Rozsika Parker has published widely in Art History and

Psychoanalysis. Her books include Old Mistresses: Women, Art and

Ideology and Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-
1985 (both written with Griselda Pollock) and Torn in Two: The
Experience of Maternal Ambivalence. Her latest book is The Anxious
Gardener. She now practices as a psychotherapist in London.
THE SUBVERSIVE STITCH
Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine

R O Z S I K A PA R K E R
New edition published in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
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Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

First published by The Women's Press Ltd, 1984

Reprinted 1986, 1989
Reprinted and revised 1996

Copyright © Rozsika Parker, 1984, 1996, 2010

The right of Rozsika Parker to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any
part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 84885 283 9

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

Contents

Victoria and Albert Museum Image Credits vi

Acknowledgements viii
Foreword ix
Introduction xi

1: The Creation of Femininity 1

2: Eternalising the Feminine 17

3: Fertility, Chastity and Power 40

4: The Domestication of Embroidery 60

5: The Inculcation of Femininity 82

6: From Milkmaids to Mothers 110

7: Femininity as Feeling 147

8: A Naturally Revolutionary Art? 189

Notes 216
Bibliography 233
Glossary 240
Index 242
Victoria and Albert Museum
Image Credits

The Victoria and Albert Museum have granted permission for the reproduction of the
following images as they originally appeared when The Subversive Stitch was first
published by The Women's Press Ltd, 1984.

7 Museum no- 480-1894 – Anonymous sampler, English, Victoria and

Albert Museum, London. Late seventeenth century, silk on linen.
8 Museum no- T. 165-1928 – B/W Neg no: X413 – Embroidered scene
from Scott’s The Talisman, Berlin, canvas wool-work, 1840–60.
14 Museum no- T.70-1923 – Frontlet for an altar hanging, linen embroidered
with silver-gilt thread and coloured silks in tent, satin, stem and long-
and-short stitches with couched work with inscription, front view,
English, 1290–1340.
16 Museum no- T.36-1955 – The Butler-Bowdon Cope – detail.
19 Museum no- T.27-1922 – Chasuble orphrey, a detail from The Nativity
of The Virgin.
22 Museum no- 83-1864 – The Syon Cope. Embroidered in coloured silk and
silver-gilt thread with the Figures of Christ, The Virgin Mary and The
Apostles, whole view. England, early fourteenth century.
23 The Syon Cope, detail showing St Thomas Placing His Fingers in Christ’s
Wounds. England, early fourteenth century.
24 Museum no- T.36-1955 – The Butler-Bowdon Cope silk velvet,
embroidered with silver and silver-gilt thread and coloured silks, with
scenes from The Life of The Virgin, whole front view, weaving Italian,
embroidery English, 1330–50.
27 The Butler Bowdon Cope – detail showing The Coronation of The Virgin.
34 Museum no- 8128-1863 – Apparels of Albs, with Scenes from The Life of
The Virgin, embroidered in coloured silk, silver thread and silver-gilt on

