This book is a history of embroidery from the mostly English point of view. Written in 1984, it is a study of women’s history and women’s role in society as it is reviewed through the shifting notions of femininity and the roles ascribed to women through samplers, decorative arts and dress and a touch on modern fiber art, though this aspect could due with a more recent look at current artists who use stitching as a medium for expression.
In the middle ages women worked alongside men in embroiderers’ guild workshops as apprentices, designers, and stitchers of gold, silver and silk and embroidery was thought to be equal of painting and sculpture. But, by the eighteenth century embroidery was considered to be a task exclusively suited to women, and by the nineteenth century the fine stitchery expected of women of the upper classes and the skill work extracted for slave wages from working-class women, had become both a symbol and instrument of female subservience.
Drawing on household accounts, women’s magazines, letters, novels, and the art works themselves, Rozsika Parker discovered pockets of resistance: paradoxically, while embroidery was employed to define femininity in women, it also provided a way to negotiate the constraints of the feminine role. “Polly Cook did this”, one eighteenth century child’s sampler states, “and hated every stitch she did in it.” Good for Polly.
The images of the embroideries were amazing work. The writing itself was a bit dry and academic, which I suppose is to be expected given the subject matter.
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