The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine

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Rozsika Parker uses household accounts, women's magazines, letters, novels and the works of art themselves to trace through history how the separation of the craft of embroidery from the fine arts came to be a major force in the marginalisation of women's work. Beautifully illustrated, her book also discusses the contradictory nature of women's experience of embroidery: how it has inculcated female subservience while providing an immensely pleasurable source of creativity, forging links between women. Rozsika Parker, “The Domestication of Embroidery.” in The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 60-82. Since I am new in the world of embroidery, I was eager to read such an interesting looking work as this and I must say I was not disappointed. Rozsika Parker's exploration of the history of embroidery (primarily within the scope of Britain) and its relationship to femininity drew my attention because I've taken up embroidery entirely on my own in the past few years. A lot of the appeal for me was the historical connection, so of course I looked around for books on the history of the art. Add in a discussion of gender and society and I'm sold.

The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker – Anna Vidal Honours 2020 The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker – Anna Vidal Honours 2020

Rozsika Parker’s book brings to light the relationship between women (mainly upper and middle class) and embroidery. Exposing how embroidery was used to subdue and control girls and make them ready for marriage. How samplers represented the quiet dignity of a girl but also how some also stitched quotes into them hinting of their unhappiness. This led to women using stitch as a means of communicating their dissatisfaction of their lot. Examples of this are the suffragettes and the anger of the women’s lib movement. This story of embroidery brings us to where we are now with artists like Tracey Emin and movements like Craftivism. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the needle itself wields its own visual power. Now in her eighties, Olga Frantskevich’s hand-woven tapestries recall scenes from her childhood in Belarus under German occupation. They tell vivid stories of friends and neighbours, widows and soldiers lost to war, her brightly coloured child-like scenes punctuated with traumatic memories. The prequel to, provocateur of, and title inspiration for McBrinn’s book was Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984). Parker’s treatise was an important craft history text and a feminist polemic on women’s art. Pennina Barnett and Jennifer Harris [1] summarized Parker’s contribution to the art and craft canon: “In this ground-breaking study she mapped the decline in the status of embroidery from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century: from a high art form practised by both men and women, particularly in England, to one that was seen as lowly and feminine—and from an admired professional art to a marginalised domestic craft.” [2] The Subversive Stitch identified the male presence in British textile activities as historical (i.e Opus Anglicanum), and rare from the Victorian era forward. McBrinn notes in Chapter 1 that Parker quoted an Office of National Statistics (UK) report (c. 1979) wherein only two percent of British men engaged in needlework. I used this book as a major component of my research for my masters thesis. I was writing about the Glasgow Girls, specifically Ann Macbeth. I am so thankful for this book for having more information on these remarkable women than almost any other text and so much insightful knowledge about this brave woman. UR - https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Queering_the_Subversive_Stitch.html?id=XeEWswEACAAJ&redir_esc=yMcBrinn's book marks an urgent intervention in the field of craft studies and it will be an essential text for those interested in the history of needlework and masculinity ... it will also become an important starting point for scholars looking to explore much wider, more diverse and inclusive approaches to investigations of queerness and craft in the future. This book tells the history of embroidery. It shows how useful embroidery is to get to know the history of women or how similar it remains to other art forms such as painting.

Queering the Subversive Stitch: Men and the Culture of Queering the Subversive Stitch: Men and the Culture of

I’ve wanted to read this book for a while but to be honest as it is hailed as a piece of academic feminist literature I was put off. I expected it to be wordy, heavy going and worthy but to my relief it is none of these things. Yes it is academic but the writing style flows and is always engaging, full of evidenced based opinion. This book traces the use of embroidery, especially by Victorian England, to define and enforce barriers on femininity and the effects this has had both on embroidery and women. The main focus is on embroidery in the UK, although from time to time references are made to other countries. The information that is part of the descriptions of the images comes up again in the main text and that I didn't like. I skipped most of the long quotes in the book, as I think they were not always necessarily significant.

Garland is a partner of World Crafts Council – Australia, a national entity of the World Crafts Council – Asia Pacific. I really, really enjoyed this look at embroidery and the making of the feminine throughout (mostly English) history. I give it 4 stars only because it would have really been improved by colour photos at a higher resolution...but this re-issue is very fine otherwise. Rambles a bit but this is an interesting (if currently dated) look at Embroidery and how in many ways it has come to define a certain level of femininity. How it went from being a career to being an acceptable way for women to pass their time and how it has been diminished by both men and women.

The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the

This book gives an historical perspective on the way embroidery changed from being a profitable business for women to a method of oppressing and exploiting women and their emotions. Only in the final two chapters do we begin to hear about how women have reclaimed embroidery to use it in subversive ways, such as the use of embroidery by suffragettes in their banners, and by more recent feminist artists.

The excess of images, goods, currency, and the contemporary problem of algorithm-generated Tweets that influence our consumer and political choices inspired Yelena Popova’s banner reminiscent of a Euro banknote. At the end of the 19th centruy a group of anarchists around the photographer, engineer and inventor Leon Warnerke, attempted to crush Russia's (and with it the world's) economy by flooding the market with an excess of forged banknotes. Popova used a computer to generate multiple images of banknotes in denominations of 5-500 EURO, the elements that make up the image constantly shift in potentially infinite patterns. In this chapter, Parker also talks about the different themes women used to embroider. In the 15th Century, many women used to embroider religious iconography with domestic qualities, such as an enthroned young virgin Mary smiling as she breastfeeds her baby, placing emphasis on motherhood and women’s nurturing gentle qualities. At the same time (mid – Renaissance) embroidered images of renowned women of the past became very popular. During the Elizabethan era (1558 to 1603), it was popular to include flowers and plants, as each could carry several symbolic meanings. Embroiderers also included emblems in their embroideries, together with a saying or motto, challenging the viewer to establish a relationship and meaning between the elements. [6]