vi
 Victoria and Albert Museum Image Credits

velvet, detail of The Annunciation to St Anne, The Meeting at The Golden

Gate and The Birth of The Virgin.
35 Apparels of Albs, with Scenes from The Life of The Virgin, detail.
38 Museum no- T.46-1914 – Hood of a cope, deep red velvet with
embroidered orphreys, English, 1460–90.
39 Museum no- 230-1879 – Cope, 1510–58. Silk damask, the hood and
orphrey of velvet, embroidered with gilt thread and coloured silks.
41 Museum no- 879A-1904 – The story of Myrrah, embroidered bed
valance, 1575–99, wool, silk, canvas work.
43 Museum no-T.135-1924 Hood, embroidered with floral, design with
bobbin lace trimming, English, c.1600.
45 Museum no- T.29-1955 – The Marian Hanging – Centre Panel
embroidered with inscription ‘Virescit Vulnere Virtus’, green velvet with
applied panels of canvas embroidered with silks in cross-stitch, from The
Oxburgh Hangings, English, 1500s.
47 Museum no-CIRC.279-1923 – Sampler, English, Early seventeenth
century, oblong sampler various patterned panels in various colours, with
birds, animals, fishes and flowers.
48 Museum no- T.432-1990 – Stumpwork Casket; wood covered in silk with
rowed embroidery in a variety of techniques with silk and metal threads,
seed pearls and applied motifs, trimmed with silver braid; signed M.E. for
Martha Edlin, English, 1668–71.
50 Museum no- T.17-1946 – The Judgement of Solomon, stumpwork
picture, English, 1686.
53 Museum no- 125-1878 – The Story of Abraham and Hagar, stumpwork
panel, late seventeenth century.
54 Museum no- T.125-1937 – Esther and Abasuerus, embroidery in silk
thread on white satin. English, 1665.
59 Museum no- T.13-1929 – Drapes from a set of bed-hangings embroidered
in crewel wools on linen and cotton material. Displayed on bedstead by
Abigail Pett, English, c.1690’s.
60 Museum no- T.92-1934 – Embroidered picture, 1718–30, English man
and woman in garden, made by Dorcas or Hannah Haines.
66 Museum no’s- 114A-1873 and 114-1873 – Dress and petticoat, silk,
English, 1730s, cream, floral embroidery, gold thread, gold lace.
67 Museum no- 306-1887 – Embroidered picture, English, framed, c.1780.
79 Museum no- T.321-1960 – Sampler, coloured silks on woollen canvas.
English, 1830, Jane Bailey.
85 Museum no- T. 141-1935 – The Prince of Wales, embroidered picture,
portrait of King Edward VII (1841–1910) as a child as the Prince of
Wales, with a dog; canvas embroidered with wool, in tent-stitch and
Berlin wool work, after an engraving by Franz Xavier Wint.
91 Unfinished embroidery by May Morris from William Morris design.

vii
Acknowledgements

Many people have enabled me to complete this book:

The London Women’s Art History Collective, in particular Denise

Cale, Pat Kahn, Tina Keane, Griselda Pollock and Alene Strausberg
prompted the initial research.
Spare Rib published the article which led to the book; I
would like to thank members of the 1974 magazine collective: Rose
Ades, Alison Fell, Marion Fudger, Jill Nicholls, Janie Prince,
Marsha Rowe, Ann Scott and Ann Smith.
For their help and support in diverse ways I am grateful to
Linda Binnington, Guy Brett, Anthea Callen, Jocelyn Cornwell,
Penelope Dalton, Briony Fer, Susan Hiller, Maggie Millman, Kim
Parker, Will Parente, Stef Pixner, Michèle Roberts, Ann Scott,
Alison Swan and Annmarie Turnbull.
Adrian Forty, Griselda Pollock, Margaret Walters
and Michelene Wandor read the manuscript and offered
invaluable comments.
Finally, I cannot thank Ruthie Petrie enough for the generous
editorial advice and encouragement she provided at each stage of
the work.

viii
Foreword

‘Has the pen or pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human
race as the needle?’ asked the writer Olive Schreiner. The answer
is, quite simply, no. The art of embroidery has been the means of
educating women into the feminine ideal, and of proving that they
have attained it, but it has also provided a weapon of resistance
to the constraints of femininity.
In this book I examine the historical processes by which
embroidery became identified with a particular set of
characteristics, and consigned to women’s hands. By mapping the
relationship between the history of embroidery and changing
notions of what constituted feminine behaviour from the Middle
Ages to the twentieth century, we can see how the art became
implicated in the creation of femininity across classes, and that the
development of ideals and feminine behaviour determined the
style and iconography of needlework. To know the history of
embroidery is to know the history of women.

