Here, let’s talk a bit more about the politics of gender and work and art and craft.

Some years ago I started a brave new blog, with the intention of entering the online crafty biz scene as a producer. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to produce, but I was excited at the prospect of earning an income from my passions and skills.

(Still am, thanks.)

Gradually I developed products and services: I made custom embroideries for a while, sold some patterns, did a bit of teaching. It was all fairly scattered and n00b-like. I didn’t make much money, but I had a lot of fun.

After a couple of years my creative focus shifted, as it tends to: I started painting and went back to writing fiction, and soon my textile-crafts blog no longer felt like home.

More importantly, I realised that despite my deep and abiding love of all forms of textile crafts, producing work to order was emphatically not my thing. So I stopped doing that, and after a while I stopped blogging altogether.

Throughout the experience, I was keenly conscious of the politics associated with textiles – specifically the gender politics – and of inhabiting a slightly uncomfortable space at the intersection of work, leisure, craft, and art.

Of course, all human activities come with politics attached. And yet I sometimes wish I could ignore that and just get on with revelling in my textile fascination. Some people seem to be able to enjoy the fibrous endeavours of themselves and others without getting mired in the loaded questions that spring so readily to my mind.

Loaded Questions?

Like how easily I was able to lay down this work, for one thing.

I’d worried at the outset that when I started to make money from these beloved pursuits, they’d take on a new quality for me and become a chore. Looking back on it, in fact, that’s … not entirely what happened, but it’s not a trillion billion miles from the truth either. At heart I’m a variety-junkie (there are kinder terms), and the daily practicalities of working to a pre-determined formula didn’t suit me at all.

Well now, wasn’t I the lucky one, that I could simply stop?

I chose in the first place to become, you might say, a textile worker, and when it ceased to suit me, I had sufficient privilege that I could choose to withdraw from that space without penalty.

I stopped because I wanted to rediscover my joy in the work itself. So many people, now and in the past, haven’t had that choice. How different their experience must be.

Flashback Sequence

For tens of thousands of years, women of all social strata (and also men, but especially women) have encountered strong pressures – domestic needs, social expectation, plain old coercion – to produce textiles, and have responded in a range of ways, many of them stunningly creative and inspiring.

The relationship between necessity and creativity in textiles is rich and delightful, and yet the history of textile work is largely a history of human exploitation.

I’m thinking of the sweatshop workers of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, who may well have produced clothes that you and I have worn, before the negligence of their employers cost more than a thousand of them their lives in April 2013.

I’m thinking of their long lineage.

The garment workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, who marched in 1912 for “bread and roses”.

The mill workers of the Industrial Revolution, inhaling noxious dusts and losing limbs in the relentless jaws of the capitalist machine.

The knitters of Shetland or Aran. Royal embroiderers and weavers and lacemakers. Pieceworkers in every time and place.

Teams of slave weavers in ancient Egypt or Mycenae. The spinners of the Late Stone Age.

The ordinary women who, down the millennia, have had the responsibility for clothing their families, starting from scratch – when “scratch” meant a flock of sheep or a stand of plants.

Choice

I wonder about the interplay between the satisfaction of creating beautiful things and the lack of choice in doing so.

Perhaps, for many people, as for me, textile work has been a positive experience. But doing it from necessity, under greater or lesser degrees of coercion, must add a darker dimension.

Here in Ireland, we had the infamous Magdalene Laundries, where “fallen” women were incarcerated throughout much of the twentieth century and treated with breathtaking inhumanity.

Many of the women were put making elaborate embroidered textiles, for sale at a good price, and they received no pay for their work. A number of years ago, the then Minister for Education and Science, in ruling out any legal redress for the surviving victims, had the gall to refer to these people as “employees”.

No, actually, there’s a different word we use for that setup.

Meanwhile, girls in Ireland’s Industrial Schools were also doing textile work. I quote here from the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, in a section on girls’ everyday life experiences in the schools:

8.18 Sewing, knitting and decorative needlework were regular semi-recreational activities; several witnesses reported making clerical vestments, as well as socks, jumpers, dresses and school uniforms for co-residents. Specialised needlework and knitting was also undertaken for what witnesses understood was the commercial market and a number of witnesses reported being regularly occupied knitting Aran sweaters, making rugs, embroidering tablecloths, vestments and other cloths for shops and church use.

They used to have these huge tablecloths and I used to have to do embroidery on it and do the designs, I used do the crochet. I used do the vestments, the nuns used give them as gifts to the priests. I used to have to do all the sewing for the girls plus all the knitting during the school’s holidays. Remember I was 14 years old at the time.

8.19 Witnesses reported that mending clothes was a regular occupation in 16 Schools, others gave accounts of lay staff being employed in sewing rooms. In five Schools it was reported that residents darned socks and jumpers for local boys’ Industrial Schools and fee-paying boarding schools.

And here am I

…wondering will I break out a skein of handspun sock yarn next, or do a little decorative patchwork.

Makes me feel like a latter-day Marie Antoinette, donning my fantasy shepherdess costume to go and milk a freshly scrubbed cow in the Trianon gardens.

Of course, it could be argued equally that this in itself is so much middle-class posturing. After all, the essentially non-voluntary nature of most of history’s textile work didn’t prevent the development of a host of substantial and multi-faceted art forms.

Not only that, but it has frequently represented for women a path towards some degree of economic independence – back at least as far as Bronze-Age Mesopotamia, by the way, as absorbingly detailed by Elizabeth Wayland Barber in her brilliant book on the prehistory of textiles, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. (Read that.)

We may well imagine, in other words, that textile work is often by no means the worst option available.

I bet it beat washing the nuns’ menstrual cloths with bare hands in cold water, for instance, which is another memory from the Industrial Schools.

We may hope that many of the women and girls who were forced by self-righteous sadists to embroider vestments and knit school socks in the social dustbins of twentieth-century Ireland derived some pleasure from the work itself.

Golden Spindles

Citing Barber again, it turns out that the phenomenon whereby privileged women take a hand in textile work – presumably without overt coercion – is not new either: excavations have on occasion revealed actual, honest-to goodness golden spindles, as in spindles made of gold, in the graves of high-status women.

Although the position of women has obviously undergone various transformations in the meantime, to my mind, these are analogous with our modern-day luxury crafting supplies: hand-painted yarns, gorgeously-coloured knitting needles, designer quilting fabrics, speciality fibres such as banana, soy, or wool from specific breeds of sheep, and the ability to afford organic and/or fairly traded supplies (let’s not forget what a privilege that is).

As rich people in the twenty-first century (look, we have internet access and the leisure to write/read a rambling blog post about textile history: I contend that relatively speaking, we’re rich), our participation in the textile industry, if any, is presumably entirely voluntary.

And yet many of us pick up our modern-day golden spindles and get to work – for fun, for profit, or both.

Plus ça change.