Introduction: Materializing Women

Introduction: Materializing Women

Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin

Relationships between objects and gender are formed and take place in ways that are so accepted as “normal” as to become “invisible.” Thus we sometimes fail to appreciate the effects that particular notions of femininity and masculinity have on the conception, design, advertising, purchase, giving and uses of objects, as well as on their critical and popular reception.

Pat Kirkham and Judy Attfield1

This volume takes as its object of investigation the overlooked and often despised categories of women’s decorative arts and homecraft activities as sites of important cultural and social work. This collection is designed to explore the complex relationship between women and things, focusing on women’s active engagement with material culture in the various stages of the material object’s life cycle, from design and production to consumption, use, and redeployment. While current work on women and material culture has focused primarily on women as consumers,2 our volume provides case studies of women who were producers of material objects as diverse as embroidered undergarments, butter sculptures, Tlingit dolls, suffragette handkerchiefs, and war monuments. As such, this volume is concerned not only with objects themselves but also with women’s gendered material practices, which range from design and creation within the fields of fine, decorative, and domestic arts, including sculpture, needlework, and cooking, to the bricoleur’s re-use of natural and fabricated objects in such activities as fancy work, paper arts, collecting, and scrapbooking. Also, theorized and described are the ways in which women engaged in meaning making, identity formation, and commemoration through their production and manipulation of material artifacts.

What makes this volume a unique contribution to the study of women and material culture is its focus on what we are calling “gendered material

women and things, 1750–19502

practices.” The contributors to this volume have in their essays attended to material practices—the act of manipulating materiality—and as a result have collectively shifted attention from the object itself to the ways in which objects were conceptualized, produced, circulated, used, and exchanged. Traditionally, material culture studies have tended to reify the object, locating its significance within its physicality.3 Although objects contain traces of the conditions under which they were constructed, used, and exchanged, and can reveal the techniques by which they were brought into existence, and as such, ultimately bear witness to the processes of their own making and circulation, we believe that of even greater significance than the object’s thingness, at least in terms of social, cultural, political, and economic importance, is the interaction between the subject and the object. As Bruno Latour reminds us, the relationship between subject and object is richly complex. He argues that conceiving of this relationship in simple dialectical terms is far too restrictive, challenging us to “abandon the mad idea that the subject is posed in its opposition to the object, for there are neither subjects nor objects, neither in the beginning—mythical—nor in the end—equally mythical. Circulations, runs, transfers, translations, displacements, crystallizations—there are many motions, certainly, but not a single one of them perhaps, that resembles a contradiction.”4 The essays in this collection demonstrate the richly woven tapestry of networks in which subjects and objects are multi- and reciprocally connected. This volume’s focus on the processes whereby an object is designed, produced, used, and/or exchanged signals a willingness to take seriously women’s productive labor as a form of invention and as possessing epistemic and social significance. Women’s engagement with the material world, most obvious when a woman is making something—a doll, a sculpture, a cake—may be far less apparent, but no less productive, in cases such as writing a letter or bequeathing an heirloom where the engagement is less visible. By providing concrete examples of women’s material practices, we anticipate that this volume will help us all to rethink women’s productivity, inventiveness, and creativity as well as their intellectual, social, and cultural contributions.

Even though most of the material practices examined in this volume may fall into the category of the mundane—sewing, using scissors to cut paper, fixing an arrangement with glue—we are making large claims for women’s material practices. We argue here in the introduction and collectively and incrementally in the following essays, that women’s engagement with the material world is not only informed by a deep knowledge of the materials used and as such they are participating in the creation, maintenance, and communication of knowledge about those materials, but also women’s manipulation of the material world is central to constructing social meanings that operate in the world beyond the traditionally prescribed (and circumscribed) boundaries occupied by women. For these reasons, material culture should no longer be ignored as beneath the notice of traditional discipline-based, academic

Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin 3

inquiry as practiced in such text-based fields of history, literature, and rhetoric.5 As historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has demonstrated with her own work on women and textiles,6 we think that the ways in which women have manipulated the material world bear scrutiny as legitimate subjects of social, cultural, and economic history.