ix
Introduction

At first sight embroidery practice is much as it was when The

Subversive Stitch was first published, twenty-five years ago. There
continues to be a huge diversity of practice under the heading of
embroidery. Men and women stitch as craft, as art, as professionals
and as gifted amateurs. Moreover, 1984 and 2010 have something
in common: financial recession. Then I observed a revival of
enthusiasm for embroidery as a ‘homecraft’ with the call for the
homemade, the hand-made and the natural. Now the same holds
true. The London College of Fashion in August 2009 reported that
bookings for sewing classes had increased by almost a third in
twelve months.
Yet there are detectable changes in embroidery practice. For a
start, the context of the book has altered significantly. Today
there is no longer a thriving political movement of women. I wrote
the book under the impetus of Second Wave feminism. By righting
the neglect of women artists and questioning the downgrading of
art forms associated with women – like embroidery – feminist art
and craft historians revisioned many of the premises underlying
the writing of Art History. Theory and history came alive for us
and gathered new meanings. Passion and vibrancy characterised
the work of both artists and academics. I feel fortunate to have
been part of those times.
Shortly after the publication of The Subversive Stitch, a
backlash against feminism set in. The political and psychological
xi
Introduction

losses that accrued have been compellingly documented by, for

example, Sheila Rowbotham, Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf.1
Headlines blared ‘When Feminism Failed’ and ‘The Awful Truth
About Women’s Lib’. Typically, anti-feminism focussed on the
bodies and beings of feminists. It was trumpeted that the fight
for equality led to hair loss, worry lines, cellulite and above all
infertility. A magazine feature was typically titled ‘The Quiet
Pain of Infertility; for the success oriented it’s a bitter pill’ while
an ad for face cream inquired ‘Is your face paying the price for
success?’ Of course, nineteen-seventies feminists had no desire
for ‘success’ under the contemporary social and political structures.
Far from wishing to climb ‘the ladder’ we wanted to kick it away.
Where embroidery was concerned, feminists of the time were
described as rejecting and spurning women’s traditional crafts and
skills. The ambivalence we experienced in relation to embroidery
– our understanding of the medium as both an instrument of
oppression and an important source of creative satisfaction – was
repeatedly misrepresented as blanket condemnation. Apparently we
‘dumped’ women’s domestic art skills. The Feminist was represented
as stitch-hating, sad, ugly and drastically devoid of humour.
Feminism survived – in part by foregrounding a humorous
face. Today a feminist magazine on the internet is, for example,
satirically titled The F-Word, while exhibitions containing
embroidery with feminist connotations are titled, for example,
‘Not Your Grandmother’s Doily’.
But what of other issues raised in the book? I identified the
historical hierarchical division of the arts into fine arts and craft
as a major force in the marginalisation of women’s work. The
movement to break down boundaries between different forms of
creative expression, which gathered pace in the nineteen-seventies,
has undoubtedly intensified. Some working in the crafts today
refer to themselves as ‘craftists’. Craft magazine declared in 2008,
‘We now take for granted the cross-pollination of arts and crafts.’2
And, in recent years, a number of exhibitions have displayed work
by artists employing stitchery. The Museum of Arts and Design in
New York mounted ‘Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting’ in
2006, followed by ‘Pricked: Extreme Embroidery’ in 2007. The
latter included 48 artists who, in the words of the New York
Times reviewer, ‘make another case for needlecraft without the
“craft”’.3 In Britain there was ‘Cloth and Culture NOW’, in which
35 artists from six countries used textile history to investigate the

