Abstract:

This dissertation explores women's complicated relationship to the performance of needlework in the late Georgian period by examining the way in which needleworkers and the needle arts were characterized in a range of visual and verbal texts, including novels, plays, educational tracts, art, and satirical prints. Over the last several decades, cultural historians have unearthed more nuanced information about women's role in Georgian society as it pertained to the consumption of goods, calling into question the notion that their shopping patterns revolved solely around the desire for emulation. This work takes the scholarship about women's roles in society in a new direction by challenging the prevailing belief that women were exclusively consumers of goods rather than producers, using needlework, performed in a variety of modes, to make my case.

By the end of the eighteenth century, most women of all classes plied the needle, but did so in very different ways and for a variety of outcomes. The following chapters expose the ways in which these cultural narratives of needlework did not always accurately portray women's real material existence. Women's needlework was a valuable form of productive labor and both the process and the product took women out of the home into the public realm, contrary to the notion that their skills had significance only in the private sphere. For example, middle and upper-class women in the Georgian period refashioned their clothing in the style imitating men's military uniforms, and thus, registered their engagement in national and international events; middle-class women sewed military uniforms for their family members worn in the Napoleonic Wars and crafted dresses, bonnets, and needlework gifts for family and friends as a form of exchange necessary for community interaction. Working-class women used the needle to contribute to the growing economy by constructing clothes for the burgeoning ready-made clothing industry and offering the latest haute couture to wealthy clients.

This exploration exposes the anxiety felt in the culture about women using a skill meant to signify the private sphere and feminine accomplishment and repurposing it to construct new subject positions and to engage with the public realm.