Obviously, material culture is important in the writing of women’s history. As feminist historian June Purvis astutely observes, “examining the material conditions of women’s lives and their experiences of those conditions seems to be the most legitimate way to construct a feminist women’s history that has women centre stage.”7 And, more to the point for this collection, as contributor Vivienne Richmond writes: “Things mattered to people and they must matter to those who write their histories.” Many of the essays in this volume make the case that material culture is the only path to reconstructing the history of some women’s lives, especially women for whom writing and its preservation was not an option. Richmond’s discussion of a pair of working-class girl’s drawers recovers traces of two sisters’ lives which otherwise would be lost to history; Peers’ treatment of a beaded bag from Canada attests to the artistic abilities and skill of an unnamed, mixed-race daughter of a fur trader; Coughlin’s description of women’s mourning practices in Brittany illuminates and complicates these misunderstood and often stereotyped practices; and Kearney’s examination of Yanyuwa’s rituals of sacred place making argues for aboriginal women’s importance in maintaining their people’s cultural practices. Even for much more privileged women than these, women who lived comfortable, middle-class lives with access to writing and other forms of self-expression, material culture is still often all that remains of their lives. The seaweed pressed in a bound album, discussed by Marcinkus, with the name of its compiler written on the title page is all that remains of a Mrs. Charles Penfield. However, the survival of this kind of material culture produced by such women is far from secure given the traditional undervaluation of their production, and the fragility of material things that are, as Marilynne Robinson puts it, “so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay.”8 The albums filled with pressed flowers, the shell-studded frames, the photograph albums, and scrapbooks will have been lucky to make it out of the attic or basement and into a junk shop, where they might be rescued from oblivion, just as Jennie Drew’s autograph album was rescued by our contributor Lisa Ricker’s sister. Most nineteenth-century, middle-class handicrafts, not having the validating air of the exotic about them that might have diverted them to a proper museum, wind up in the dustbin, or if they are really, really lucky, they might find refuge in some drawer or cabinet of a local historical society or historic house open to the public infrequently if at all.

Unappreciated and understudied as well are the multiple and complex ways in which women manipulate materiality. Crafts, for want of a better word, have recently and only very slowly been acknowledged to be of some


social and historical significance. Quilting, for instance, has been elevated into an art form, exhibited in fine arts museums (making the leap out of the folk museums), and has been the subject of social and cultural histories, particularly as quilting relates to African American history, Hawaiian history, and colonial American history.9 Increasingly embroidery has crept out from specialized newsletters to capture the attention of feminist historians and rhetoricians.10 Scrapbooking, though widely popular as a home hobby, is just now being examined by design historians and historians of women’s history.11 Home cooking, as a part of the new field of foodways, is starting to be taken notice of by social and cultural historians.12 Most of the essays in this book are about women making something, or to put it another way, women as producers. With the exception of the two essays on sculpture, the things that our authors describe and analyze were not sold as commodities, were more ephemeral (as in butter sculptures), and often circulated as gifts, or were displayed within the home or kept privately as mementos and keepsakes. The few essays that do not feature a woman making something demonstrate how women used particular things, such as a cloak, to achieve social ends or perform a social identity. Collectively we argue that women in the process of making and manipulating things were not only engaged in self-definition and identity performance, but were actively engaged in meaning-making practices that involved the construction, circulation, and maintenance of knowledge.

