Women - Regional Studies, Social Stratification & Social Classes, Women's Studies, General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism, Women's History, European Art, Regional Studies, English Literature

Women, Work, and Representation

Name: Women, Work, and Representation
Author: Lynn M. Alexander
ISBN: 9780821414934

by Lynn M. Alexander

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

In Victorian England, virtually all women were taught to sew; needlework was allied with images of domestic economy and with the traditional female roles of wife and mother -- with home rather than factory. The professional seamstress, however, labored long hours for very small wages creating gowns for the upper and middle classes. In her isolation and helplessness, she provided social reformers with a powerful image of working-class suffering that appealed to the sensibilities of the upper classes and helped galvanize public opinion around the need for reform. Women, Work, and Representation addresses the use of that image in the reform movement, underscoring the shock to the Victorian public when reports revealed that the profession of needlework was extremely hazardous, even deadly. Author Lynn M. Alexander traces the development of the symbol of the seamstress through a variety of presentations, drawing from the writings of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and George W. M. Reynolds and on visual representations by Richard Redgrave, Thomas Benjamin Kennington, John Everett Millais, John Leech, John Tenniel, and Hubert von Herkomer. Written to appeal to Victorianists, women's studies scholars, and those interested in semiotics and aestheticism, Women, Work, and Representation includes twenty illustrations, most of them from periodicals of the day, which provide new insights into the lives of working women in the Victorian era.