Catherine E. McKinley on the Sewing Machine as a Tool of Empowerment
For African women across the continent, many of the most powerful but less remarked upon modern legacies were born of the sewing machine and the camera.
This may seem like a bit of a wild claim: to survey the late 19th and 20th centuries and elevate these two instruments of modernity above the car, above other industry, above medical innovations and the tools of agriculture, above even the machinery of electricity-making and all that it powers. But for decades after the fall of colonial regimes, beginning with Ghana’s Independence in 1957, very few of these other things reached democratically or consistently into most African lives, especially women’s. And even now they remain elusive, including consistent power or water even in the most state-of-the-art corners of metropolises, whereas the camera and the sewing machine slowly became part of the quotidian—steadfast instruments that offered a powerful means to author one’s own life.
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