To justify our claims that women’s decorative arts and homecrafts can be interpreted as epistemic activities, we turn to two key concepts—“situated knowledge” (sometimes referred to as local knowledge) and “embodied knowledge”—both of which have been posited by feminists as a way to destabilize the dominant validation of disembodied, abstract thinking.13 These two ideas, emerging in part from a feminist critique within science studies, insist on the contingent and embodied ways in which scientific ideas are generated, the ways in which knowledge about nature is constructed. Situated knowledge invokes a geographic metaphor of place—knowledge emerges out of the specifics of a particular location (and time).14 Embodied knowledge reconnects the abstract—or whatever it may be called, “truth,” “facts,” or “ideas”—with the body’s ways of knowing. These crucial concepts have led to rethinking of how science happens in society, redefining the locus of investigation within the disciplines of the sociology, history, and philosophy of science. However, what is left out of these two formulations—implied by them, but not articulated—is the interaction between the body and the place, and this can be conceptualized as the domain of the hand—that bodily part which engages with and transforms the materiality of the place. Our privileging the hand over the eye (though the eye is key to what the hand can accomplish) might undo the way in which the eye has been co-opted by thinkers as the mind’s tool of investigation. Though eyes are just as embodied as the hands, philosophy has managed to elevate the status of eyes by making


them central to the way in which we conceive of knowing (“I see” equals “I understand”). Patricia Spyer has aptly called this privileged focus on the eye “ocularcentrism.”15 Here we are arguing for touch as key to knowing one’s materials, and the dexterity of the practiced hand, for knowing how to transform those materials.16 This is to argue that material practices, those that the hands perform, are a form of knowledge making, and, as such, have been overlooked or ignored as inferior to other forms of expression or thinking that seem to leave the material world behind. Dewey’s analysis of the way in which we tend to value the immaterial over the material aptly sums up what is at stake in our argument:

the age-long association of knowing and thinking with immaterial and spiritual principles, and of the arts, of all practical activity in doing and making, with matter. For work is done with the body … and is directed upon material things. The disrepute which has attended the thought of material things in comparison with immaterial thought has been transferred to everything associated with practice.17

The mundane procedures and concrete materials that make up what gets called “crafts” are usually overlooked or, if acknowledged, perceived as debased or beneath what is considered that which is disembodied or abstract and rises “above” its circumstances of production.

The vertical hierarchy of art, with certain kinds of art being privileged and others ignored, emerged in modernity, radically transforming earlier concepts of art and artist. Under a modernist view, artists became identified with the products of their creation rather than with praxis and knowledge of praxis. This unrelenting focus on the “thingness” of art and a concurrent shift of focus away from praxis, reorganized artistic artifacts with privileged objects of art positioned at the top and other objects demoted as lowly crafts that were often distinguished in negative terms as “useful” objects, and typically feminized as “women’s” objects. We would do well to recoup Aristotle’s horizontal concept of art and artist whereby artists are distinguished not by their products but “as wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory for themselves and knowing the causes.” In other words, artists are those who know their knowing. As Aristotle continues, “it is a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know, that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is.” Art, regardless of medium, under this view is best understood as epistemic.18

One way then to avoid the trap of art versus craft, which echoes other hierarchical binaries of male/female and culture/nature, is to examine what historians of science call “artisanal” practices; these fuse technique with knowledge, thought with action, and are a form of praxis. Artisans, however, is a term that carries with it gendered overtones, implying skilled men, who know how to do things with steel, wood, concrete, and stone. But couldn’t we use artisanal to describe cooking, sewing, and crafting, and this way, lend to


women’s domestic arts some of the moral weight and economic seriousness that travel with this masculinized word? For isn’t the problem with women’s domestic arts that they are perceived as “decorative,” as trivial, superficial, and as unnecessary? This volume collectively insists that the decorative performs vital social and cultural functions, creating meaning and maintaining knowledge through its manipulation of materiality.

