This was really interesting! It makes me want to get back into embroidery, not that I was ever very good at it in the first place but still. Embroidery, and I suppose textile art in general, has a history of being seen as "lesser" in comparison to the male-dominated fine arts such as painting or sculpture, but this wasn't always the case. The slow transition of embroidery from a fine art to a craft, from something both genders practiced to something relegated to the feminine, is a story of sad decline. It's not that the skill became less; it's that it became less valued (primarily because of its association with women). It also became, in its way, a reinforcement of the values society wanted to inflict. If training little girls to be silent, obedient adults was the goal, for example, then endless hours of highly structured stick-to-pattern stitchery, especially in the absence of any other education, was a useful tool. (Those poor sad little samplers!)

Parker, though, while describing these changes, also looks at how women used embroidery to subvert the expectations and roles thrust upon them. Many of the banners for women's suffrage, for example, used embroidery in contrast with a number of other artistic techniques to reinforce the point women wanted to make - and even when restricted to pattern, the choice of subjects is a telling one. Parker's example of the changing interpretations of St. Margaret in embroidery, for instance, is excellently drawn, as is the use of symbols that focus on women's experience of fertility and reproduction at a time when midwives were being forced out of childbirth and replaced by male attendants. Very, very interesting.