xii
 Introduction

importance of cultural identity and transcultural influences in

their work. In 2008 ‘Banners of Persuasion’ (a visual arts
commissioning organisation started by Christopher and Suzanne
Sharpe) organised ‘Demons, Yarns and Tales’, in which 17 artists
were invited to explore a textile medium they didn’t normally
work in. Also in 2008 ‘The Fabric of Myth’ was organised at
Compton Verney. The exhibition explored the symbolic function of
textiles in classical myth and their thematic influence on historic
and contemporary art. It included the sculptor Louise Bourgeois,
whose work I discuss below.
Karen Rosenberg, reviewing ‘Pricked: Extreme Embroidery’,
wrote ‘In the 70s artists who swapped their paint brushes for a
needle and thread were making a feminist statement. Today,
as both men and women fill galleries with crocheted sculpture and
stitched canvas, the gesture isn’t quite so specific.’4 Many pieces
exhibited were primarily concerned with the formal possibilities
of embroidery and new materials, but there were, nevertheless,
powerful feminist pieces, for example Christa Maiwald’s party
dresses for little girls embroidered with images of male
world leaders.
The exhibition also showed the work of a number of men,
suggesting that embroidery practice seems to have become
significantly less gender specific. I use the word ‘seems’ because
it could be that the Internet is revealing previously hidden
male embroiderers. Jamie Chalmers, for example, runs a website
which functions as a resource for contemporary embroidery,
featuring international textile artists, many of whom are men. He
says, ‘It’s not always easy being a Manbroiderer, people
sometimes can’t get their head around the fact that I’m six feet
tall and yet I like stitching. But I’m not too fazed. I know how
much I enjoy it and I just want to help other people share that
experience.’5 Thanks to the Women’s Liberation Movement, there
is a greater flexibility in what is considered natural or normal
behaviour for men and women, yet the associations of
embroidery with femininity, triviality and domesticity still need
to be warded off by the term ‘manbroiderer’ – and by the build
of the stitcher.
There are real differences between work employing
embroidery to comment on the condition of women in the
seventies and work produced in later decades influenced by
Second Wave feminism. A comparison of the work of the earlier

xiii
Introduction

feminist artists described in The Subversive Stitch to Tracey Emin’s

more recent sewn work is telling.
Seventies artists employed embroidery as a medium with a
heritage in women’s hands, and thus as more appropriate than
male-associated paint for making feminist statements. Kate
Walker comments (see page 211), ‘Embroidery was one technique
among many which could be combined in new ways to create
forms of art truer to our skills and experience.’ Taking the format
of the sampler, the sayings she stitched were deliberately defiant,
not compliant: ‘Wife is a Four Letter word’ (Illustration no 102).
She said of her sampler, ‘I have never worried that embroidery’s
association with femininity, sweetness, passivity and obedience
may subvert my work’s feminist intention. Femininity and
sweetness are part of women’s strength…Quiet strength need
not be mistaken for useless vulnerability.’
Catherine Riley, who trained as a textile artist, parodied the
emotions associated with needlework – purity and chastity – and
revealed the limitations they imposed. In an exhibition of her art
in 1980 all the pieces were worked in shades of white, conjuring
up and cutting across the way whitework embroidery creates the
image of women as pure, sexless, spiritual and sensitive.
Illustration No. 106…In a Tin displays the word ‘Sex’ spelled out
in bone-silk and flowers, and contained in a white sardine tin,
beautifully mounted and framed in pure white.
Other feminist artists explored the relationship between
embroidery and class. Margaret Harrison assembled examples of
traditional needlecraft and contemporary doilies ‘made in the
factory by working-class women and sold back to them’,
highlighting the process of de-skilling working-class women
since the industrial revolution.
For those who saw themselves as feminist artists, embroidery
was the perfect medium to give form to consciousness-raising. The
Women’s Liberation Movement employed the slogan ‘The personal
is the political’. Steeped in the personal, yet shaped by the
political, embroidery displayed the power of the political on
personal life, as well as the political implications of personal
relationships. Tensions between traditional expectations of feminine
reticence and lived female sexuality were stitched on samplers – for
example, Kate Walker’s ‘Wife is a Four Letter word’, described
above. The constraints of feminine ‘purity and chastity’, associated
with the construction of femininity, were challenged but not with