The time frame—1750–1950—covered by this collection is, as any stipulated period, a convenient social construct, but we purposively carved out this 200-year space because it is a period during which the ideology of domesticity—the limited interior space women were meant to occupy—emerged as the dominant discourse on women’s place in society.19 These years also were a time when, as historian Deborah Simonton observes, European women’s “position in urban industrial production was gradually eroded …, undermining their participation in high-status occupations, and it became increasingly difficult [for women] to gain access to them.”20 As the production of goods moved into public spaces and women’s productivity ostensibly moved out of the public sphere into the home, the ideology of domesticity concealed that production continued not only in cottage industries and by women who crossed spheres to secure a living but also in bourgeois sitting rooms and parlors.21 Yet, most scholars, even those who have contested the limits of the separate spheres construct, have typically focused almost solely on female consumption rather than production, and as a result, women’s myriad contributions to design and production during the modern period have been largely overlooked and forgotten. The essays in this volume are designed to illuminate and complicate this time period’s received notions concerning domesticity by showing that women were highly skilled creators and producers of useful as well as decorative objects both inside and outside the walls of the home.

Organization of the Chapters

[C]lassifications are not passive ordering devices in a world objectively divided into obvious categories. Taxonomies are human decisions imposed on nature—theories about the causes of nature’s order.

Stephen Jay Gould22

Women and Things, 1750–1950 is organized into four sections: “Textiles and Meaning Making,” “Bricolage,” “Troubling the Private/ Public Divide,” and “Memory and Commemoration.” Of course, organizational schemes are, as Stephen Gould reminds us, great convenient fictions—social constructs guided by theorizing—and some of the essays we have located under one heading could well appear under another. Nevertheless, we found this scheme


useful for bringing together essays that resonate with or challenge one another because of their object of study, theoretical frame, or methodology.

The four essays in “Textiles and Meaning Making” explore the ways in which women’s sewing practices, in particular plain needlework, embroidery, and beadwork, are productive of gendered, classed, and racialized social identities. In the first essay, “Fabricating Identity,” Maureen Daly Goggin examines and contextualizes the “layers of symbolic residues of identity performance that are woven into [Janie] Terrero’s [signature handkerchief],” a piece Terrero embroidered in 1912, while she was imprisoned, to mark two hunger strikes that year by suffragettes serving in Holloway Prison, London. Goggin demonstrates how material practices materialize identity by exploring the ways in which Terrero’s “piece of needlework serves as an act of resistance and purposeful construction and negotiation of specific, albeit partial, aspects of her identity, most notably her class, gender, nationality, political allegiances, and prisoner status.” In so doing, Goggin makes a powerful case for the crucial role of material practices in identity performance. In the second essay, “Stitching the Self,” Vivienne Richmond also grapples with the intimate, dynamic connection between material culture and identity performance. She analyzes two pieces of working-class late-nineteenth-century plain-sewing—a needlework sampler wrought by Emily Kenniff and a pair of calico drawers stitched by her sister Eliza Kenniff that were entered into an English Girls’ Friendly Society exhibition in the late 1880s. Her impeccable analysis shows “how a young working-class woman in late-Victorian London might use her needle to fashion an identity.” Focusing on gender and class performance, Richmond persuasively demonstrates the indispensable role of material artifacts and practices for constructing and understanding history. In “Material Culture, Identity, and Colonial Society in the Canadian Fur Trade,” the third essay, Laura Peers examines the construction and reception of two mid-nineteenth-century artistic objects—an embroidered and beaded “octopus” pouch and an oil painting, Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall—created by women who occupied very different places in British colonial society in the Canadian fur trade. The former was crafted by an unknown Métis woman of mixed European and First Nations heritage, the latter by the successful upper-class English artist Frances Anne Beechey Hopkins. Peers’ study powerfully demonstrates how these two objects “materialize the identities of their makers within a complex social system in which race, [class,] and gender mattered deeply.” Peers calls attention to the importance of materiality when she observes that “the very physicality of objects, their survival in museums and archives, provides opportunities of analysis which are both uncomfortable and profitable in terms of existing evidential sources and narratives.” The final essay in this section, “From Ruffs to Regalia” by Megan A. Smetzer, also helps us see just how much things matter in understanding identity performance. In her essay, Smetzer focuses on the


