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Women Art Workers and the Arts
and Crafts Movement
Zoë Thomas
Manchester: University Press,
2020 Hardcover. x+258 p. ISBN 978-1526140432.
£80
Reviewed
by Jacqueline Bannerjee The Victorian Web
The Arts and Crafts movement of the late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century has always seemed very much a male
preserve. Dominated by well-known figures like William Morris and Walter Crane,
its history centred on the organisation with which they were associated: the
Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury. This was founded in 1884, but its doors were
shut to women, however successful they were, until the second half of the
twentieth-century. Indeed, it was not until 1972 that it elected its first female
“master”, the wood-engraver and illustrator, Joan Hassall (1906-1988). Such was
the lingering prejudice against women artworkers that Hassall herself had had to
battle her parents’ reluctance to let her take up “so unorthodox a calling” [qtd.
223]. Even today, the busts and portraits of past masters, ranged along the
sides of the hall, make the Guild a kind of shrine to its early male leadership,
a celebration of their pioneering ideals of craftsmanship. Women, it seems,
were for many years peripheral to the movement. This misapprehension was hardly helped
by women’s own reluctance to exhibit their work in major exhibitions. They knew
that it would be presented separately, in a women’s section — and consequently,
they felt, devalued: “the work of artists should be judged without regard to
questions of sex”, insisted the sculptor Feodora Gleichen [qtd. 84]. The
sentiment was echoed by Christiana Herringham and May Morris when refusing to
submit work to the Scottish National Exhibition of 1908. The result of their
refusal, however, has been near-oblivion. The way in which they did choose to
exhibit publicly, as against in “at homes” or similarly intimate spaces, has
been completely ignored by subsequent scholarship. This was in the annual
Englishwoman Exhibition held at “prestigious locations” [67] to provide outlets
and encouragement for female artworkers. An alternative to the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition Society, this was first held at Maddox Street Gallery in November 1911,
and became a regular event for many years. Despite its impact at the time, Zoë
Thomas’s pioneering history of the movement is the first to examine it closely.
The names of the outstanding women
artworkers mentioned above might already be familiar to some. Gleichen’s
Artemis fountain in Hyde Park features in Pauline Rose’s Working Against the
Grain : Women Sculptors in Britain c.1885-1950 (Liverpool University
Press, 2020), another work seeking to set the record straight on women’s
contribution to the arts during this period. Mary Lago published her book on Christiana
Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene (University of Missouri Press), in
1996, and an exhibition of Herringham’s work was held at Royal Holloway College
in 2019. May Morris may have been overshadowed by her famous father, but is
probably also more widely known because of him: Jan Marsh’s May Morris :
Arts and Crafts Designer (2017) was published by the Victorian and Albert
Museum. But Thomas introduces us to many others, including Charlotte Newman
(1840-1927), “Goldsmith and Court Jeweller”, who served an exclusive clientele
from her Savile Row
premises; Mary Lowndes (1857-1929), who designed stained glass, who founded the Woman's Suffrage League, and who first thought of the Englishwoman Exhibition; and Mary Sargant Florence (1857-1954), who painted
murals and landscapes. In fact, Thomas presents an “extensive network” of
craftswomen [5], all of them founding or early members of the Women’s Guild of
Arts. This was established in 1907, and had a relatively small membership, at
around sixty strong, compared to the Art Workers’ Guild’s 240 or so. But it was
very active, and indeed, says Thomas, its members were “central players” in the
Arts and Crafts Movement — so much so that no account of it can be complete
without discussing them. The
fact that the Women’s Guild was founded in Edwardian times is itself important,
because the conventional view is that the Arts and Crafts movement had started
to run out of steam by then. Yet, as Thomas argues so convincingly, these women
had a new and energetic agenda, “to disrupt gendered marginalisation in the art
world and in society” [8]. In doing so, she suggests, they inspired a more diverse
following of people from different classes who were more open to new trends.
They created new spaces for work as well as new markets, reaching those who
(ironically, in view of Morris’s ideals) would never have aspired to Morris
wallpaper or, say, a mahogany-veneered etagère by C.R. Ashbee. In this sense, the women carried through and usefully disseminated the
ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, while their particular political
purpose — not the socialism to which Morris and others were attached, but
equality for women — helped to achieve practical results. They had a strong
presence in suffrage exhibitions, and one of the few artworks shown among the
historic illustrations here is a propagandist one, Mary Sargant Florence’s
“Dare to be Free” Women’s Freedom League banner, demanding votes [fig. 5.1].
Very much a revisionist history, with cultural and feminist
ramifications rather than art criticism, Thomas’s book deals with clubhouses
and guild halls (Chapter I), exhibitions (Chapter II), artistic houses and
studios (Chapter III), and businesses and workshops (Chapter IV) before a final
chapter (“Out of the guild hall and into the city”) on how these women’s work
was influenced by the huge changes taking place in British society, and the
outbreak of the two world wars — important years when women actually “made
the visual spectacle” of campaigns for suffrage and equality [184], and later used
their particular talents “in numerous new philanthropic, commercial, cultural
and medical spheres” [199] to support the war effort. One example here is
Woodward’s training of women to be oxyacetylene welders and metalworkers in
factories across the country. Finally, a brief epilogue relates the women’s
efforts to “democratise the arts, balance married life and work, fight for a
living wage, and tussle with the appropriateness of women-only spaces” [231] to
the situation today, when, as Thomas says, these all remain important issues.
Much of this material, such as the information
about the various women’s clubs, and the many businesses run by women, is new,
and the result of painstaking archival research. Who knew, for example, that
the 1890s were a “boom time for women’s clubs” [44], or that women, not only in
London but all over the country, set up “artistic” businesses, formed
partnerships and generally showed such a strong and adaptive entrepreneurial
spirit? This is a wonderful contribution to women’s studies generally as well
as to scholarship about the Arts and Crafts movement.
The text is well illustrated with photographs. For
example, one shows the Lyceum Ladies’ Club, formally opened in 1904 [fig.1.4],
and still in existence. Another much more recent photograph shows St Paul’s
Studios in Talgarth Road, London [fig. 3.11], which Thomas describes as
“significant venues in the strategies of professionalisation implemented by
women art workers” [139]. Most interesting perhaps are photographs of the women
themselves, especially when shown at work on their various crafts. One features
Gleichen dealing with a large block of marble or stone [fig. 3.1]; another
shows Ellen Caroline Woodward (1859-1943) engaged in metalwork [fig. 4.10], with
the various rather daunting-looking tools of her trade — blowpipe, foot-bellows
and so on. The point here is that women not only designed but also executed
their work with the same detailed technical knowledge, practical skills, and
stamina, as men.
Rather disappointingly, however, there are hardly
any glimpses of the end-products. Granted, this is an art history rather than
an art book, and a very informative and readable one at that. The omission is
intentional: one footnote reads, “The artworks discussed in this paragraph can
all be located in the Museum of London and the WI” [214]. But nothing could
have confirmed these women’s skills more effectively than some photographs and
discussion of their work. Judging by one picture of three exhibits at the
Modern Living Spaces Gallery in Berlin, in 1905 (the kind of intimate place in
which the women liked to show their work), the results were splendid. In the
foreground is an exquisite silver casket with bronze panels along the side and
figures on the lid, by “Rope and Woodward” — Woodward here collaborating with the
sculptor Ellen Mary Rope (1855-1934). More such photographs, perhaps as
colour-plates in the middle of the book, would have been very welcome.
☞ Illustrated
version on The Victorian Web : http://www.victorianweb.org/art/design/artsandcrafts/thomas.html
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