by Clare Hunter
Signing textiles authors needlework but also amplifies individual voices, voices that might be forgotten. To resist anonymity people have embroidered their signatures on textiles to register their existence or record a common trauma in indelible sewing which leaves a lasting impression. Such stitched signatures are the physical marks of individual or collective insistence on being recognised. Mary, Queen of Scots, declared her rightful sovereignty, again and again, in her needlework through her embroidered coat of arms, monogram and emblem; the suffragettes in Holloway gaol smuggled out handkerchiefs bearing their stitched autographs as avowals of undiminished resolve; the women in Changi prison sewed their signatures to name themselves, over and over, as survivors, as individuals in a system where their identity was reduced to a mere number. And the signing of cloth is also a way to represent those who cannot speak for themselves: the victims in Mexico’s war against drugs still have a presence through others embroidering their names on handkerchiefs displayed in public places; the makers of AIDs quilts humanised lost loved ones who were anonymised as statistics. In the state of Chihuahua on the Mexican and U.S. border, where over two thousand women have been murdered since the early 1990s, many of them garment workers – the artist Mandy Cano Villalobos restores the identity of forgotten victims by sitting in a performative exhibition surrounded by piles of shirts and T-shirts onto which she sews their names.
Needlework can also be a way to give voice to those who might otherwise go unheard. In South Africa, the Amazwi Abesifazane memory cloth programme collects the autobiographical testimonies of women’s experiences under apartheid. It has established an embroidered archive of over three thousand individual stories and statements on discrimination, forced removals, police brutality, imprisonment, rape, faction fighting, murder and other atrocities. In a country of many different dialects and a high level of female illiteracy, written evidence is partisan, unrepresentative of most and inaccessible to many. But, through needlework, sewn pictorial re-enactments of racism, abuse and discrimination are being documented in a common language, ensuring that what might have gone unregistered is recorded. The Advocacy Project based in Washington, D.C., with the support of American quilters, supports damaged communities elsewhere in the world to speak of their trauma. It has made quilts with the Roma people of the Czech Republic, the Bosnian survivors of the Srebrenica massacre, freed domestic slaves in Nepal and the waste-pickers of Chintan in India.
But the most prolific relic of the suppression of voices lies in the samplers sewn by schoolgirls in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. As early as 1631, John Taylor in his The Needles Excellency, a compendium of designs for embroidery, advised the tempering of women’s speech through their needlework:
And for my countries quiet, I should like
That Woman-kinde should use no other Pike
It will increase their peace, enlarge their store
To use their tongues lesse, and their Needles more.
Taylor’s exhortation was zealously seized upon by the educators of schoolgirls, as an effective way to temper the supposedly febrile female spirit. These small rectangles of linen, originally designed as aide memoires for embroiderers to record stitches and patterns before they had access to printed guides, had little artistic purpose in educational establishments. Instead, they were devised as tools of discipline to inculcate in students an understanding of the attributes expected of them as women: the ‘feminine’ qualities of humility and reticence.
The schoolroom making of samplers wasn’t just an exorcism of creative expression but the literal physical limitation of needlework itself. Fabric was no longer softly held in a sewer’s hand but stretched taut over a frame; scaled down to a small rectangle of cloth: colours were limited, the type of stitches and imagery proscribed. The first sewn task demanded of a schoolgirl was to produce serried rows of letters or numbers – alphabets, multiplication tables, almanacs – basic literacy practised in an exactitude of stitches. From there she graduated to longer text, moral platitudes or biblical quotations, corrective in nature. Content was restricted to a uniform template: a central house or school building surrounded by symmetrically arranged pairs or rows of stylised stock motifs.