xiv
 Introduction

the aim of achieving masculinity. Nineteen-seventies feminists

categorically did not wish to exchange the frying pan of the
feminine stereotype for the fire of the masculine stereotype.
Embroidering the personal as political was, above all, intended to
challenge the subordination and oppression of women.
Feminist artists were part of a thriving political movement,
whereas today’s embroiderers, most notably Tracey Emin, are
working in a very different time. I’d like to be able to claim
Emin as the daughter of seventies feminism – the daughter we
would have wanted. But it’s not that simple. She is the complex
product of the confluence of her personal history with celebrity
culture, and of the evolution of art practice under the impact of
nineteen-seventies feminism.
There are two major ways in which her work differs from her
‘foremothers’. Nineteen-seventies feminists eschewed celebrity and
leadership in favour of collectivity, whereas Tracey Emin is
undoubtedly a celebrity. The number of features that have been
written about her is quite extraordinary. But, perhaps more
importantly, while nineteen-seventies feminists and Tracey
Emin equally use the fact that embroidery, during the twentieth
century, had become increasingly categorised as the ‘art of
personal life’, Tracey Emin employs embroidery as the prime
medium of personal life not to proclaim that the personal is the
political, but that the personal is the universal. ‘Tracey Emin
reveals intimate details from her personal life to engage the
viewer with her expressions of universal emotion,’ read, the
commentary on her work in the Saatchi Gallery.
Tracey Emin has nevertheless been described as ‘reviving
an approach that was previously practised by feminists in the
’70s’. 6 Like nineteen-seventies feminists, Emin employs
traditional sampler technique with the incorporation of words.
Her most famous stitched work was the embroidered tent,
‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995’, in which she
sewed onto the tent walls all the people’s names, including her
grandmother and her teddy bear. Peering into the tent was a
powerful experience. Sadly, it was destroyed in the Momart
warehouse fire. Her other embroidered work includes ‘When I
Think About Sex’, appliquéd with the words ‘Drunk’ and ‘super
Bitch’. In another piece the words ‘There is no fucking peace’ are
spelt out against floral rectangles which re-inforce the tension
between the message and the medium.

xv
Introduction

On her website Emin describes herself as producing

‘autobiographical art’ with the following statement: ‘Her
confessional subjects include abortion, rape, self-neglect, and
promiscuity expressed with the help of gloriously old-fashioned
looking, hand-sewn appliqué letters. Her dad quite likes sewing,
because it reminds him of his mum.’
Embroidery as ‘gloriously old-fashioned’ highlights the harsh
and painful nature of the contemporary subject matter. The sewing
dad saves stitchery from the triviality associated with femininity.
That it reminds him of his mum reminds us that Emin is
displaying a ‘cosy’ domestic art in a professional setting, breaking
the boundary between the private, the personal and the public –
both psychologically and formally.
Second Wave feminists wanted an end to the inhibition and
shame that limited women’s lives – exemplified by the bowed head
of the embroiderer. We wanted women to be free to express a broad
spectrum of affects and ways of being without the fear of being
shamed. While nineteen-seventies feminists asserted the power of
female sexuality, Tracey Emin exhibited it. She achieved a glorious
shamelessness with her taboo-breaking embroidery. But the
conventions of sexual difference are not so easily overcome. Her
work is received not as evidence of the diversity of women’s work,
extending what is accepted and expected of women. Tellingly it is
praised as ‘feminine and ballsy’.
Nineteen-seventies feminists wanted women artists and
women’s traditional media to receive the recognition they richly
deserved. With Tracey Emin – thanks in part to the machinery of
the new celebrity culture – the aim appears to be achieved. Yet
so often in the past we have seen the phenomenon of the Token
Woman, raised, praised and soon forgotten – leaving the status of
women unchanged. It remains to be seen whether Tracey Emin’s
success will have an impact on the position of women in the arts.
Believing that only the transformation of the structures of art
practice itself would truly improve things for women, nineteen-
seventies feminists invented new ways of making and showing art.
In Chapter 8 I describe ‘Feministo’: during 1975, women began
exchanging art works through the post, setting up a visual dialogue
about their lives as housewives and mothers. They utilised whatever
materials they had to hand and whichever domestic skills they
possessed, including embroidery. They wanted an end to
competitive individualism fostered in the institutions associated

