We went out to dinner as a family the other night to celebrate the publication of my article in a major material culture journal. As my kids said "you are officially a historian, mom". They were also referring to three articles that are starting to appear in another top journal, Textile History. I shall let everyone know when these three linked articles are ready to be seen.
All four of these articles are a big deal and they have a story behind them. It has been a really rough road for the last four years getting them published, and at many points I almost abandoned the process in favor of self-publishing something. My business has taken a real hit as I haven't been able to devote as much time to embroidery of new projects and classes. But as I explained to the people close to me who had to hear my complaints, it was very important to see through. Why?
There aren't many places to publish about textiles in the academic sphere in the first place, and nowhere for embroidery specifically; yet almost everyone who comments on the history of women uses embroidery as part of their subject matter arguments. Often it from a place without knowledge of embroidery other than that which has been published in the late 19th century and regurgitated over and over in multiple forms. You know the drill - women learned embroidery instead of how to read and write. They were learning to mend, getting ready for marriage. Fancy embroidery was done by rich, aristocratic women. Some flavor of these three generalities with spins on them abound everywhere without question as if there had been some rigorous historical work a hundred years ago to prove these points. But there wasn't. Some of us in a smaller connected community of people who love and study embroidery call it 'the lily-white fingered lady' complex
Over the last decade as my work has become more well known with the large reproduction projects of the Plimoth Jacket and the caskets, I have gotten contacted quite a bit by traditional historians. Usually it goes like this: "I found you (or someone mentioned/forwarded your site to me) and want to take your class on the history and making of caskets because I am a historian and am going to write the great final book on these caskets". Implied in this is that they see me as a resource so they can explain it all to the world, because as a maker, I might not know how to interpret in a historical context. They have no idea that I trained in experimental materials culture as a scientist when I was at MIT. Trying not to get upset, I often call the person and talk to them. Who knows - maybe a beautiful collaboration might take root! But I am always disappointed as they start "embroidery-splaining" (think mansplaining) to me. Things like: they had recently learned that the casket they saw was not the only one! Did I know that??? They have biblical stories on them (really? I hadn't noticed) and they are an expert in biblical stories! It goes on.
Then I start asking them the historical questions that one should ask. First one - what socio-economic class of people do you think these were made by? Automatically comes out the regurgitated lily-white fingered lady discussion. No questioning of it at all. Then I ask them if they have read any of the research that has been done in the last thirty years. That is when the bombshell always drops.
"There isn't any, I did a search of JSTOR and came up with mostly nothing". And then they pronounce "This is a ripe area for me to extend my (insert here work on Early Modern Women Writers/Gender Studies/Renaissance Humanism/Biblical Interpretations/etc) theories". And that is the key, they did what any academic is taught to do - look in the journal database for articles published that have been reviewed by independent and anonymous reviewers. Because there aren't places to publish devoted to this ubiquitous topic of female history - there isn't anything to read.
That doesn't mean that there hasn't been groundbreaking historical work and that it isn't being published. There is and lots of it!! A short list and not exhaustive:
- Betty Ring's seminal work on Girlhood Embroidery in the 1990s
- Anything published by Needleprint (Goodhart Samplers, the Feller Collection, etc)
- Edwina Ehrman's book on Judith Hayle samplers
- Carol Humphrey's book on Samplers at the Fitzwilliam
- Twixt Art and Nature exhibit publication
- Pam Parmel's book Women's Work: Colonial Samplers of Boston
- Every Witney Antiques catalog ever written including the 2023 and 2024 tomes as well as Sampling by Finkel and Daughter
- Almost now countless books about American samplers by state (Delaware, Ohio, Tennessee, Rhode Island, etc)
But notice - every author is either an amateur historian (Ring and the state sampler books), a curator (Ehrman, Humphrey and Watt/Morrall) or an antique dealer (Rebecca Scott and Amy Finkel). And that doesn't even count the teachers such as Joanne Harvey and docents such as Lorraine Mootz who are literal fountains of raw and hard won historical information. Or the amazing documentation efforts led by Lynne Anderson of the Sampler Archive Project and others you have seen me interview on Flosstube.
