Textiles

How are embroidery, and the women who do it, portrayed in the years after the First World War?

This month Jessica takes us on a tour of post-war embroidery in Tracy Chevalier’s A Single Thread and Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages. Along the way we discuss surplus women, the varying perceptions of embroidery as skilled work, and the constant reminders of the First World War.

References

Tracy Chevalier, A Single Thread (2019)

Dorothy Whipple, High Wages (1930)

Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (1927)

Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)

Herman Darewski and R.P. Weston, ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’ (1914). This is Billy Murry’s 1915 version)

Janet S.K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War (2004)

Alexia Moncrieff, Expertise, Authority and Control: The Australian Army Medical Corps in the First World War(2020)

Ana Carden-Coyne, ‘Butterfly Touch: rehabilitation, nature and the haptic arts in the First World War’, Critical Military Studies 6:2 (2020)

Lesley Glaister, Blasted Things (2020). See episode 9 of the podcast for our discussion with Lesley Glaister.

Armistice & After: Peace Project, Leeds City Museum 10^th-18^th November 2018:

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Professor of Modern British History at Leeds University. My research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of gender, particularly masculinity, medicine and warfare.

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A historian focusing on the First World War and popular representations of warfare. I received my PhD from the University of Sussex in 2013. My thesis examined relations between British and French soldiers during the First World War.

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Is a Visiting Research Fellow at Leeds University. My current research focuses on manpower and authority in Britain, starting with the First World War and running through until the end of the Second World War.