| Summary: | Thousands of women worked as lacemakers in nineteenth-century France on a
‘putting-out’ basis. Their tools—pillow, bobbins, pins—were cheap or easy to make, but
held emotional and symbolic connotations, both for lacemakers and for the connoisseurs and
philanthropists who protected the trade from mechanisation. Pillows, bobbins and other tools
could be decorated with sentimental or other messages. Lace tools were anthropomorphised
in local dialects, becoming ‘servants’. They were exchanged as gifts, lent by neighbours and
passed down the generations. They embodied lacemakers’ relationships, as well as their craft
identity. On their feast-days, lacemakers paraded with their tools as a statement of craft
pride. Yet in lacemakers’ work culture, tools became instruments of torture. Lacemakers
were ‘broken to the trade’ by their tools and the bodily attitudes they were forced to adopt.
As lacemaking became closely associated with poverty, some lacemakers destroyed their
tools in protest at the grinding discipline.
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