We have such a sampler, handed down through my husband’s family, typical for its time: a handsome house, stylised trees, a dog sleeping on the fenced front lawn and two sentinel peacocks in open tail-feathered splendour strutting below. There are twins of pineapples, bluebirds, crowns and flowering shrubs. The border is wreathed in blossom and a stretch of regimented thistles confirms a Scottish provenance. The text is suitably Calvinistic:
Wealth and titles are the only gifts of fortune, but peace and content are the peculiar endorsement of a well-disposed mind, a mind that can bear affliction without a murmur, and the weight of a plentiful fortune without vainglory.
The sampler is signed and dated: ‘Jean McMorron, 1829’. And while no one in the family can recall how Jean fitted into family history, her sampler still echoes her voice, translated through her needlework.
Many of the samplers wrought by schoolgirl hands centuries ago were valued as family heirlooms: archiving not just the name and age of their maker, the date of completion but often including their place or school of origin and the initials of family members. They have become collectors’ pieces, displayed in museums, sold as antiques, valued as echoes of a bygone age. But their value is dubiously nostalgic, a sentimental attachment to a time when girls were schooled in domestic and moral duty, when their creative voices were dulled by duty-bound stitchery. While samplers are undoubtedly pretty, their exacting stitches, strict arrangements and small sermons speak more of silent perseverance than of pleasure. Moreover, the signing and dating of samplers, while they represent the first pieces of needlework, of any quantity, to authenticate a female provenance, were not authored to mark a girl’s talent. Instead these restrictive rectangles of sewing were school certificates. Their naming executed in the same tightly controlled cross-stitch employed on the sampler itself. Framed, hung on walls, they boasted a school’s credentials, not a girl’s presence.
Through the centuries needlework became increasingly domesticated. It was hidden from public view and, as it started to be replaced by manufactured goods and its traditional forms were truncated or lost, its complex language faced extinction. It was feminist artists of the 1960 and 70s who reclaimed its potency and visibility. The art world they entered still considered painting and sculpture to be the highest forms, and disparaged any other mediums, including needlework, as lesser. The representation of women by women themselves, through mediums like needlework, in which they were familiar, barely existed in the public realm. Artists like Miriam Schapiro, Faith Ringgold and Judy Chicago, active in the newly-forged women’s liberation movement, recognised that their own reticence to be associated with a gendered women’s craft – knitting and sewing and others – was a prejudice handed down by men and dishonoured their own female heritage. They committed themselves to the reinstatement of women’s craft traditions, and the values inherent in them, as relevant and potent artistic expressions of women’s lives. Faith Ringgold made quilts that incorporated deliberate allusions to techniques of sewing and pattern-making and used the nuances of different kinds of fabric to interpret her African story-telling heritage and confront issues of racism and sexism. Miriam Schapiro used diverse materials associated with women’s domestic work – aprons, tea towels, sewing – to make contemporary, textured, abstract art which transformed functional fabrics into an articulation of women’s experiences.
In 1970 Judy Chicago set up a Feminist Arts program at the California Institute of the Arts and with Miriam Schapiro and her students took over a dilapidated mansion in 1972 to renovate it and transform it into an exhibition space for women artists where they could curate their own work uncompromised by being juxtaposed with male-made art. In the house’s seventeen rooms they created art installations which claimed the themes of domesticity, childbirth and female sex
uality as viable subjects for art. They called the project Womanhouse.
Textiles featured in many of the rooms: a row of aprons in the kitchen, a stitched chandelier in the dining room, opulent miniscule furnishings in the bedroom of a doll’s house, quilts on the stairwell, the train of a wedding dress trailing down the stairs – all created as metaphors for the reality of women’s domesticity. The aprons had false breasts attached to them to suggest that, in their removal, a woman was divested of all a man required of her – housekeeping and sex. The wedding dress train changed from white to grey as it neared the hallway of home to symbolise the drabness of life as a wife, the tiny sewn luxury in the bedroom of the doll’s house made it harem-like, a site for male desire not female pleasure. Ten thousand people came to see Womanhouse. For women, it was one of the first times they had seen exclusively female art set within a domestic context, art which used explicit female imagery and reflected their own experiences. Men had the novel experience of being spectators of a world in which for once they were the outsiders.