mid-twentieth-century artistic production of souvenir dolls made by Tlingit women in Southeast Alaska to build a compelling case for understanding how such artworks reclaim “specific indigenous identities, and their creativity and innovation in the face of often repressive social, economic, and political circumstance.” Challenging the mistaken commonplace that the last century saw a paucity of indigenous art making, Smetzer demonstrates that not only was there a strong tradition of art but that Tlingit women found ways through their designs and the materials they used to balance “the desires of tourists with their own desires to assert and lay claim to their identities as Tlingit people.” In so doing, these women found resilient ways to forward long-standing Tlingit cultural practices despite marked cultural disruptions brought about by colonialism.

The four essays in the second section, “Bricolage,”23 focus on how women engaged available material objects to create new meanings and practices, thus, revealing how “making do” is a powerful inventive strategy. Ariane Fennetaux’s “Female Crafts” opens this section by recouping female arts of japanning, gilding, fancywork, filigree, and shell work that have been largely ignored by historians and art historians. Her keen analyses of these material practices make clear the ways in which late-Georgian British women traversed the domestic boundaries in which they were ostensibly inscribed to enter into specific activities and fields (especially scientific) more commonly associated with men. Women accomplished this, Fennetaux argues, by engaging in “female crafts such as japanning or shell-work [that] can be seen as lévi-straussian bricolages, that is, techniques of assemblage that used material debris of Britain’s imperial history such as exotic shells or printed chinoiseries.” In so doing, these women engaged in a meaningful process that permitted them to organize and appropriate their world for their own ends. Such artistic endeavors, then, “should be seen as material strategies developed by women to appropriate through bricolage concerns not usually associated with women or domesticity.” In “Reading Circles, Crafts, and Flower Arranging,” Julia Sedda analyzes Luise Duttenhofer’s silhouette papercuttings (focusing primarily on her portraits) to show how Duttenhofer, an upper-middle-class woman from Stuttgart, captured the everyday activities of women of all classes. By so doing, Duttenhofer’s art, and Sedda’s treatment of it, provides us with an important glimpse into eighteenth- and turn-of-the-nineteenth-century European female life. Beyond this significant role, “the silhouettes [also] point up the inventiveness and the artistic ability of Duttenhofer,” and thus, recasting papercutting as a fine artistic expression. Andrea Kolasinski Marcinkus, in the third essay, “Preservation and Permanence,” focuses on nineteenth-century American nature fancywork, exploring both how women created this art and the role such artistic expression played in domestic life. Her thoughtful analysis of nature fancywork as it relates to time, memory, commemoration (as souvenir), and death reveals the complexities of this art


endeavor, showing how women under the banner of art engaged in established scientific practices of collecting specimens and preparing them for display. Such work, as Marcinkus so astutely observes, “utilizes the late-nineteenth-century domestic value system to express preservation and permanence from a particularly feminine view point.” In “Material Histories,” Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger examines late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scrapbooks constructed for and by American women’s organizations to demonstrate how women transformed the popular practice of scrapbooking for personal ends into a cogent articulation of the history of their organizations and the important role these played in American society and culture. Such documents are crucial because, as Mecklenburg-Faenger perceptively notes, “given that public memory tended to be hostile to clubwomen and dismissive of their cultural work, many women felt the need to become their own historians in order to ensure that at least some self-representation survived the ravages of public hostility or indifference.” What Mecklenburg-Faenger calls an “important form of a ‘vernacular’ practice of history writing,” scrapbooking deserves close scholarly attention in that they “reveal how clubwomen viewed and understood themselves and their place in a historical narrative.”

