Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century
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Overview
Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls' garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives.
Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.
In an innovative reimagining of the relationship between production and consumption, Dyer guides readers through the material biographies of four women, shedding light on fashion history, material culture and the history of fashion and textile production and consumption.
The first book-length study of the material knowledge and skills of consumers in 18th-century Britain
Makes legible the lives of women whose stories do not appear in traditional archival sources
Contributes to material culture, consumption and women's history syllabi, as its structure can be accessed as individual case studies or cited as an interdisciplinary methodological model
List of Illustrations
List of Charts and Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction: Making Material Lives
Material Life Writing
The Consumer Culture of Making
Four Material Lives
2. Material Accounting: A Sartorial Account Book
Barbara Johnson (1738–1825)
Educating Barbara Johnson
Accounting for Herself
Material Literacy
A Chronicle of Fashion
3. Dress of the Year: Watercolours
Ann Frankland Lewis (1757–1842)
Sartorial Timekeeping and the Fashion Plate
Accomplishment and Creative Practice
Society and Fashionable Display
Selfhood, Emotion and the Mourning Watercolours
4. Adorned in Silk: Dressed Prints
Sabine Winn (1734–1798)
Paper Textiles, Dress and the Dressed Print
Sabine Winn's Dressed Prints
Print and Making at Nostell
5. Fashions in Miniature: Dolls
Laetitia Powell (1741–1801)
The Powell Dolls
Mimetic Dolls and Miniature Selves
Dolls as Sartorial Social Narrators
6. Conclusion: Material Afterlives
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
There is something deeply moving about encountering eighteenth-century women via the things they stitched, wore, cut, drew and painted. Richly detailed, evocative and precise – as well as beautifully illustrated – Material Lives has much in common with the intricate, creative women's work that Dyer studies in this book.
Serena Dyer's lavishly illustrated and brilliantly researched book calls for us to rethink the immense cultural power of the “needles, brushes, glue and scissors” that four Georgian women used to fashion new versions of history. It is a compelling read.
A meticulous, insightful and intimate reconstruction of how four genteel women recorded and memorialized their lives through 'material life writing' ... [and] a compelling vision of women's engagement in the eighteenth-century world of goods as knowledgeable, skilful and creative makers.
This splendid book portrays the unforgettable world of female imagination, skill and artistic talent that shaped consumer identity in the eighteenth century.
Material Lives offers a brilliant re-evaluation of eighteenth-century women's lives through their craft practices. Organised around four rich case studies, Dyer's book eloquently questions the presumed primacy of the textual archive and models an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that has far-reaching repercussions for the study of women's history.
- Title: Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century
- Author: Serena Dyer
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 272
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350127005, 9781350126961, 1350126969, 1350127000
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350127005
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T12:07:23Z
Serena Dyer is a historian of material culture, consumption and fashion. She is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De Montfort University, UK, an Associate Fellow of the University of Warwick and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre. She was previously Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, London, UK.