The project, Judy Chicago declared, ‘allowed women to feel that their lives had meaning.’ It was a revelation.
In 1974 Chicago embarked on what became a five-year project, to involve women in the creation of a monumental multimedia artwork which interpreted the experiences and achievements of women through history. The Dinner Party was conceived as a response to Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper, reinterpreted by Chicago with a triangular table on which place settings were laid out chronologically for thirty-nine women who, in different ways and in a variety of spheres, had made their mark on the world. Each of the three sides represented a historical period: Pre-History to Rome, Christianity to the Reformation; the American Revolution to the Women’s Revolution. Each table had settings for thirteen women, the number of men present at The Last Supper but, by making her table triangular, Chicago arranged them democratically. There was no focal point, no central figure. The floor beneath the table was inscribed with the names of another nine-hundred and ninety-nine women who represented the support they had had from other women’s endeavours as a foundation for the artwork itself.
The research was extensive. At a time when there was little in the way of historical research into women’s history and no women’s study courses to draw on, few images or texts were available. Twenty researchers worked for two years unearthing the stories of women since the beginning of time, and before that, into mythology. The thirty-nine women chosen were selected not because they were the most celebrated in their field but because their lives and work best revealed the circumstances of women’s achievement at a particular time and the nature of their struggle to progress women’s status and role in society. Already experimenting with china-painting as an art medium Chicago decided to have a ceramic plate at each woman’s place featuring stylised vaginas, symbolising the wellspring of birth and creation, each customised to reflect individual experiences: three-dimensional representations of each woman’s personality. Each plate incorporated a butterfly, the ancient symbol of liberation, but in different stages of metamorphosis, becoming more fully formed as women gained social independence and more prominent as women garnered creative power.
But Chicago also became fascinated by needlework and decided to use it to embed additional cultural and biographical information at each setting. She studied textiles and different kinds of embroidery. Aware that until now she had dismissed women’s craft from her own practice, she decided not just to include sewing in the Dinner Party, but to exploit and demonstrate the rich visual potential of traditional needlework to signify progress or restriction. She introduced large fabric runners to each place setting which referenced – symbolically and pictorially – each woman’s chronological place in history and provided greater insight to their narratives. On the front was the flourish of each woman’s name, stitched in a thick lustre of gold thread, the initial of her first name elaborately worked as a symbol to define her contribution to society – for the physician Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) a stethoscope, for the biblical heroine Judith, a sword, for the composer Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) a metronome. And, collectively, the runners traced the status and circumstances of the women themselves through the changing nature of the needlework of their time: the early creativity of medieval embroidery becoming more constrained as women became sequestered at home or, in the eighteenth century, as samplers became tools of education.
A wide variety of needlework techniques was embraced. This was no tokenistic application of sewing to enhance the Dinner Party’s visual effect. Each runner was thoroughly researched, carefully considered and exquisitely executed: stitchers translating Chicago’s graphic designs to texture and colour through myriad sewing techniques, painstakingly finding ways to overcome technical challenges. It took two years to complete the runner for Hatshepsut (1503–1482 BCE), the female Egyptian pharaoh of the XXVIII dynasty, made from the finest linen and embroidered with hieroglyphic characters in praise of her reign. The eleventh century Italian gynaecologist Trotula’s runner featured a tree of life worked in trapunto quilting, a form of Italian quilting, its soft white fabric mimicking a baby’s swaddling cloth. For Christine de Pizan (1363–1431) the first professional woman author in France, a technique called bargello was adopted, its jagged pattern suggestive of the hostile climate in which she wrote and, for the artist Artemisia Gentileschi (1590–1652), a sumptuous three-dimensional runner fashioned from deep folds of velvet. Different fabrics, methods, colours and motifs were all purposefully chosen to provide tangible interpretations of individual experiences. Sometimes the design on a runner would be an extension of that on a plate to signify a woman who had temporarily broken down the barriers between herself and the world to which she was trying to contribute. In others, a rigid constraint signalled enforced limitations. This was the multi-layered language of needlework harnessed to offer a textural and, at times, an emotional background to these women’s lives. Hundreds of women were involved in the creation of the Dinner Party, their names embroidered into the backs of the table runners.
