Women and material culture, 1660-1830

Sinopse

Women and Material Culture presents a collection of twelve illustrated and interdisciplinary essays on gender and material culture across the long eighteenth century. Written by scholars from the USA, the UK and Europe, these essays point to the manifold ways in which gender mediated and was shape by the consumption and production of consumable goods (from clothing and artworks to books) and elucidate the complex and shifting relationships between material and social practice in the period. The study of material objects and their visual and textual representation reminds us that the meanings of objects - like the meaning of gender - are neither monolithic nor stable. Women and Material Culture explores some of the many ways in which women across eighteenth-century Europe actively participated in the social production of meaning through the consumption, creation and deployment of material artefacts.