I started listing these to one of the people who contacted me recently and the historian said "you mean stuff is printed in POPULAR books?!" Yes. Embroidery is so looked down upon as women's work that you can't get a regular publisher to publish and so they have to be (1) self-published (2) a museum catalog or (3) a dealer's biographical research on the pieces they are selling in their catalog. I have now been turned down on publishing a book so many times by publishing houses.
Importantly none of these works is indexed. Indexing a publication is a process of having the citation put in a recognized, searchable database which makes the publication easier to find (using keywords) and enhances its credibility and visibility. And to top that off, there are often conferences that go with museum exhibits where those 'amateur' historians speak about the topics, revealing the depth of new research and yet there are no conference proceedings, which often become indexed.
So without a journal, conference proceedings and all the research being published in non-indexed publications - the lily-white fingered woman hypothesis is perpetuating. Just this week a major historical institution in the UK put out a video about an embroidery in their possession and that was the first thing out of the presenters mouth. I couldn't watch past that point. It has over 200,000 views at this point and is raging around the world in social media. It depressed me.
I am not saying that the historians who venture into using embroidery as part of their investigation aren't good or have something insightful or important to say. Just that they accept what has been written in the past without critically looking at the sources and investigating what else might be out there to inform. There is a bias and we should all know that as well, the bias is towards what are called textural sources; things that have been written down in texts in previous periods. So that means that their education in their field puts more emphasis on what a contemporary person wrote than on evidence pulled together from a larger variety of sources. So if a man in the 17th century wrote that embroidery was a trifle that only air-headed women paid attention to - that becomes the evidence to be used. So bias creeps in significantly and is limited mainly to those who had a position to be argued and could get printed. Think about it this way, your car mechanic doesn't write a treatise on fixing a car. But maybe someone quickly watched them and wrote a few paragraphs on 'how to fix a car' from their perspective not knowing how to do it or ever trying it. That written material would be given all the weight in historical investigations instead of talking to the mechanic as a source. How accurate would the person who watched and wrote down a few paragraphs? This is what has been going on in our embroidery history. Important information is being missed. A great deal of it. It is this 'embodied knowledge', the knowledge gained from actually doing that is being overlooked.
You can see how important it is to publish in an indexed publication - i.e a journal so we can 'tag' the perspective of someone with embodied knowledge (doing the skill as well as teaching and manufacturing) as well as reference others who have done research in embroidery using multiple sources other than just textural ones (such as biographical, object based, etc). That way a debate and expanded discourse can start.
Now why is this so hard? Well, over time as the field of history has developed it has fractured into schools of thought. In other words, what sources are you using. There are textural-source historians, biographical historians, material culture (object based) historians, economic historians, legal historians, etc. Each has essentially said - "Hey, you forgot that there is knowledge there in that set of data". They then do the hard work of separating using those data sources and building up a way to publish of their own - excluding as a matter of course - the others. So in practice I am finding economic historians don't talk to material culture historians who don't talk to textural historians. And they don't always look in those fields for information that can inform their perspective either. And the journals are tailored to each type. So I come along and say that you can't understand embroidery history without knowing the economics of manufacturing, the biographical details of the embroiderers, the legal environment that women lived under and data from lawsuits, how the embroidery was worked, and even for the three papers yet to be seen, use science and math too. And yes, what was written about it in text sources. It doesn't fit into the box that has been constructed!!
Talk about freak out! My collaborators and guest editors were so patient and helpful. The reviewers were harsh and shocking. Basically I was writing that the concepts they had been told all their professional lives were not fact based and were romanticized ideas. Either 19th century lovers of the objects who wanted to associate them with royalty to save them or they adhere to ideas promoted by feminist authors who wanted access to all the areas men traditionally shut women out of, so they degrade embroidery as a ball and chain that men have put on women. Or even worse, I used science and math to tease out information. So the mix of sources, the use of embodied knowledge, and shocking with math made some reviewers just throw in the towel and write WRONG on the first page. One reviewer wrote on one paper "There is no place in textile history for science". And left it at that. Ummm. That is an entire field of its own called Textile Conservation. One editor told me, that is how you know what you are writing is really, really good stuff; when it ruffles feathers in a major way with data.
