‘The Queen of Inventions’: How Home Technology Shaped Women’s Work and Children’s Futures

This paper studies the impact of the home sewing machine on women’s work and intergenerational mobility—an innovation that enabled women to generate income from within the household. Marketed directly to women as a tool for both domestic use and paid work, it provides a unique setting to examine how household technologies reshaped labor markets and intergenerational outcomes. Exploiting the expansion of sewing machine sales agents, which generated geographic and temporal variation in access, I show that access to sewing machines increased demand for dressmakers, raised women’s employment in this occupation, and reduced reliance on child labor. In the long run, children exposed in early life attained higher literacy, formed smaller families, and experienced greater intergenerational mobility. These findings highlight the household as a crucial site of technological change, showing how domestic innovations could expand women’s opportunities and generate lasting gains across generations.