thesis that “all intellectual products are shaped by political and historical circumstances, albeit unawares.”

In speaking of the quandary that Bachmann grappled with, Lennox has quoted the 20th-century German philosopher Theodor Adorno: “There is no right way to live in a false world.” Lennox’s book reveals the tensions and influences on her subject as she tried to live, and the interpretations of that life that followed, and makes Bachmann’s world visible.