A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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a group of celibate men and that women were not present. This was based on a particular reading of textual sources, and these readings of the texts were then corroborated with the architecture that was excavated, which also appeared to lack any domestic space. However, comparing the site with other architecture of the period and closer analysis of the material objects that were found has challenged the presumption that there were no women in Qumran. Indeed it is believed that it was most probably a manor and not just a space for men to come to pray (Galor, 2014). This case highlights the primacy that was given to textual sources for historical research, even in the presence of material objects that might indicate something different from the texts. This bias towards textual sources led to the literal erasure of women from the scene. Had it not been for clues from surviving objects, the question of whether women could have been present in the space might not have ever risen.
Besides pointing to the very existence of women, the material culture approach can offer particularly fruitful ways of writing women back into history. Studying the things that women made, bought, used, and desired has been one way of accessing women’s experiences. Take for example a cupboard made in eighteenth‐century United States that has been studied by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Ulrich, 1997, 2009). We know this cupboard belonged to a woman as it has her name emblazoned on it (Figure 7.2). Through textual sources we have some details about her family but not much about her as an individual. The cupboard does not bring us any closer to understanding her individual experience but it does enlighten us on what kinds of things women of a certain social status owned and how they made space for themselves in a patriarchal society.
Figure 7.2 Court cupboard owned by Hannah Barnard, 1710–20, Hadley, Massachusetts. The Henry Ford Museum.
From the Collections of The Henry Ford.
When the cupboard is compared to similar pieces of Hadley furniture, it turns out that such items often belonged to women and were marked with their initials or with those of married couples. Hannah Barnard’s cupboard is following convention to a certain degree, although the bold placement of the entire name is still unique. It is tempting to read the cupboard as a protofeminist object, as has been done, but it is not clear who had the idea to put her name on the cupboard in that manner. It could have been that Barnard’s husband had it made as a wedding present. It’s also possible that Barnard herself painted her name, which if true would also mean that she had knowledge and experience of the craft of joinery (Ulrich, 2009: 120–1).
The object does appear in some written documentation which allows for further interpretation on the role the cupboard played in Barnard’s family. It seems she herself did not live long enough to give the cupboard proper use, and upon her husband’s death it was bequeathed to her daughter, Abigail Marsh. Once Marsh was married and had children of her own, she named one of her daughters Hannah and even gave her Barnard as a middle name (an unusual move for the time). Unsurprisingly, the cupboard went to this daughter and so on for a couple more generations (Ulrich, 2009: 130–1). In her study of this cupboard and other similar items, Ulrich argues that these objects are material evidence of women maintaining and remembering familial bonds, especially the link between mothers and daughters (Ulrich, 2009: 132–5). This is a profound revelation, because matrilineal links do not survive in written records as women in New England would adopt their husband’s last names after marriage, thus legally severing ties with their natal families. Probate inventories list what items went to whom but the women are not necessarily named, and the inventories cannot help us imagine how a woman might create a bond between her mother and daughter the way the surviving objects do.
Objects such as these cupboards can also help us see the literal space they would have occupied in someone’s home. We can imagine that when one opened the drawers of the cupboard one would find linens, some with embroidered initials that would have been yet another link to the family that the woman left. While the linens do not survive, the cupboard reminds us that such textiles would have also been an important part of a woman’s belongings. The example of Hannah Barnard’s cupboard is particularly tantalizing as the design with the name so boldly expressed on it made it difficult to pass the cupboard on to someone outside the family and perhaps reinforced the need to preserve the name “Hannah.” The object then is evidence of the kinds of things women could possess and quite literally make their own, but simultaneously it is also evidence of how material objects could shape the lives of the women and men who owned them, as seen by the example of Abigail Marsh choosing to give her daughter the middle name Barnard. Through her study of the cupboard, Ulrich is able to write women into the history of New England in a way that had not been done before, and she is able to show that in a patriarchal society they found ways to create and maintain identities for themselves through their material belongings.
In a different historical context, Dorothy Ko has used material objects to write women into a history that is about women but where women’s own voices were not heard. In her study of the practice of footbinding in China, Ko analyzed a great many textual sources to understand the origins and the development of the practice (Ko, 2001, 2007). Through these sources she tells the history of the practice as it developed from a court dance to a more widespread practice that symbolized the wealth and status of women. She recuperates the history of the custom of footbinding so that we know that there was a specific time and place where the practice took hold, and a particular group of women among whom it began. Yet, as Ko admits herself, these written sources were mostly penned by men and gleaning the experience of the women through them is very difficult.
Ko’s textual analysis showed how central the female body was to men’s sexual desire, to ideas of wealth and status and later to ideas of liberation. She found, on the other hand, that studying the shoes that women with bound feet wore, often referred to as lotus shoes (Figure 7.3), was much more useful than written texts for understanding the women’s experience. Her study of the material objects was able to get closer to how those female bodies themselves lived through these changes. Her methodology consisted of dissecting the shoes, studying their construction, their decoration and the variations in styles at different times and across regions. Such an analysis served several purposes. First, it served to show the practice as historically contingent and locally specific. The tiny shoes and photographs of bound feet have been potent visual symbols that are readily summoned as examples of women’s oppression. At the same time these images also reinforce the idea of footbinding being a timeless practice from a “backward” place. Ko’s methodology helps us move beyond these terms and actually think about the women who were subjected to the practice. By studying how lotus shoes changed over time and who made them, Ko shows that Chinese women played a role in defining ideas of femininity as they often made the shoes themselves and thus had a say in their designs. In a manner similar to Ulrich, Ko is able to use material objects to show how women created a space for themselves in a time and place where we might otherwise imagine them not to have much of a voice.
Figure 7.3 Pair of bridal lotus shoes, Zhejiang and Jiangsu style, early twentieth century.
Image courtesy of the Textile Research Centre Leiden. TRC 2013.0059a‐b.
Another significant contribution of Ko’s material analysis of the lotus shoes is to have made the body more present as a site of inquiry. While we can imagine footbinding to be excruciating, contending with the shoes themselves made Ko question how exactly feet had to be transformed to fit into the particular shape of the shoes and how women might have moved in them. Her work on classifying the different styles of shoes was particularly important in this regard because it showed that the physical transformation of the foot was not done in a standard way across all regions and time periods. This emphasis on thinking about the