xvi
 Introduction

with the fine arts, while avoiding idealisation of the domestic

sphere. ‘We both celebrated the area of domestic creativity and
“women’s world” and exposed it for its paucity,’ commented
participant Phil Goodall.
In the same year a group of six women artists took over
a house in Lambeth, London and created the installation
‘Housework’, exposing ‘the hidden side of the domestic dream’.
The ground-floor rooms dealt with the emotional expectations
bound up with marriage. A bride in traditional white gown,
standing in an all-white environment with chocolate-box
landscapes and collages of Princess Anne’s wedding decorating
the walls, stretched out her arms to welcome an unseen groom.
In 2007, following in the footsteps of seventies feminists, a
group of 12 people calling themselves ‘Leftovers’ took over a
condemned house in London’s Hampstead. Their declared
intention was not to challenge the constraints, nor to highlight the
creative possibilities of the domestic sphere, but to ‘democratise
creativity’. Whereas seventies feminist alternative exhibition spaces
had been women-only, ‘Leftovers’ involved men and women.
Anyone could exhibit anything in the house. A spirit of anarchy
informed the project. The desecration of the domestic provided a
creative energy. Yet there were echoes of the nineteen-seventies:
Lydia Samuels exhibited sewn pictures on the staircase, depicting
people enjoying their food. In the medium associated with
reticence and restraint, she stitched people eating with
unselfconscious relish, refusing the self-denial of the diet. (See, on
the cover, one of her sewn pictures, ‘Naomi Eating’). Twentieth-
century feminists challenged the constraints on female desire.
Twenty-first century feminists depict desire in action.
The historical association between embroidery, collectivity and
political protest is evident in the recent world-wide movement of
Craftivism. The term was coined in 2003 by Betsy Greer to
designate work that combines craft and activism. She comments,
‘I make international anti-war cross stitch … juxtaposing the
masculine “war” with the feminine “craft”’.7 The London Craftivist
Collective was formed by Sarah Corbett in 2009. Crativist protest
banners, exhibited in public spaces, display stitched slogans
challenging, for example, capitalism, global poverty and injustice.
In 2010 the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol mounted ‘Craftism’, an
exhibition of 14 projects intended ‘to question, disrupt or replace
the dominant models of mass culture and consumerism’.

xvii
Introduction

Perhaps the artist whose work has done most to restore

fabric and stitching to their place within ‘high art’ is Louise
Bourgeois. Had she frequently employed embroidery and fabric
prior to 1984, I would have allocated a large section of the last
chapter of the book to her work. Here I can do little more than
signal her importance.
Born in France in 1911, she has spent most of her working
life in the USA. During the mid-1990s, having established herself
as a successful sculptor employing conventional materials – marble,
bronze and wood – she began increasingly to work with fabric.
Whereas Tracey Emin’s use of embroidery and fabric
highlights the disjuncture between imposed femininity and lived
female sexuality, Louise Bourgeois’ work brings out the deeper
meanings of textiles’ evocation of women. In her work fabric is
associated directly with female sexuality, the unconscious and the
body. Familiar with psychoanalysis, she explores the infantile
roots of female sexuality in the family through her own history,
which was closely tied to textiles, as her parents ran a tapestry
restoration business.
Occasionally Louise Bourgeois utilises the traditional
employment of embroidered words: an installation of 1997 which
involved hanging garments, included a white coat embroidered
on the back with the words The Cold of Anxiety is very real. The
strength of her work lies in her ability to use fabric to convey
psychological processes. The stitches themselves convey meaning.
Linda Nochlin has commented on the ferocity of the bad sewing,
with large, awkward stitching, far from the tradition of
professional tapestry making.8 Often employing tactile fabrics like
terry towelling to create stuffed, sewn figures, she explores
relationships, with couples having sex, women giving birth and
figures conveying pain and vulnerability.
Louise Bourgeois says of herself, ‘My feminism expresses itself
in an intense interest in what women do. But I’m a complete loner.
It doesn’t help me to associate with people, it really doesn’t help
me. What helps me is to realize my own disabilities and
express them.’9
Scrutinising her own experiences led to works with an
obvious feminist content. Take, for example, ‘Femme Maison’ of
2005, an image she had earlier explored in various materials. A
stuffed, headless female torso lies on its back covered with a
patchwork quilt. Emerging from the torso is a house. The piece

