> as lemmas

1836 C. M. Sedgwick Poor Rich Man & Rich Poor Man ix. 83 Agnes was a diligent and good girl, and had been well taught plain sewing in a public school.

1853 E. C. Gaskell Cranford iii. 47 I always took a quantity of plain sewing to Cranford; for, as we did not read much, or walk much, I found it a capital time to get through my work.

1932 ‘R. Scully’ Scarlet Pansy xl. 347 One comes to believe almost anything [is] possible, especially after seeing the two Frenchmen osculate each other. Honest-to-Gawd, dearie, the way they kiss is just nobody's business. Your Aunt Mary [sc. a homosexual man] is too busy these days to do aught but plain sewing.

1941 F. Thompson Over to Candleford ix. 137 Plain sewing was still looked upon as an important part of a girl's education.

1969 W. H. Auden in N.Y. Rev. Bks. 27 Mar. 3/4 I conclude he [sc. J. R. Ackerley] did not belong to either of the two commonest classes of homosexuals, neither to the ‘orals’..nor to the ‘anals’... My guess is that at the back of his mind, lay a daydream of an innocent Eden where children play ‘Doctor’, so that the acts he really preferred were the most ‘brotherly’, Plain-Sewing and Princeton-First-Year.

1980 D. Attridge in Times Lit. Suppl. 18 Apr. 441/1 Auden..once boasted to me..of his having been the first to use ‘Plain-Sewing’ in print, and explained it as a sailor's term for mutual masturbation.

1994 T. May Victorian Schoolroom 17 (caption) The ability to do plain sewing was as useful to the future domestic servant as it was to the future labourer's wife.