Studies of millinery tend to focus on hats, rather than the extraordinarily skilled workers who create them. American Milliners and their World sets out to redress the balance, examining the position of the milliner in American society from the 18th to the 20th century. Concentrating on the struggle of female hat-makers to claim their social place, it investigates how they were influenced by changing attitudes towards women in the workplace. Drawing on diaries, etiquette books, trade journals and contemporary literature, Stewart illustrates how making hats became big business, but milliners' working conditions failed to improve. Taking the reader from the Industrial Revolution of the 1760s to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and from Belle Epoque feathers to elegant cloches and Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hat, the book offers a new insight into the rise and fall of a fashionable industry. Beautifully illustrated and packed with original research, American Milliners and their World blends fashion history and anthropology to tell the forgotten stories of the women behind some of the most iconic hats of the last three centuries.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was common practice for milliners to decorate women's hats with birds' feathers and plumes--and sometimes with the birds themselves. As many as 300 million birds per year were killed for this fashionable enterprise, causing the extinction of some entire species and the endangerment of others. Lawmakers and bird aficionados were slow to react to the effects of this practice, which went on almost unabated for a quarter of a century. Then, noted naturalists like George Bird Grinnell, William T. Hornaday, and President Theodore Roosevelt, who recognized the economic benefits birds provided, banded together to pass meaningful legislation to protect them and to curb the production of murderous millinery. This book explores the troubled history of millinery and its complicated relationship to birds and conservation. It explores why it took so long for the slaughter to end and how the efforts of individuals and groups brought about change.