‘Home is Where the Art is’:
Women, Handicrafts and Home Improvements 1750–1900
Loughborough University
The crafts produced and consumed by women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the domestic interior are worth investigating to try to unravel why women at various levels of society took up home crafts and what their motives were for doing so. At one level, it may have been artistic self-expression; at another level a product of a commitment to household duty or financial necessity, or on a third level it may have been for entertainment or pastime. These motivations seem to reflect the more recently labelled DIY home improvements. The fact that particular crafts were associated with women was based partly on the determinist philosophies of the eighteenth century. These were predicated on distinctions that supposed that each gender had inherently different faculties. In the fields of art and crafts, this led to the distinction between amateur women and professional men, and more especially, the equating of specific crafts with women's work and homemaking. This gendering, which was preached both in school and in print, meant that by the mid-eighteenth century, any visual sensibility women had developed was particularly directed towards their homes. The broad aims of this paper are therefore to investigate the nature of the work undertaken, the role it played in certain women's lives, how it reflected social attitudes of the period, and its relationship with the home during the period 1750–1900. Finally, the article will reflect on how and in what different ways women's domestic arts and crafts could be considered as precursors to the DIY of today.
Key Words: crafts • Do-It-Yourself • domestic arts • leisure • women