Women's History Month - guest post by Katrin Kania
Today's guest post is from an archaeologist, Dr Katrin Kania. I want to invent loads of vile things about her, but we're currently working on the Beast together and she shares my sense of humour and it would be a certain path to doom. Her main field is textiles, and she has a lovely blog and online shop and an even lovelier cat. She will be at LonCon3 in August. Introduce yourself to her and admit that I sent you. http://owlfish is the one who introduced us, in case you were wondering.
Gillian
Textile work, so the 19th century tells us, is women's work. So our modern age tells us, too. When I was in primary school, back in the 1980s, we already had co-ed classes called "Textilarbeit und Werken" (textile crafts and crafting - this is hard to translate). The textile part was, by all, considered a girl's thing... and the title itself implies that textile crafts are not "proper" crafts. Otherwise, they could just have called it "Werken". Or "Handarbeiten". Or whatever else.
The connection between textile crafts and women is so strong in our heads that Elizabeth Barber titled her famous book about ancient textile crafts "Women's Work". I confess that irks me - a lot. Because if you look back at history and try to look past that what seems obvious, it's not just women's work, and I think we are in danger of painting a faulty picture.
If we look at the Middle Ages, there's a very strong connection between spinning and women. It's so strong that females are sometimes still called "the distaff gender". Textile work is women's work. Spinning is the symbol of the active, "good-busy" woman (though it can even be used negatively in some circumstances, as with Noe's wife - you can read more about that in the first part of Holloway, Julia Bolton, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold. Equally in God's image: women in the Middle Ages. New York [u.a.]: Lang, 1990).
Weaving women are also depicted, both on a "proper" loom as on narrow wares. Mary is often shown as one of the temple virgins, spinning or weaving.
So textile work is really a feminine thing, right? I'd say no, not really.
There is evidence for men working in textiles - the guilds coming up in later medieval times, they are predominantly male, even those for textile workers. Knitting becomes a male-dominated guild in the 17th century, when knitting gets its first heyday. There are dyers' guilds, weavers' guilds, tailors' guilds - all male-dominated.
Now... if textile crafts were an exclusively female thing, done on the side, where would those guys have learned? And how would they have gotten the idea that it was a proper, guild-worthy job?
With the textile crafts, especially with spinning, we have the same find-the-minority-gender problem that often turns up in medieval history... only the other way around, this time. There are many, many topics where we might suspect that women had a bigger, more important, more prominent role in things than we can easily prove, and historians and gender-sensitive people try to find more and sometimes overlooked evidence to get a better, more accurate picture.
With textile crafts, this is turned on its head - we see women, predominantly so, and only rarely a man is shown doing that work. But does that mean it was truly this way? Or is there just a convention of showing women, and not men? Just like there are way less pictures of women doing blacksmith work, to just pick a random example? Were spinning men something maybe not ubiquitous, but frequent enough to not raise an eyebrow? Or were they the exception, and male participation started in earnest only after the step of yarn production?
I would dearly love to answer these questions. Personally, I think that much artistic convention went into the depiction of crafts, and that if we could take a Tardis back to the Middle Ages, we might be surprised. But no matter my personal suspicion, or yours - the question of men in textile work is one that should be kept in mind, as it helps us stay wary of gender conventions, then... and maybe also now.
Gillian
Textile work, so the 19th century tells us, is women's work. So our modern age tells us, too. When I was in primary school, back in the 1980s, we already had co-ed classes called "Textilarbeit und Werken" (textile crafts and crafting - this is hard to translate). The textile part was, by all, considered a girl's thing... and the title itself implies that textile crafts are not "proper" crafts. Otherwise, they could just have called it "Werken". Or "Handarbeiten". Or whatever else.
The connection between textile crafts and women is so strong in our heads that Elizabeth Barber titled her famous book about ancient textile crafts "Women's Work". I confess that irks me - a lot. Because if you look back at history and try to look past that what seems obvious, it's not just women's work, and I think we are in danger of painting a faulty picture.
If we look at the Middle Ages, there's a very strong connection between spinning and women. It's so strong that females are sometimes still called "the distaff gender". Textile work is women's work. Spinning is the symbol of the active, "good-busy" woman (though it can even be used negatively in some circumstances, as with Noe's wife - you can read more about that in the first part of Holloway, Julia Bolton, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold. Equally in God's image: women in the Middle Ages. New York [u.a.]: Lang, 1990).
Weaving women are also depicted, both on a "proper" loom as on narrow wares. Mary is often shown as one of the temple virgins, spinning or weaving.
So textile work is really a feminine thing, right? I'd say no, not really.
There is evidence for men working in textiles - the guilds coming up in later medieval times, they are predominantly male, even those for textile workers. Knitting becomes a male-dominated guild in the 17th century, when knitting gets its first heyday. There are dyers' guilds, weavers' guilds, tailors' guilds - all male-dominated.
Now... if textile crafts were an exclusively female thing, done on the side, where would those guys have learned? And how would they have gotten the idea that it was a proper, guild-worthy job?
With the textile crafts, especially with spinning, we have the same find-the-minority-gender problem that often turns up in medieval history... only the other way around, this time. There are many, many topics where we might suspect that women had a bigger, more important, more prominent role in things than we can easily prove, and historians and gender-sensitive people try to find more and sometimes overlooked evidence to get a better, more accurate picture.
With textile crafts, this is turned on its head - we see women, predominantly so, and only rarely a man is shown doing that work. But does that mean it was truly this way? Or is there just a convention of showing women, and not men? Just like there are way less pictures of women doing blacksmith work, to just pick a random example? Were spinning men something maybe not ubiquitous, but frequent enough to not raise an eyebrow? Or were they the exception, and male participation started in earnest only after the step of yarn production?
I would dearly love to answer these questions. Personally, I think that much artistic convention went into the depiction of crafts, and that if we could take a Tardis back to the Middle Ages, we might be surprised. But no matter my personal suspicion, or yours - the question of men in textile work is one that should be kept in mind, as it helps us stay wary of gender conventions, then... and maybe also now.