xviii
 Introduction

evokes women’s isolation and incarceration in the home as well as

suggesting the significance of women as the foundation of the
home, while the inclusion of patchwork celebrates, though
ambivalently, women’s traditional media.
Particularly powerful are her recent fabric heads. Taking the
template of the portrait bust in stone or bronze, Louise
Bourgeois reworks the form in patched-together fabric: tapestry,
towelling, ticking or pink bandages. The medium of personal life
well conveys internal conflict, age, pain and doubt.
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (whose work Louise
Bourgeois knew) considered creativity to be driven by the
unconscious desire to make reparation – specifically to the mother
for destructive attacks motivated by infantile ambivalence. We can
speculate on the unconscious processes that may have led Louise
Bourgeois to turn to stitching in her old age. She wrote, ‘When
I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles.
I have always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power
of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to
forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’10
Her work, to my mind, associates stitching not only with
reparation but also with aggression and destruction. A theme
that recurs in The Subversive Stitch is the dual face of
embroidery. Historically, through the centuries, it has provided
both a weapon of resistance for women and functioned as a source
of constraint. It has promoted submission to the norms of
feminine obedience and offered both psychological and
practical means to independence. Colette describes observing
the latter process in her daughter. She writes, ‘… she is silent
when she sews, silent for hours on end…she is silent, and she
– why not write it down the word that frightens me – she
is thinking.’11
Psychoanalytic theory provides a way of understanding how
creativity fosters thought. The psychoanalytic theorist W.R.Bion
described the process of ‘containment’ occurring between parent
and child, and between analyst and patient. The parent and
clinician take in the formless fears and raw experience of the
child and patient, make sense of them and return them in a form
that can be thought about. Psychoanalyst Margot Waddell has
related Bion’s theory of ‘containment’ to the experience of the
artist and the art work. She writes that ‘the art object promotes
and expands mental capacities by offering a shape and containing

xix
Introduction

structure for the transformation of emotional experience into

recognizable form.’12
The processes of creativity – the finding of form for
thought – have a transformative impact on the sense of self.
The embroiderer holds in her hands a coherent object which
exists both outside in the world and inside her head.
W.R.Winnicott’s theory of mirroring helps us understand how
the experience of embroidering and the embroidery affirms the
self as a being with agency, acceptability and potency. Winnicott
developed his theory of mirroring in the context of the
mother–child relationship. The child sees in the mother’s face a
reflection of him or herself, mediated by the mother’s feelings
of love and acceptance. The embroiderer sees a positive reflection
of herself in her work and, importantly, in the reception of her
work by others.
The containing and mirroring function of embroidery, with
the associated capacity for thought and self-esteem, is evident in
the work produced under the aegis of Fine Cell Work, a charity
established in 1997. Following a tradition begun by the
eighteenth-century prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, the charity
provides skills and embroidery materials for men and women in
prisons throughout the United Kingdom. Volunteers deliver
material to prisoners, who carry out the work in their cells. The
embroidered cushions, bags, cases, quilts and wall hangings are
then sold, with money going to the prisoners.
Sam, who embroiders in Wandsworth, writes,
I am learning a new skill which I did not think possible, I also
know that people do care about me and what I do because
otherwise why would people take an interest in my fine cell
work. I now believe what others think about me makes a real
difference to how I conduct myself.13
Embroidery promotes and reflects a richer, more meaningful
internal world, which is in turn substantiated by the reception of
the work in the outside world.
Sam found that the reception of his work changed both his
relationship to himself and others. Dee describes how the
processes of embroidering promoted the capacity to think, as
well as confirming her sense of agency and the ability to love and
feel loved. She writes,
I put many hours of love and concentration into the commission.
As I saw it grow I became more and more excited. It was never
xx
 Introduction

