All Work Is Women's Work

All Work is Women’s Work: On The Seamstresses’ Union’s Radical Publishing Practices in Early 20th-Century Amsterdam is an exploration of feminist labour history and the power of radical publishing. This publication uncovers the forgotten story of The Seamstresses’ Union, one of the first all-female labour unions in the Netherlands, and their radical use of print media to challenge patriarchal and capitalist systems in the early 20th century.

Inspired by the poignant words of a late 19th-century seamstress’ poem—“We stitch our sweat and tears, like shining pearls on lace, three cents, three cents an hour”—this project delves into the struggles and triumphs of working-class women who fought for fair wages, dignity, and autonomy. Through their newspaper, De Naaistersbode (“The Seamstresses’ Courier”), the union created a vital communication channel that connected women across Amsterdam, amplifying their voices and fostering solidarity in the face of exploitation.

The project is a feminist intervention into the archives, drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s assertion that “documentation is a feminist project.” It brings to light the radical publishing practices of The Seamstresses’ Union, situating them within a broader history of leftist and anarchist print culture. In a Cixousian act of “writing the body,” the project reinscribes the seamstresses' struggle into the present through the body of the text, the fabric of the city, and the materiality of dress. By mapping key sites of labour activism, republishing archival materials through XEROXED, a garment publishing platform founded by Alia Mascia, and providing a sticker to mark these hidden histories in Amsterdam's urban landscape, this project reimagines the archive as a space of “active recollection” rather than a static repository.

All Work is Women’s Work features:

• a critical essay examining the union’s publishing strategies and their relevance to contemporary struggles for labour rights and gender equality, designed by Beau Bertens, containing also
• a map of Amsterdam highlighting sites of feminist resistance and garment industry history
• a sticker, inviting the public to actively participate in marking and remembering the seamstresses' erased history throughout the city

 All Work is Women’s Work is part of the Library of Unruly Fashion Practices, an emerging project—a library in flux—that seeks to platform anti-capitalist, queer, feminist, and decolonial approaches to fashion, textiles, clothing, and identity. By challenging capitalist patriarchal knowledge systems, it interrogates the conventions of fashion education: what we teach, how we teach it, and the broader dynamics of knowledge production and dissemination. The library also explores publishing as an artistic practice, engaging critically with archives through acts of (re)publication and reinterpretation. It treats the archive not as a site of knowledge retrieval, but as one of knowledge production.

Type: softcover/ Dimensions: 210 × 297 portrait/ Pages: 68/ Art Director and Graphic Design: Beau Bertens/ Author: Hanka van der Voet/ Release date: December 2025/ Binding: stapled/ Colour: black and white/ Printer: KOPA/ Language: English and Dutch/ Text editing: Will Pollard/ Publisher: Clotheslines Press/ Made possible by: AFK and Nederlandse Kostuumvereniging

photography: Diego Diez