The four essays in “Troubling the Private/Public Divide” challenge the problematic binary of separate gendered spheres by examining the ways in which women not only participated in but redefined public spheres via their material practices. In the first essay in this section, “Materials of the ‘Everyday’ Woman Writer,” Cheryl Nixon and Louise Penner analyze eighteenth-century women’s manuscript letters against models offered in letter-writing manuals of the day to show how real women often subverted or challenged the limited and limiting ideology of femininity that pervaded many of the rhetorical models. As they so well observe, “real letters expect to have real effects on real people. While print letters depict women offering advice to other women and addressing shared relationships, manuscript letters are written between women and men, and women and non-relatives, and often move beyond the immediate family to influence larger social relationships.” In “Inside Out,” Marjan Sterckx explores the role and work of female sculptors between 1750 and 1950 in three major European cities—London, Brussels, and Paris—to recover women’s artistic and cultural contributions to the world of sculpture, contributions that have been largely ignored or erased. She deftly teases out some of the “various power structures and exclusion mechanisms, often invisible” that women artists, especially sculptresses, confronted in their artistic efforts. In detailing the many obstacles sculptresses had to overcome and negotiate in securing public commissions and recognition of their art, Sterckx paints a compelling picture of the ways in which women have traversed the private/public divide to make their mark in what she calls (semi-)public spaces. The next essay, “The Butter Sculpture of Caroline Shawk Brooks,” by Rebecca Bedell and Margaret Samu, also delves into the world of


women sculptors, focusing on the artistic innovation of American sculptress Caroline Shawk Brooks. In tracing Brooks’ career “in a highly unusual medium [butter] and at the highly unlikely intersection of art, domesticity, and dairy production,” Bedell and Samu offer a richly textured portrait that reveals how Brooks attempted to straddle the ever-widening gulf between popular (or lowbrow) and elite (or highbrow) forms of art by working in both butter and marble. Brooks crossed the public divide on many levels—as a woman sculptor, as an artist who brought a domestic medium (butter) into the public arena, and as a woman artist who left her farm and performed her art for publics across the USA. In the final essay, “Cooking ‘Delicious and Wholesome Food’ in Post-Revolutionary Russia,” Lyubov Gurjeva and Maria Eichmans Cochran focus their analytical attention on a ubiquitous post-revolutionary Russian cookbook titled the Book of Delicious and Wholesome Food and the social, political, and economic context in which that book was authored, read, and used. Their careful and cogent treatment of this cookbook and the culture in which it was produced brings to light tensions between Soviet culinary experts with their industrial expertise and women who faced domestic cooking demands, and demonstrates how “the double role of the Soviet woman as a worker in the public sphere and a homemaker” in the domestic sphere was both accommodated and complicated by the ideology undergirding the book. In addition to troubling the public and private divide, this essay highlights additional tensions between feminine and masculine, industrial and domestic, national and international, and privileged and less privileged as these emerge within the cookbook and the world of domestic cookery it creates.

The five essays in “Memory and Commemoration” analyze both mundane and monumental memorializing practices, from personal autograph albums to World War I public monuments to ceremonial spaces, to explore women’s roles as keepers of memory during a time of cultural anxiety over memory.24 In “Gifting and Fetishization,” Katherine Rieder traces the cultural autobiography of a miniature portrait of Sally Foster Otis and the pearl string necklace she wore in that portrait to show how both “became central to an interlocking network of gifting and fetishization that enabled the Otis family [through several generations] to deny absence and prevent familial fragmentation throughout the nineteenth century.” Situating her examination within gendered gifting practices and fetishes, Rieder calls attention to the things and activities that create living memories. In the next essay “(Re)Collecting Herself,” Lisa Reid Ricker focuses on the richly complex meanings of autograph collecting by analyzing the multiple layers of meaning in Jennie Drew’s nineteenth-century autograph album and the memory functions such ephemera serves. Ricker builds a powerful case for understanding that “what is really collected in the keeping of such material objects as autograph albums are purposeful strands of discourse exerting