far from my mind at all times. I puzzled, imagined different

colours, stitches. All in all I am proud of this piece. The
appreciation I got from everyone is the value of this hard work
for me.14
The parallel between women historically stitching in the
home and those stitching in captivity is obvious. But there is a
significant difference. Both prisoners and domestic embroiderer
find psychological growth and release in creativity, both benefit
from the power of positive mirroring provided by the work, but
the prisoners are paid for their work. Paul in Wandsworth
describes how the money will enable him at Christmas to ‘send
out postal orders to my daughters so they will know I still think
about them’.15 James in Wynot says, ‘I bought myself a nice pair
of shoes with some of the money I made and I’m keeping as much
as I can by for getting out.’16 However, Ron in Wandsworth
highlights the aspect of embroidery that has, so to speak, kept
women and prisoners sitting still and in place over the centuries:
‘I find the quality work soothing,’ he says, adding, ‘I am saving
for my release.’17
I wish I could end with an unqualified celebration of the
recent history of embroidery. Change, however, is slow and
uneven. Consider the fact that many of the beliefs that fired
feminist embroiderers in the late twentieth century were also
central tenets of the Arts and Crafts Movement that began in the
late nineteenth century. They too wanted an end to the divide
between fine and decorative arts. They too believed in the
transformative power of the arts not only on society but also on
the lives of the practitioners. Art was to be more like work and
work more like art, while William Morris concluded that the
transformation of art practice was finally dependent upon
social revolution. Similarly, Second Wave feminism, with its
condemnation of the denial of female desire and critique of
domestic relationships, repeated the insights of the earlier suffrage
movement. Yet while similar issues are re-visited – as I hope I
have indicated in this brief introduction – both feminism and
embroidery continue to evolve, although tracing a pattern of
progress which is less suggestive of a straight line than a spiral.

Rozsika Parker

xxi
Introduction

Notes

1 Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in

Britain and the United States, London: Viking, 1997. Susan Faludi,
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, New York: Crown,
1991. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used
Against Women, New York: Bantham, Doubleday, Dell, 1990.
2 Craft, 214, Sept./Oct. 2008.
3 Karen Rosenberg, ‘Needling More Than Feminist Consciousness’,
New York Times, December 2009.
4 Ibid.
5 Fine Cell Work, Newsletter, 2009.
6 Craft, 214, Sept./Oct. 2008.
7 Kate Mikhail ‘Off the Wall: Mosaics with a Message’ Observer
Magazine, 7 February 2010.
7 Linda Nochlin, ‘Old-Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois’, in Louise
Bourgeois, New York: Rizzoli, 2007.
8 Interview with Donaly Kuspit, 1988, in Charles Hanson and Paul
Wood, Louise Bourgeois, Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
10 J. Gorovoy and P. Tabatabai, Louise Bourgeois Blue Days and Pink
Days, exhibition catalogue, Fondazione Prada: Milan, 1997.
11 Colette, Earthly Paradise, London: Secker and Warburg, 1966
p.205.
12 Margot Wadell, ‘The Containing Function of Art’, unpublished
paper, 2009.
13 Fine Cell Work archives. Names have been changed.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.

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