Legal historian Laura F Edwards discusses her new book on clothing and textiles in 19th-century America, Only the Clothes on Her Back. Speaking to Elinor Evans, she reveals the meaning and care that went into garments, and how clothes and textiles could lend subversive power to marginalised people.
Laura F Edwards is the author of Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2022)