Judith Williams
TRAVEL DOCUMENTS: How Irish school workbooks of collated samples of needlework became passports to a better life for women in the nineteenth century.
This work examines Simple directions in needle-work and cutting out; intended for the use of the national female schools of Ireland, to which are added specimens of work executed by the pupils of the Female National Model School as a material object within nineteenth century education.
This work will explore how the needlework lessons that formed part of the curriculum could ensure social and economic freedom for girls who were impoverished. The hand-sewn miniatures reveal precision, diligence, personality, and skill, developed from age six to fourteen, as pupils progressed according to ability.
The safekeeping and consequently survival of so many books is a testament to the importance they held to the maker. These books (often anonymous) have ended up scattered around the world; in libraries, museums, personal collections, and as inherited heirlooms.
Currently I’ve sourced thirty of these books across the globe. Books like this are difficult to display and conserve; consequently they often end up in storage in institutions. They will be examined through the lenses of gendered labour, first wave feminism, poverty, famine, emigration, industrial revolution and the inception of suffrage. They are a record of design, materiality and material culture, and deserve recognition for the work contained, rather than being thought of as books of “cute” dolls clothes.
