The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury/The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain/Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century

Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate 2005) xiii + 274 $99.95 A Review by Gina Luria Walker The New School The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury, by E.J. Clery; The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, by Betty A. Schellenberg ; and Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Beth Harris demonstrate the path-breaking work being done at the interstices of literary, historical, and cultural studies while refuting tired assertions about the historical insignificance of women. Harris's approach parallels Clery's and Schellenberg's: each contributor dissects an aspect of prevailing gender ideology, providing primary research and/or trenchant analyses with the common purpose of understanding the nineteenth-century seamstress in Britain, France, and the United States as reality, icon, pawn, and worker. Other chapters argue that the transformation of needlework into a profession paralleled the "professionalization" of American women writers; trace the ambiguous goals and results of girls' vocational training; discuss representations of mid-nineteenth-century Parisian needlewomen, the overlooked successes and failures of "London's Principal Milliners and Dressmakers," "The Fund for Promoting Female Emigration" to Australia, New Zealand, British North America, and the Cape of Good Hope, and the struggles to enact national "Protective Legislation, 1840-1914" for British needlewomen.