Women History: needle works and women in Renaissance

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SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1 Needlework has been all these to women during Renaissance . From the time that early woman formed her first bone needle to the modern sweatshops women have had the major responsibility for clothing both mankind and womankind . Men have been tailors and factory workers sailors at sea have sewn their own clothing . However women have most frequently held the needle , whether for sewing on buttons or for taking the fine stitches that formed the great women 's art of quilting

br Quilting received attention long overdue as art , although the everyday craft of sewing and the women who accomplished it for a living their techniques , their tools , their materials , their working conditions , the ways they dispersed their work , the changes caused by the nineteenth-century invention of the sewing machine these have been virtually ignored

Text and textile are inextricably intertwined , seen variously as commensurate , comparable and complementary . What distinguishes the two is gender : language use has been seen as masculine , with the power to speak , to write and to create a text being viewed as a male prerogative In contrast , clothwork - from spinning to decorative finishing - has traditionally been categorized as women 's work ' as craft rather than art . Historically , this gender divide has not been immutable , as witnessed by the prominence of men in medieval cloth working guilds and by women . What is important here , however , is not so much the historical reality as the perception , the fiction , that pens are for men and pins (or needles ) are for women . This essay examines not the facts of women 's cloth production , but rather the myth and ideal of the spinning weaving , sewing woman

The images of women working at looms or bent over a needlework frame were didactic images , employed to illustrate an ideal of womanhood Clothworking provided a sort of litmus test of femininity and virtue : a weaving woman was seen as domestic , silent , submissive and chaste - and hence feminine . Pattern books sought not only to educate women in a domestic craft , but also to craft them into the cultural image of the ideal woman , and the value of clothworking , according to these and other texts , lay not so much in the production of textiles as in its role in the production of feminine women and good wives

Needlework has long been an occasion for sociability . It seals the bond between mothers and daughters and among friends . The old-time quilting bee is well remembered , although most quilts were actually solo products . The spinning bee , an evening gathering for work and gossip in early modern France and Germany , was so much fun that clergymen objected . They feared that women away from their homes at night must be up to no good ' HYPERLINK "http /www .looksmartmom .com /p /articles /mi_m0IUK /is_2002_Spring /ai_86504 540 http /www .looksmartmom .com /p /articles /mi_m0IUK /is_2002_Spring /ai_865045 40

Needlework was held to be the most gentle and feminine , and as such was central to the definition...