Early Life and Career
Lewis was born in the small farming settlement of Freetown, Orange County, Virginia, the granddaughter of an emancipated slave who helped start the community. She was one of eight children.
She left Freetown at age 16, after her father died, and moved to Washington and eventually to New York City. When she arrived in New York, an acquaintance found her a job in a Brooklyn laundry, where she was assigned to an ironing board. She had never ironed and lasted three hours before she was dismissed. She soon found work as a seamstress, and copied Christian Dior dresses for Dorcas Avedon, then the wife of Richard Avedon. She made a dress for Marilyn Monroe, as well as the African-inspired dresses for which she became well-known. .
She also worked for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker, was involved in political demonstrations, and campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read more about this topic: Edna Lewis
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers,
Which is both healthful and good husbandry.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“She never dies, but lasteth
In life of lover’s heart;
He ever dies that wasteth
In love his chiefest part.”
—Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)