Leenia, a few answers


1) The song doesn't say a woman wore the jeans, it says a woman made the jeans. (Georgia Turner says "sewed those new blue jeans," not "sewed my new blue jeans.") So whether women WORE jeans is irrelevant.

2) Even if it did say that, women did indeed wear jeans prior to the 1950s, rivets and all. Jeans were extremely popular with women in factories during WWII, but had been popular with women workers on farms and in other rural outdoor working communities (such as ranching and mining communities) for many years before that. If you look in the places where you'd expect to find photos of women in jeans, eg. among photos of factory workers, ranch hands, etc., you see plenty of jeans on women.Here's a picture of two of them, in 1943. Here's a working cowgirl in 1939. Norman Rockwell's famous painting of Rosie the Riveter is another example from the 1940s. Georgia Turner, a miner's daughter, and Clarence Ashley, who grew up among farming homesteaders, would have been quite familiar with women who at least occasionally wore jeans in the 1930s.

3) The song doesn't say that the mother is making the jeans "on a home sewing machine." She could easily be in a factory, as far as we know from the song.

4) Even if it did say that, if you read Q's post, you'll see that the word "jeans" did not always mean the riveted pants we think of today. Jeans has referred to a number of different kinds of pants, some of which were made by mothers at home.

5) You seem to be arguing that only someone in the post-1970s world could imagine the scene of a woman making or wearing jeans in the early part of the century. But we know people did imagine it; the song was consistently collected with those words in the 1930s—obviously it made sense to Clarence Ashley and Georgia Turner, and didn't seem like an anachronism. The song probably isn't much older than that, so why should it seem anachronistic to us if it didn't to them?