Book Club: The Subversive Stitch

“The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine“ by Rozsika Parker

5 Wednesday meet-ups, from 11 am – 12 pm
in the Textile Center Library

• October 1: Introduction
• October 15: Chapters 1-2
• October 29: Chapters 3-4
• November 5: Chapters 5-6
• November 19: Chapters 7-8

About the book:

Rozsika Parker’s now-classic text, The Subversive Stitch, re-evaluates  the reciprocal relationship between women and embroidery, bringing stitchery out from the private world of female domesticity into the fine arts. Since its publication in 1984, The Subversive Stitch created a major breakthrough in art history and criticism, and fostered the emergence of today’s dynamic and expanding crafts movements. Parker uses household accounts, women’s magazines, letters, novels and the works of art themselves to trace through history how the separation of the craft of embroidery from the fine arts came to be a major force in the marginalisation of women’s work. Beautifully illustrated, her book also discusses the contradictory nature of women’s experience of embroidery: how it has inculcated female subservience while providing an immensely pleasurable source of creativity, forging links between women.

About the author:

Rozsika Parker (1945-2010) published widely in Art History and Psychoanalysis. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine first appeared in 1984. Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence was published in 1995. She and Griselda Pollock together wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981) and edited Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985 (1987).