About
He wrote the history she made.
While history is being made, there are as many versions of it as there are people to speak. The version that endures depends on who dominates to means to tell it in concrete form. For all of written history, women have rarely had access to the means of perpetuating our own perspective on events, people, and institutions that shape the way we think of ourselves now.
The version we live now leaves gaping tears in the tapestry that hangs before us proclaiming who we should venerate, what is now important, who should be our heroes, and when the world was as it should be. The problem with this tapestry is that its yarn was spun by men, the female figures featured in it are shaped by the men who wove her into it, and men have claimed credit for parts the women themselves made.
So how then, do we recover the voices, the actions, the thoughts of women who made the history we live possible? To know the history of men, we look to books, paintings, sculpture, and architecture as the contours of it. Yes, we can look to a few women who contributed to those contours, but they are the exceptional women who prove the rule. Historically, men have also made ownership of the work women have done more important that the artists who made it.
As many women as men made the history that we read possible. Those women had a common voice that crossed the bounds of class and race and geography. That is the language of thread and fiber, needle and cloth, warp and weft. Most of them were taught to spin, weave, and sew rather than read. But, these women were not without their own power.
Though they were excluded from the clergy responsible for their salvation, they did embroider the ornate depictions of female power from the hem of the Pope’s cope to its collar. Though they could not command troops in the field, they could ensure the memory of both the defeated Anglo Saxon King Harold and the Norman French William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in a distinctly English tapestry embroidered with distinctly feminine subversion. Enslaved women who were expert seamstresses could loosen the bindings of slavery to roam more freely in their surroundings. Women spies could sit at windows with their needle and cloth without the men outside recognizing that they were counting soldiers and not just stitches. Women gathered around a quilting frame were so inconspicuous that they could encode directions in their quilts to assist slaves escaping to freedom. Though they were excluded from the chambers of power, they could sew the symbols of power that distinguished the hierarchy of men in the chamber.
Though women’s monuments stitched in that fiber medium were ubiquitous throughout historic and pre-historic realms of power, stone chiseled by men endures, paint applied by men endures, and fiber stitched by women endures far less often. From the beginnings of recorded history through the Medieval period, embroidery and tapestry were more often than not considered high art. The more textile production was claimed by machine, the less esteemed textile art became.
By the 1700s in Western Europe, the art of needlework was becoming an art to shape feminine disempowerment. The art that made her story powerful was warped to entangle her. But, the human need to create and the human need for autonomy of spirit could not be cinched so neatly into place. Even in the needlework meant to occupy their wandering minds and bodies, women found sophisticated expression, eloquent aesthetics, and subversive power. These writings are intended to recover women’s voices throughout time through their work. In honoring their work and the process of making it, we can weave them back into the history they made possible. In doing so, we redefine ourselves with our own voice, not the voice we are given.
