The Politics of “Women’s Work”

by NANCY CARLISLE Senior Curator of Collections

For decades, even centuries, the phrase “women’s work” has been used derisively to suggest that women’s work isn’t important. This summer, Historic New England is participating in an exhibition that confronts this perception. Women’s Work, on view at Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, New York, showcases pieces by major twentieth-century female artists alongside examples by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women, many from Historic New England’s collection. The exhibition tracks the influence of women’s historical craft traditions on the work of contemporary artists. Expressing acts

of resistance, many of these modern artists have rejected the traditional primacy of painting and turned instead to textiles, ceramics, and mixed media.

Before the twentieth century, the division between female craft and the male-dominated field of “fine art” was exacerbated by the traditional training that artists received. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that women were allowed to take classes where artists learned how to depict the human figure by sketching the anatomy of nude models. Instead, women’s artistic undertakings were more often confined to traditional crafts, particularly the so-called needle arts.

When women were finally allowed into the hallowed world of fine art, it wasn’t long before they rebelled, turning away from painting and sculpture in favor of craft. In the 1970s artist Elaine Reichek, for example, despite earning a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting at Yale University, turned to needlework. She explains that her change of media was about “aesthetic politics”: "When I was growing up and was a student, painting was the dominant art form, really the center of a cult, and the members of that cult were historically mostly male—there was very little room for women there. And I have to say I love painting, but I also feel, what’s the big deal? I can make these same images using knitting, using embroidery—using media traditionally associated with women. But if I make them that way, of course their meaning changes, since the meaning of an artwork is always bound up with its media and processes and their history."

The Lyndhurst exhibition pairs Reichek’s 1992 Sampler (Their Manners Are Decorous) with one by Atta Downing of Marblehead, Massachusetts, made nearly two

Page 22 A plate from the Dinner Party series, a feminist work of art that Judy Chicago created in the 1970s. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York. top Nineteenthcentury writer Celia Thaxter found a new creative outlet by decorating tableware. This teacup and saucer evoke the writer’s love of nature. Historic New England, gift of Boylston Beal. above Elaine Reichek created Sampler (Their Manners Are Decorous) in 1992. Though inspired by traditional needlework examples, Reichek used her work to make a contemporary statement that cites Christopher Columbus’s encounter with Indigenous people in the “New World.” Photograph courtesy of the artist and Marinaro Gallery.

hundred years earlier. When Downing was young, a sampler did double duty, encouraging the maker to practice lettering at the same time that she practiced her stitches.

The number of surviving samplers like Downing’s suggests that while they may not have been valued by society the way paintings have been, they were clearly valued by the families of the makers. Historic New England owns more than two hundred examples, most of them made between 1735 and 1825. At first glance, Reichek’s sampler is very much in the tradition of earlier ones—two figures mimicking Adam and Eve, separated by a tree and surrounded by a decorative border. But Reichek’s is polemical, showing an Indigenous man and woman with a quotation from Christopher Columbus about the people he met, among them the Taino, on a Caribbean island he named San Salvador. “Their manners are decorous and praiseworthy,” Columbus wrote to his financial backers, Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. He kidnapped several Taino and transported them to Spain.

Reichek was by no means the first to use needlework to make a controversial statement. In the early nineteenth century, women’s sewing circles in Boston played a key role in abolitionism in the region. The women organized fundraising fairs where they sold the goods they made, often inscribed with antislavery maxims, and used the income to support abolitionists’ activities. Before long, alongside abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, their activism included the fight for women’s rights.

In the continuing fight for women’s rights, Judy Chicago’s plate [shown on page 22] is part of her Dinner Party series, created in the 1970s and considered one of the cornerstones of twentiethcentury feminist art. Dinner Party comprises a triangular table with thirty-nine place settings, each one representing a heroine—from Boadicea to Artemisia Gentileshi to Emily Dickinson. In the full installation the place settings included embroidered table runners, utensils, goblets, and plates with painted vulvar designs. Two plates will be in the Lyndhurst exhibition, one honoring Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female medical doctor, and the other, author Virginia Woolf.

Nineteenth-century writer Celia Thaxter also decorated tableware. Married to an indigent and sickly man several years her senior, Thaxter became a successful author and the family breadwinner. Over time she grew tired of the literary demands placed on her and turned to a new creative endeavor. “I have taken to painting, – ‘wrastling with art,’ I call it,” she wrote to a friend. “I can scarcely think of anything else. I

left Curupira is Shary Boyle’s female reimagining of a mythological male creature in Brazilian folklore. Loan from private collection. page 25 The exhibition pairs the porcelain Curupira with a female wax figure under a glass dome that the daughter of a wealthy Boston family created in the 1720s. Historic New England, gift of Mary C. Stimpson.

want to paint everything I see, every leaf, stem, seed, vessel, grass blade, rush, and reed and flower has new charms and I thought I knew them all before.” The teacup and saucer [shown on page 23] are suggestive of Thaxter’s enduring love of nature. Indeed, her garden at the artists’ retreat she created on Appledore Island off the coast of Maine is the subject of numerous paintings and books.

A third pairing includes one of Historic New England’s treasures, a female wax figure under a glass dome created by Sarah Gardner in the 1720s, when the daughters of Boston’s well-to-do families were taught reading, writing, needlework, and other art forms.

When Gardner married Rev. Joshua Gee, the third pastor of Boston’s Old North Church, she brought with her three “Shadow Glasses on Stools filled with Wax Work.” Each is listed in the inventory of Gee’s estate, valued at £30 while most of the furniture in the house averaged £3 to £4. Gardner kept the figures after her husband’s death. One of them disappeared long ago. The other two passed down in Gardner’s female line; a descendant donated them to Historic New England in 1924.

Gardner’s wax figure is paired with a female figure by Canadian artist Shary Boyle. Like other contemporary artists in the exhibition, Boyle uses a medium not usually considered in the canon of fine art; she creates fantastical figures out of porcelain. Curupira [shown on page 24] is a male mythological figure in Brazilian folklore, a creature of the forest whose backwards feet enable him to leave misleading tracks that confuse travelers and hunters. Curupiras are known for protecting woodland creatures when they’re caring for offspring. The backwards feet of Boyle’s female figure no doubt connote those same protective qualities.

Twenty works made by women from Historic New England’s collection are on view in Women’s Work along with the work of nearly fifty contemporary artists including Harmony Hammond, Faith Ringgold, Yoko Ono, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, and Liza Lou.

Women’s Work is on view through September 26 at Lyndhurst, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. For more information, visit lyndhurst.org/. Discounted tickets are available for Historic New England members.