ELIZA PHILLIPS: A MODERN WOMAN
Eliza Phillips was born in Chapeltown, near Sheffield, in 1880, the daughter of John Phillips, a mill-worker.
She was one of a new breed of young women: clever and ambitious, she was able to find her way into higher education - the first of her family to do so. She trained as a teacher at Southlands College, in south London, in the 1890s, and here it was that she completed the set of needlework samplers that demonstrated her skill at stitching. They are shown below.
What happened to her after her student days? First of all, she moved back to Chapeltown to earn her living as a teacher;. Then, in 1908, she married and as a consequence had to give up paid work. But years later, she is to be found with her husband and family in Devon, running a a school - called Sunnyside - where one of the special subjects taught was Needlework Plain and Fancy. The samplers of her college days must have been brought out for her pupils to admire and copy.
Those women who earned their living by the needle in the earlier part of the nineteenth century - the "seamstresses" of popular literature - were among the poorest and least regarded in society. The middle-class Victorian ladies who bent so decoratively over their embroidery were living proof that their husbands had no need for them to work. But for Eliza needlework was a means of making a new sort of life for herself - of becoming a "modern woman."
THE STATUS OF SEWING
This extract is taken from Westwood, a novel by Stella Gibbons set in 1944 and published in 1946. Gerard Challis, a pretentious and second-rate writer, is pontificating to the heroine about the sewing-room in which she is working.
"Women, with their half-formed desires timidly pressing forward into the unknown world outside these walls. Here they sit...sewing."
Impossible to convey in print the chill irony he put into the last word; any self-respecting needle would have melted before it...
"I want," he went on..."to convey in one sentence of dialogue that feeling of half-conscious imprisonment that was sewn into the er-the-er...the hemming of handkerchiefs, concluded Mr.Challis, with delicate contempt.
"I used "handkerchiefs" as a symbol," he said gently..."a symbol of the necessary, the commonplace, even the sordid."
From The Land of Green Ginger, a novel of 1927, by Winifred Holtby:
She wondered whether most women who sought the answer to insoluble problems stifled their hunger for reality in needlework, cooking and the making...of butter. "We take to darning as men take to drink," she told herself.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792: she had a radical vision of the need for women to be recognised as the equals of men, and realised that education (for both sexes) was the key to this. In order to achieve this, she proposed a universal, state-funded system of co-educational day schools. However, there would still be discrimination according to ability - and gender - and girls over the age of 9, "destined for domestic employment" would learn "plain-work,mantua-making, millinery,etc."
This work is discussed in Other People's Daughters - The Life and Times of the Governess (Ruth Brandon,2008), where she points out that:
This extract is taken from Westwood, a novel by Stella Gibbons set in 1944 and published in 1946. Gerard Challis, a pretentious and second-rate writer, is pontificating to the heroine about the sewing-room in which she is working.
"Women, with their half-formed desires timidly pressing forward into the unknown world outside these walls. Here they sit...sewing."
Impossible to convey in print the chill irony he put into the last word; any self-respecting needle would have melted before it...
"I want," he went on..."to convey in one sentence of dialogue that feeling of half-conscious imprisonment that was sewn into the er-the-er...the hemming of handkerchiefs, concluded Mr.Challis, with delicate contempt.
"I used "handkerchiefs" as a symbol," he said gently..."a symbol of the necessary, the commonplace, even the sordid."
From The Land of Green Ginger, a novel of 1927, by Winifred Holtby:
She wondered whether most women who sought the answer to insoluble problems stifled their hunger for reality in needlework, cooking and the making...of butter. "We take to darning as men take to drink," she told herself.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792: she had a radical vision of the need for women to be recognised as the equals of men, and realised that education (for both sexes) was the key to this. In order to achieve this, she proposed a universal, state-funded system of co-educational day schools. However, there would still be discrimination according to ability - and gender - and girls over the age of 9, "destined for domestic employment" would learn "plain-work,mantua-making, millinery,etc."
This work is discussed in Other People's Daughters - The Life and Times of the Governess (Ruth Brandon,2008), where she points out that:
- governessing was the only career option open to single, poor, middle-class women in the 19c
- it served a social purpose in perpetuating a half-educated female middle class.