Women's History in a Sewing Basket
Mine is a shoe box!
I’ve been wondering how to honor Women’s History Month in a few short paragraphs. It’s like walking into a large library looking for no particular book. Stand there (at the computer, if you don’t want to stand out) and become quietly aware of the sections of the library. Which direction beckons? Go there. And then there and there. Let your interests lead you to the books you want to open.
Today I (virtually) walked into Women’s History, one of the largest libraries on earth. The first book I found was in a dim, deserted aisle on the highest shelf and I had to find a step stool. Lifting it down, I felt dust on my face.
In Erica Wilson’s Embroidery Book, Wilson writes that Mary Queen of Scots embroidered while she was a captive at the Shrewsburys’ estates. She stitched there with Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury. Elizabeth was married for the first time at age 12, and by her time with Mary she was “a sharp and bitter shrewe, and therefore lieke enough to shorten your life if she should kepe you company.”
Because Mary’s letters and actions were constantly watched, she embroidered covert symbols into a series of emblems that were later sewn into “The Marian Hanging”. Below, the ginger cat playing with a mouse is “a veiled representation of the unequal and uneasy relationship between herself and (red-haired) Elizabeth”.
I put the book back up on the shelf and, wandering out of the 16th century, I realized I was in 1917. I wasn’t in the Dewey Decimal 900’s, so it wasn’t World War I going on around me. Instead, I came out into a reading room with a display of fashion books. The picture on the right below is Sonia Delaunay’s costume for the opera Aida in Madrid, 1917.
I could see that with Delaunay, color was coming into its own in the world. It fought against war and suffering. It celebrated women’s emergence from heavy skirts and pinched waists. Delaunay said about the designs she translated into clothing,
The new painting will begin when people understand that colour … is a mysterious language in tune with the vibrations, the life itself, of colour. In this area, there are new and infinite possibilities.
By 1923 she designed fabric for fashion houses, making a living for herself and her husband Robert, a painter. But she would not take credit, this woman who stole design from the painter’s canvas with her weapons of scissors and thread. “If you play at something, you don’t think why you do it,” she said quite selflessly.
I was back in the stacks again, a little aimless. Sonia, you don’t think? What is a woman? There was a book lying wide open on the shelf.
This flowered fan is not the hidden symbolism of Mary Queen of Scots. It is not the breakthrough burst of abstraction that was denied by its creator, Sonia Delaunay. This huge fan is woman plain and simple, in fabric, thread, paint and canvas, all of it. It’s called femmage without apology. Linda Nochlin wrote,
For Schapiro, femmage is collage from a woman’s point of view, indebted to traditional women’s work such as quilts and embroidery.
In 1976 Schapiro helped found the Pattern and Decoration (P & D) movement made of New York artists, women and men, reacting to the sterility of modernism. They were bringing humanism back to the studio.
These three women reside in the library and in history, and their sewing baskets are very different. I’m home now with my own sewing basket, although it’s a shoe box. It says “Letters to Save” written on one end. It holds my mother’s collection of darning threads that I still use, and a small hand-sewn pincushion.
I have a feeling I can’t explain. There is no women’s history. All women are all here, now.
A delightful post. Thank you
We had to become stronger and fight for our RIGHTS.