Women and Things, 1750-1950

Maureen Daly Goggin is Associate Chair in the Department of English at Arizona State University, USA.

Explored in this volume are women's material practices, which range from production within the fields of fine and decorative arts, including needlework and sculpture, to the bricoleur's re-use of natural and fabricated objects in such activities as fancy work, paper arts, 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.

Contents: Introduction: materializing women, Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin. Textiles and Meaning Making: Fabricating identity: Janie Terrero's 1912 embroidered English suffrage signature handkerchief, Maureen Daly Goggin; Stitching the self: Emily Kenniff's drawers and the materialization of identity in late-19th-century London, Vivienne Richmond; Material culture, identity and colonial society in the Canadian fur trade, Laura Peters; From ruffs to regalia: Tlingit dolls and the embodiment of identity, Megan A. Smetzer. Bricolage: Female crafts: women and bricolage in late Georgian Britain 1750-1820, Ariane Fennetaux; Reading circles, crafts, and flower arranging: everyday items in the silhouettes of Luise Duttenhofer (1776-1829), Julia Sedda; Preservation and permanence: American women and nature fancywork in the 19th century, Andrea Kolasinski Marcinkus; Material histories: the scrapbooks of progressive-era women's organizations. 1875-1930, Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger. Troubling the Private/Public Divide: Materials of the 'everyday' woman writer: letter-writing in 18th-century England and America, Cheryl Nixon and Louise Penner; Inside out: sculptures by women in the metropolitan public space (Paris, London, Brussels, 1750-1950), Marjan Sterckx; The butter sculpture of Caroline Shawk Brooks (1840-1913), Rebecca Bedell and Margaret Samu; Cooking 'wholesome and delicious food' in post-revolutionary Russia, Lyubov G. Gurjeva and Maria Eichmans Cochran. Memory and Communication: Gifting and fetishization: the portrait miniature of Sally Foster Otis as a maker of female memory, Katherine Rieder; (Re)collecting herself: Jennie Drew's autograph album, mnemonic activity and the creation of feminine subjectivity, Lisa Reid Ricker; Cloaks, crosses, and globes: women's material culture of mourning on the Brittany coast, Maura Coughlin; Monumental visions: women sculptors and World War I, Jennifer Wingate; Place as material culture and restorative tool: Yany