The Subversive Stitch - Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine

The Women's Press, London, 1986. ISBN 0704338831. Paper covers are in good order with some minor soiling and bumping to corners. Contents tight and clean. Previous owner's name impressed on contents page. 247pp with illustrations. Nice copy.

In the history of embroidery - through the very threads of samplers, firescreens, table runners and dress - can be traced another history - the history of women. In this fascinating study, Parker, co-author of Old Mistresses - Women, Art and Ideology, traces the shifting notions of femininity, and roles ascribed to women, through embroidery from medieval times to today. In the middle ages, women worked alongside men in embroiderers' guild workshops as apprentices, designers and stitchers of gold, silver and silk. Yet by the 18th century,m embroidering was considered to come naturally to women alone, and by the 19th cenrtury the fine stitchery expected of women of the upper classes, and the skilled work extracted for starvation wages from working-class women, had become both symbol and instrument of female subservience. Drawing on household accounts, women's magazines, letters, novels and the art works themselves, Parker discovered strands of resistance: paradoxically, while embroidery was employed to inculcate femininity in women, it also provided a way to negotiate the constraints of the feminine role. `Polly Cook did this,' states one 18th century child's sampler, `and hated every stitch she did in it.' This carefully researched and entertaining study, with over 100 photographs, creates a new departure in the writing of the history of embroidery; and makes a singular contribution to the history of women and the histoyr of art...