powerful forces on the past and present, bestowing new meanings at every turn.” In the third essay, “Crosses, Cloaks, and Globes,” Maura Coughlin analyzes the material, cultural, and social significance of the funerary proëlla cross, the widow’s cloak, and the marriage globe in women’s mourning rituals in the rural communities of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century coastal Brittany. Through her cogent analysis, Coughlin offers us a “view [of] women’s rural material culture and representations of it as assertions of specifically local meanings, activated with agency that enable performances of identity and resistance to the homogenizing forces of modern consumerism and the institutional packaging of experience.” In arguing for the specificity of mourning practices in these rural communities as rituals of resistance to national and even global identities and desires of outsiders, Coughlin details the ways in which rural coastal Breton women’s mourning rituals and objects dealt in particular and local ways with loss of life and social change. In the next essay, “Monumental Visions,” Jennifer Wingate examines American “women’s professional roles in shaping memories of World War I through their sculptural contributions to the physical landscape of war commemoration.” Wingate’s compelling study of women sculptors reveals the personal and professional challenges and obstacles with which these artists struggled in their efforts to realize their individual, and decidedly differentiated, artistic visions for commemorating war. In the final essay, “Place as Material Culture and Restorative Tool,” Amanda Kearney examines indigenous women’s (Yanyuwa) ceremonial places in far northern Australia to demonstrate how Yanyuwa women actively produced and maintained cultural landscapes as material culture during the early to mid-twentieth century. Her study shows how “ceremony places are constructed through relational processes and as socio-material culture they move dually through physical and conceptual worlds, retaining variable elements of tangibility and intangibility.” In arguing for theorizing cultural spaces as material culture, Kearney reminds us that “gender and material culture are processes; both are negotiated, contested, and interactive.” Her well-taken point may be understood as a lynchpin for this entire collection that insists on focusing on the gendered practices of material culture, for taken together these essays materialize women by recouping women’s material practices and thus women themselves.

Notes

1. Pat Kirkham and Judy Attfield, Introduction to The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 1.

2. For a few examples, see Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Tammy C. Whitlock, Crime, Gender, and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot, Hampshire,


England: Ashgate, 2005); Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siécle France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). See Susanne Küchler who argues that archaeology has been at the forefront of consumption studies. She notes that the “centrality of consumption in the study of material culture today has arguably grown out of a ‘post-structural’ preoccupation with the fluidity of process, practice and performance, which acknowledges the transformation of objects and persons”; Susanne Küchler, “Process and Transformation,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 325–8 (London: Sage, 2006), 326.

3. See Christopher Tilley et al. for an excellent review of the scholarship on material culture in which they identify the two major approaches: one that takes the material objects as the starting point for investigation, and the other, the human subject or society as the starting point. What their review of the literature reveals is that there has been scant attention to the practices of material culture—that dynamic space between object and subject. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, “Introduction,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (London: Sage, 2006), 4. Also see Daniel Miller, “Why Some Things Matter,” in Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, ed. Daniel Miller, 3–24 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) for a discussion of the development of material culture studies; and Victor Buchli, ed. Material Culture: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2004).

4. Bruno Latour, “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things,” in Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture, ed. P.M. Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000), 10.

5. While researchers in anthropology and archaeology have long studied material culture, increasingly scholars from other disciplines that have traditionally been more text-centric, such as cultural studies, rhetorical studies, literary studies, history, geography, gender and women’s studies, to name but a few, are increasingly focusing attention on material culture in what might be termed the material turn in scholarship. However, our position is that in this material turn, women, and gender, more generally, have been given little attention. Two exceptions are, for instance, Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, eds., Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830 (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Sheldon Lee Gosline, Archaeogender: Studies in Gender’s Material Culture (Warren Center, PA: Shangri-La, 1999).

6. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001).

7. June Purvis, “Doing Feminist Women’s History: Researching the Lives of Women in the Suffragette Movement in Edwardian England,” in Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective, eds. Mary Maynard and June Purvis (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 185.

8. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Picador, 2004), 100.

