Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement

摘要

In the thought-provoking epilogue to her book, Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Zoee Thomas writes '[in] many ways, the real issues began when the Arts and Crafts movement started to be understood in the past tense. Reliant on asserting their artistic status through a range of, often transitory, strategies, knowledge of these women faded fast' (p. 230). Thomas's project has been to address this fading knowledge by examining the diverse spaces-homes, studios, workshops, exhibitions, and businesses-in which women 'art workers' operated within the context of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the late nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth century. Bounded by the founding of the Arts Workers' Guild and the Home Arts and Industries Association both in 1884, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society established in 1887, but extended into the new century with the establishment of women's organisations such as the Lyceum Club (1904) and the Women's Guild of Arts (1907), Thomas maps out the complex artistic networks, professional and business connections, personal relationships, and political alliances which women navigated. Her aim: to 'offer a new history of the Arts and Crafts movement which moves beyond the tendency to construct a narrative through the perspectives of one or two celebrated individual designers, to instead position the extensive network of women working at the highest echelons of the English Arts and Crafts movement at the centre of the analysis for the first time' (p. 5).