In this fascinating study, Rozsika Parker, co-author of "Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology", traces the shifting notions of femininity, and roles ascribed to women, through embroidery from medieval times to today. In the middle ages women worked alongside men in embroiderers' guild workshops as apprentices, designers and stitchers of gold, silver and silk.
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Yet by the eighteenth century embroidering was considered to come naturally to women alone, and by the nineteenth century the fine stitchery expected of women of the upper classes, and the skilled work extracted for starvation wages from working-class women, had become both symbol and instrument of subservience. Drawing on household accounts, women's magazines, letters, novels and the art works themselves, Rozsika Parker discovered strands of resistance: paradoxically, while embroidery was employed to inculcate femininity in women, it also provided a way to negotiate the constraints of the feminine role. "Polly Cook did this", states one eighteenth century child's sampler, "and hated every stitch she did in it". [Fonte: editore]