Five thousand people attended the opening of the Dinner Party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 1979 and one hundred thousand came to see it during its three-month run, many queuing for hours. An American tour had been planned when, inexplicably, one by one each venue pulled out and it proved impossible to find alternatives. The Dinner Party, which Chicago had designed to make women’s voices heard, to ensure – through scale and popularity – that a lasting imprint of women’s lives would persevere in the public arena, was made invisible, silenced. It went into storage and the people who had created it went their separate ways.
It did go on tour in the early 1980s, to fourteen venues in six countries, garnering public interest, media support and an overwhelmingly hostile and negative response from the art world from its critics and mainstream curators. The focus of the negativity was on the plates separated in art reviews from the context of their place settings and the needlework on which they stood. The Dinner Party was called pornographic and obscene. In 1990 a plan to house it permanently in the proposed new multicultural art centre at the University of the District of Colombia was shelved under pressure from staff and students with a Republican Congress announcing that it was ‘offensive to the sensitivities and moral values of our various related communities.’ It moved back into storage, in danger of damage and disintegration. In 2002 it finally found a permanent home at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in Brooklyn, twenty-three years after it had been seen for the first time and after it had been visited by over one million people.
The history of art is awash with graphic and stylised representations of male genitalia. But when Judy Chicago put vaginas on her plates the critics and curators of the art world were aghast. She had stepped across an invisible threshold of gendered taste, its male gatekeepers appalled that such a normal feature of woman’s physicality should feature within an artwork dedicated to women’ l
ives. It is curious to consider what the reaction might have been if her images had been executed in paint or sculpture, whether the prejudice directed at them was solely because of their subject matter or because they were realised through craft? Rather than being hailed as a pioneer of contemporary women’s art, Chicago was pilloried as an opportunist, using shock tactics to gain attention for her work. The exquisite needlework – the embroidery, beading, quilting, ribbon-work – which exemplified each woman’s story in such thoughtful textured interpretations was all but ignored. Its neglect epitomised a conflicted response to sewing itself: a practice from which men were largely excluded and in which they had no experience to proffer a critical voice. They could not interpret its vocabulary nor judge its quality. Access to its physicality, to its nuances of style and technique had long been denied them. Male critics avoided the pit-fall of opinion.
Alongside women men, too, had been the skilled embroiderers of medieval Europe – messaging faith and the promoters of the powers of emperors in China and the Ottoman and Moghul Empires. These male embroiderers had the skill, dexterity and imaginative understanding of needlework’s properties to embroider the finest of textiles to promulgate religious and political advancement. But societal change began to exclude them from its sensory language, and decreed that men should be apportioned the ‘harder’ materials of wood and metal, seen as more representative of their gender. Some men, made vulnerable by physical or mental infirmity, had reclaimed sewing to speak of worlds in which they had once been active: John Craske re-spooling his stories of the sea in embroidery; invalided soldiers of the Crimean War revisiting military triumphs on their quilts; the Pow Clifford Gatenby embroidering his experience of the Second World War. There may have been many more men who were closeted embroiderers; their voices never heard, their stories never told. For all we know there could be examples of male needlework which are as yet unaccounted for, or go unrecognised, presumed to have been worked by female hands. But for most men the world of needlework was elusive. They were denied access to its language by dictum of an educational system that deemed it inappropriate for a constructed myth of masculinity to be tainted by an equally constructed myth of femininity. So men remained, by and large, unexpressed in sensory materiality, not just uncertain but prejudiced against a language which had excluded them.