9. See, for example, Laurel Horton, ed. Quiltmaking in America: Beyond the Myths (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1994); Laurel Horton, Mary Black’s Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); Pat Ferrero, Elaine Hedges, and Julie Silber, Hearts and Hands: Women, Quilts and the American Society (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 2000).

10. See, for example, Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1989); Maureen Daly Goggin, “An Essamplaire Essai on the Rhetoricity of Needlework Sampler Making: A Contribution to Theorizing and Historicizing Rhetorical Praxis,” Rhetoric Review 21, no. 4 (2002): 309–38.

11. See, for instance, Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler, eds., The Scrapbook in American Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006).

12. See, for example, Sherrie A. Inness, ed., Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Sherrie A. Inness, ed., Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Joanne Hollows, “Science and Spells: Cooking, Lifestyle, and Domestic Femininities in British Good Housekeeping during the Inter-war Period,” in Historicizing Lifestyle: Mediating Taste, Consumption and Identity from the 1900s to 1970s, eds. David Bell and Joanne Hollows, 21–40 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006).

13. See Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575–99. Foucault’s work on the body as a site for disciplinarity has been foundational in bringing the body back into cultural history. See Discipline


and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), and The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). For an overview of Foucault’s impact on embodied knowledge, see Arthur Frank, “Bringing Bodies Back In: A Decade Review,” Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 131–62; and Felix Driver, “Bodies in Space: Foucault’s Account of Disciplinary Power,” in Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine, and the Body, eds. Colin Jones and Roy Porter, 113–31 (London: Routledge, 1994).

14. See, for example, Carl Knappett who argues: We should not treat objects as individual, isolated items; attention must be devoted to both

their spatial and temporal situatedness. The former refers to the complex environment of human and non-human objects in which individual artifacts are enmeshed. The latter consists of an artifact’s location within the flow of time, and how that artifact is experienced by agents over the course of a life time.

Carl Knappett, Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 62–3.

15. Patricia Spyer, “The Body, Materiality and the Senses,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 125–9 (London: Sage, 2006).

16. Pamela Smith’s concept of material literacy as an artisanal epistemology whereby one gains “knowledge neither through reading nor writing but through a process of experience and labor. Rather than producing a ‘lettered man,’ such literacy has the goal of making knowledge productive” comes close to what we are arguing here. However, we see no need to disconnect reading and writing practices from experience and labor practices; indeed the knowing hand is central to writing practices. Pamela H. Smith, “Giving Voice to the Hand: The Articulation of Material Literacy in the Sixteenth Century,” in Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trimbur, 74–93 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 76.

17. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Minton, 1929), 5.

18. Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” in A New Aristotle Reader, ed. J.L. Ackrill (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1.1. See also John Dewey who promotes a horizontal notion of art by defining it as any form of work that is “unusually conscious of its own meaning” and the artist as distinguished by the extent of her awareness of what she is doing. Both Aristotle and Dewey refocus our attention on praxis, something we insist on in this volume. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: New York Free Press, 1966), 260–61.

19. For the history of the rise of the ideology of domesticity, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Ideologies of domesticity and the notion of separate spheres are topics beyond the scope of this introduction; for landmark treatments of these topics, see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middleton, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). Whether women’s actual lives, as opposed to representations of women’s lives, were indeed constricted to the domestic sphere is a subject of debate. See, for instance, Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

20. Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work 1700 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998), 47.

21. For a discussion of women’s work in early modern society, including guilds and trades, see Deborah Simonton, op. cit., Ruth Perry, and Merry Wiesner, who argue that before 1750 women in Europe had more opportunities to work in and own businesses than after 1750. Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980); Merry E. Wiesner, “Spinsters and Seamstresses: Women in Cloth and Clothing Production,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, 191–205 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

22. Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996), 39.


23. See Lévi-Strauss on bricolage and Derrida who suggests “every discourse is bricoleur.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 19ff; Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 284.

24. Richard Terdiman identifies the late nineteenth/early twentieth century as a time of “memory crisis.” Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

Introduction: Materializing Women

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