So every point had to be backed up nine-ways to Sunday as we say. And since some editors often didn't have first hand knowledge and this was the first time certain 'duh' things were being put in a journal, I would have to explain things in footnotes that would be extremely common knowledge to the average stitcher. I would get a 'can you provide a text reference to that statement?' No, would be my answer, no one has ever published that as it is ordinary knowledge and then I would have to explain things in excruciating detail. No one writes this in a book. But every stitcher, manufacturer, etc. knows it as truth. Usually I would get a note back from the editor with a 'Wow - I had no idea'. Yes, we makers have deep, deep knowledge and it should be taken as seriously as what has been written in the past.
That means that the articles started out as 20-page limits that the journals put on their authors. One ended as a 59-page tome with 3/4 of the biographical information that started in it on the editing room floor with me kicking and screaming (and looking for a way to make the extremely important biography another publication). The other article is now three separate papers that range between 35-60 pages each.
Note that material culture work was a backlash against the biography and textural historians. They said 'hey - the objects are important - look at them closely". But now they say - you can't publish biography in our journals. So there is almost an unwritten rule to keep the objects anonymous; not purposeful but as a result of the history of History. That really got to me. I want the maker behind the object to be seen. She is me and she is you. Do I want my personhood to be obscured in the future when someone looks at my embroidered casket? NO. I have to thank Laura Johnson who guest edited that paper for arguing hard that some of the biography had to stay as well as Gary Albert who gave me extra space. Lots of it.
On Female Education: Projects of Mastery in Seventeenth-Century English Boarding Schools is on amateur school girl embroidery of the 17th century and is solely authored by me. The other three papers are an analysis of a late 16th/early 17th century object at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I loved working on them with my co-authors Mary Brooks and Cristina Carr. These articles are all about professional embroidery, proving what the object is, how the workshop worked, where people sat and how long it took to make. It is a new rigorous method to examine embroideries and a mathematical model that allows the labor to make something be calculated.
One aspect that I have been dogged about is how can the wider public read these articles. This is another barrier which enables social media to propagate romantic ideas over data driven history. Fortunately my collaborator's institution, Durham University, has agreed to pay the Open Access fee to allow our three papers in Textile History to be digitally read by the public as soon as the final layouts are done with the corrections. So I will be able to provide links. But my Winterthur Portfolio article was denied Open Access because I was a company and not an academic institution and didn't have a grant to do the work which required Open Access as part of funding. So I couldn't pay thousands of dollars so you could read it. And if I was a professor, after the year of embargo on distributing the pdf of the article, I could put it on my university web page but because I make a living as a company, it can't go on my site. I often tell museums in Europe that in the US there aren't grants for embroidery research and there aren't university positions for what I do. So it is chicken and egg. So yet another reason that all this good research done by 'amateurs' isn't being seen. You get some done and then it effectively gets buried to only be seen by other academics. The journal and I have come up with a compromise and if you go here, you can either buy the issue direct from them (it has other needlework articles) or pay more for threads from me and I will gift you a reprint copy of the article by itself.
I have to thank the embroidery audience and students profusely. I minored in Materials Science Archeology and Anthropology from a MacArthur Fellow at MIT; essentially the history of materials culture using scientific tools. When I started my embroidery teaching, that was always in the back of my mind. That maybe someday this would all come together and I could use that methodology to learn new things. It has and you have been a critical part of it. I watch and listen to you, see how teaching is absorbed and try new methods, manufacture and think about the economics and history of what you buy. Many of you have participated as citizen scientists to work on the Plimoth Jacket and take data or stitch experiments for me. It all has funneled indirectly or directly into these publications. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Essentially, professional and amateur work are the targets here. Hopefully in total they will add to the discussion in a way that will bring embodied knowledge on equal footing with other sources so we can banish the lily-white fingered lady romantic idea to the past and focus on actual data about school girls, teachers, women amateurs, male and female professionals, workshop owners, manufacturers of threads, the business of embroidery and the many, many unseen people behind the amazing objects we love and cherish.
You don't learn to embroider to mend. You don't sit there embroidering, eating bonbons in your castle with your hair let down waiting for a man to discover you. You love the feel of thread, the excitement of progress after an exhausting day of working or caring for family. You are an artist who creates out of your imagination. You are a doctor practicing your fine motor skills. You stitch communally to connect to others. You embroider to make a living teaching others. You make gifts or commissions. There are so many rich and varied reasons embroidery is done. You, the embroiderer, are a multi-dimensional fully fleshed out person. We need to reflect that in our history as well.
