Member Review

Ferren Gipson introduces this sensual dip into modern art history with a question. What is ‘women’s work (…) supposed to mean?’ My first question was not about meaning but about who determines this label and what is its effect? Must artists, even as they search for forms, materials, and practices that reject patriarchal and misogynistic culture, be doomed to comparison with men’s work? Indeed, typically, will it always be men, Picasso, Dali, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg and others, as in this anthology, who exemplify modes of expression, the surreal, the assemblage, or the soft sculpture? What is it that consigns the creative invention of one-half of the population to marginal status? Where all manner of female assigned at birth artists are present as random adjuncts to male assigned patterns of intention; men with a proper career; men promoted to eclipse the pious, prim conformity identified by Rozsika Parker back in 1984 in the opening of, The Subversive Stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine. Parker noted that bent-over was the posture of women engaged in craft work. However, where Parker’s critique was tightly focused on stitching, Gipson’s celebration embraces a broad perspective.

The book is an enthusiast’s selection of favourites, masquerading as an account with a critical theme. There is studio pottery and ceramic sculpture, applique, quilting, weaving, textile sculpture, installation, and fashion, even, for good measure, a bit of painting by Miriam Schapiro, who is quoted in the introduction, ‘For thousands of years, weaving, ceramics, sewing were believed to be what untutored women made with their hands. But that was our art.” Gipson presents these diverse practices as down-to-earth, shared between people outside the academy.

The larger part of the book takes the form of a catalogue with each artist allotted six pages, one a black and white portrait photograph, and (almost always) three representative works. The biographies that accompany each entry are practical accounts of individual careers. They are primarily straightforward, without the suggestion of glass ceilings, barriers to acceptance and equality with male peers, solidarity with other women artists, or with the significant movements of emancipatory feminism. Few artists consolidate the introductory narrative of creativity rooted in domestic networks. Most artists prove to be urbane and cosmopolitan. They travel widely, are active, and society networked with the very artworlds and fellow professionals that women’s work, with its emphasis on amateurism, insists separation from. Artists need a career. A chosen medium contributes to the formation of an artistic persona. However, materials can never be purely symbolic; they also have economic aspects.

Gipson privileges materials and informal networks, but their significance remains unspecific, and there is more to say. Substances, such as clay and different soft fibres, may have multiple nuanced functions in feminist artistic practices, simultaneously signalling agency and connoting regimes of oppression. The book shares its title with ‘Women’s Work,’ by Elizabeth Wayland Barbert, a sociological investigation, particularly into the relationship between textile production and civilisation’s emergence in Eurasia. Barbert points to the intersection of two factors in the early-modern and premodern eras: everyone had to work consistently to support subsistence needs, and it was conventional for infants to continue weening through the first three years of life. Women’s historical engagement with ceramic and textile production was a necessary division of labour. Women required adaptable, interruptible, and proximate activities. Only with wealth came the privilege to cease working and reflect, debate, invent, or devote time exclusively to childcare. Then, in affluent leisure, painstaking craft activities functioned to occupy some women, diverting time and attention. However, such crafts were not entirely wholesome sisterly occupations but mechanisms of exclusion. Crafts side-tracked attention and kept women out of the developmental conversations that formulated the brutal technologies of the industrial revolution. One, the mechanised loom had a devastating impact on women. Oppression was ramped up when factory work replaced domestic weaving activities that could coexist with childcare. The artistic association of textile art belongs not to the graft of ordinary women making ends meet with hand spinning and home looms but to homely needlework undertaken by women with at least a certain amount of free time. Thus, class divisions and sexual inequalities are tangled.

Any book that introduces a range of woman artists to new audiences is totally needed, and here there is a valuable ‘More artists to explore’ section too. However, without a slightly more rigorous approach to what is being anthologised and why it is important, there is a danger that the book contributes to the stereotypes proffered to justify ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ The answer could be understood not as exclusion, belittling, and erasure but as innate fussiness or, as Gipson puts it, practices with ‘historical associations with the Feminine.’ These are the very associations Mary Wollstonecraft critiqued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman over 200 years ago. ‘It is plain from the history of all nations, that women cannot be confined to merely domestic pursuits, for they will not fulfil family duties, unless their minds take a wider range, and whilst they are kept in ignorance, they become in the same proportion, the slaves of pleasure as they are the slaves of man.’