Stitching Professionalism: Female-Run Embroidery Agencies and the Provision of Artistic Work for Women, 1870-1900.

The activities of female-run embroidery agencies have been largely ignored in scholarship dedicated to the design professions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study reveals that embroidery agencies and societies played a key role in organizing and systematizing the female-dominated embroidery workforce, thereby granting women needleworkers new access to the business side of art. In illuminating the material and economic conditions of these women's working lives, the author unpacks the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between embroidery organizations and professionalism, at a time when the design industries themselves were becoming increasingly professionalized and commercialized. Two broad categories of embroidery agencies are examined: modest, economically driven work depots; and artistically and philanthropically motivated embroidery societies. In the brief period of time when the popularity of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic and demand for ecclesiastical embroidery made embroidery a viable remunerative business, dedicated agencies and societies gave women with little or no connections to the art world access to a market for their wares. It was this access that allowed female needleworkers to practice as professional art workers according to that term's most basic definition – they supported themselves monetarily through artistic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]