Sex and samplers
Sarah Bradford
The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine Rozsika Parker (The Women's Press i14.95)
There was nothing subversive about stitching at my convent school. Violets, no doubt chosen for their demure connotations, were a favourite theme. There were no fertility symbols, not even the odd lily, certainly nothing as risque as the story of Myrrah who drugged her father to make him sleep with her, a scene embroidered on a 16th-century bed va- lance illustrated in this book. In the Fifties, we were unaware of sexist role definition, although the fondness of the late Lord Cadogan for stitching petit point was consi- dered odd enough to be mentioned in gossip columns. Embroidery seemed to us quaint, rather old-fashioned and irrelevant' but nonetheless enjoyable and certainly preferable to freezing hours on the hockey pitch. It came, therefore, as a surprise to find upon reading this book that embroid- ery is considered a valid art for feminists today and its history a subject for feminist historians.
Rozsika Parker is an art historian with impeccable feminist credentials as a mem- ber of Spare Rib and a founder of the Women's Art History Collective. Her book has the faults common to polemical writing: one-sidedness, over-statement of the case and a reliance on jargon when ordinary words would do. Certain solec- isms suggest that the author's research has not been as thorough as the blurb claims (William Prynne, quoted at second hand, is misspelled twice, both in the text and the notes, and Ascoli Piceno is one place not two), and her conclusions are apparently drawn from other books on the subject and some interviews with feminists. The index is inadequate, omitting figures of import- ance in the text, like Florence Nightingale, but the illustrations are excellent and the book in general, though heavy going at times, is well thought-out, makes some good points and is full of interesting information. Its aim is to demonstrate how 'ideologies (a favourite word) about women determine the writing of history and the stitching of images', showing how, for instance, histo- rians and artists of the 19th-century mediaeval revival distorted historical real- ity by projecting their own view of contem- porary womanhood on to the past. They propagated the stereotype of the embroidering noblewoman, epitomised in the most famous myth of all, that of Matilda and her ladies stitching the Bayeux Tapestry. The Tapestry is now thought to be neither royal nor noble nor even, to the annoyance of Gallic chauvinists, French in origin, but to be the work of professional Saxon embroiderers commissioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. In fact, Opus Anglicanum, English embroidery of the early Middle Ages, was a profitable trade involving both men and women on a professional basis — one enterprising madame set up an embroidery workshop as a front for a brothel with her `apprentices' all on the game, a far cry from the pre-Raphaelites' virginal seamstresses.
Rozsika Parker has little time for that other favourite theme of chivalry and courtly love, preferring to emphasise the oppressively misogynist nature of the mediaeval Church, whose contribution to 'the ideology of the feminine' was to regard the female sex as the 'devil's gateway'. Renaissance thinkers began the identifica- tion of embroidery with the feminine, insisting on sewing as the distinguishing feature between male and female educa- tion. Parker produces some surprising MCPs, including Luther, who argued, 'Mary Victoria Gillick Smith.'
perhaps from his experience of the Ger- man hausfrau, that women having 'broad
hips and a wide fundament' were physically
designed to sit and sew, and Rousseau, who also preferred fat, sedentary women,
and demonstrated, as he thought, that
embroidery was natural to women from their innate love of ornament. Mary Woll- stonecraft in The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) castigated him for taking 'as an undoubted indication of nature what was, in fact, 'only habit'. And what a habit it had become. Men, having confined women to their embroid- ery, were unkind enough to poke fun at them for it, as Addison did in the Specta- tor, prompting a series of letters on Ena Maxwell lines. 'The sexist ridicule that marks this correspondence,' Parker com-
ments, `suggests it to be a male invention. Victorian women produced a flood of needleworked objects for their husbands comfort — darned neckties, German Plaid Comforters, Nepalese smoking caps and braided lounging caps, cigar cases, shaving books, watchhangers, fox-head slippers and something known as 'The Hanging Whatnot'. The background to all this was rooted in the contemporary 'ideology of the feminine'. It was a woman's duty to make her husband comfortable. Idleness was sinful, but, since social status did not permit middle-class women to earn a living
or play a part in public life, embroidery was their `work'. A woman was supposed to show 'feeling' (20th-century tr. 'caring'), hence the embroidering of emotive histor- ical ical scenes and the 'cult of benevolence exemplified by the `Missionary Basket' described by Charlotte, Bronte: . . . a monster collection of pin-cushions, needle-books, card-racks, work-bags, arti- cles of infant wear, etc, made by the willing or reluctant hands of the Christian ladies of the parish, and sold perforce to the heathen- ish gentlemen thereof, at prices unblushinglY exorbitant. The proceeds of such compulsory sales were applied to the conversion of the Jews, the seeking up of the ten missing tribes, or to the regeneration of the interest- ing coloured population of the globe . . .
Embroidery, Rozsika Parker says, `had become an accepted tool for inculcating and manifesting femininity in the pri- vileged classes'', so it is suprising to find it stripped of sexist connotations and taken up by 20th-century anti-Establishment groups — suffragettes, Dadaists, Construc- tivists, hippies, and, since the Seventies, by the Women's Liberation Movement and the Greenham Peace Women. Unfortu- nately the latter do not, on the evidence of the illustrations, seem to have learned to embroider as well as their unliberated sisters before them, but Rozsika Parker is moved by the symbolism of the embroi- dered banners at Greenham. 'Never be- fore' she enthuses, 'has the use of embroid- ery so clearly demonstrated the 'Mace of the art in the splitting that structures and controls our society — and may one day destroy us.'
What if Heseltine learned to sew?
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