A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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The same object could be used to connect Garthwaite to networks that were sharing botanical knowledge and to connect Shippen to the trade of silks and slaves, which was what generated the wealth that allowed her to buy the silk. Shippen’s desire for and consumption of worldly goods, and that of women like her, was one of the motors of the global economy of the eighteenth century. Indeed, one of the ways in which material culture studies and gender studies have made an important contribution is to show the power of women as consumers, especially in the early modern period where we see the formation of global trade.
However, women were not and are not the only consumers of goods, even though shopping is considered a female activity. If we look at premodern consumption, men too were keen connoisseurs of textiles and were also susceptible to changes in fashion. The history of the men’s gown in the eighteenth century illustrates this well. Long robe‐like garments were used in European dress for centuries; however, by studying the objects and other visual material, we see a distinct shift in the design of the gowns and the meanings ascribed to them in the eighteenth century. The gowns of the period are made after Asian designs, especially the Japanese kimono, and there is a noticeable increase in men choosing to have their portraits painted wearing such gowns (Figures 7.5 and 7.6) (Cunningham, 1984).
Figure 7.5 Gown made in the “Eastern” style with Chinese export silk, 1760–70. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Scholars have tried to understand the interest in this particular type of gown in eighteenth‐century Europe and have suggested that the gown helped men fashion new ideas of masculinity at the time (Fennetaux, 2004; Lemire, 2013). As seen with the silk dress worn by Anne Shippen, the gown could be a means of showing off one’s worldliness and access to goods from afar. Yet, considering that it was a piece of clothing that specifically was designed for men and popularized by them, it also served as a tool to signal other values that were important to elite men in the era. Since it was a piece of clothing, we are naturally inclined to think what impact it had on the body that it adorned. Ariane Fennetaux has argued that the looseness of the gown allowed men to feel free and unrestricted, unlike the clothes that they were expected to wear outside the home and for formal and professional occasions. According to her, discussions of the value of these garments aligned with the broader philosophical debate going on in the eighteenth century on nature versus structure. The fashion for such gowns allowed men to be in a relaxed state of dress and even be proud of their ability to do so.
Yet, at the same time, when these men chose to have themselves painted in their gowns they often fashioned themselves as scholars and artists. By presenting themselves as such, they put forth a new idea of the “modern man,” one who was industrious even in his time of repose, since he was shown to be in a study or a studio engaging in some intellectual activity. However, this new idea of manliness was not an uncomplicated one. The material of the gown, silk, suggested a luxuriousness that contradicted the sentiment of industriousness and could even have been seen to be effeminate by some. For Fenneteux these contradictions and tensions are precisely telling of the changing ideas about masculinity in the eighteenth century.
Figure 7.6 Francis Hayman, 1707/8–1776, British, Dr. Charles Chauncey, M.D., 1747. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
For Beverly Lemire the gown and the portraits represent another aspect of this modern masculinity of the eighteenth century, that of a man who was adventurous, seen both in the decision to adopt a foreign garment and in choosing to portray himself as a traveler or someone interested in travel and exploration through the accoutrements used in the paintings, of which the gown was one. For Lemire this idea was new for the eighteenth century. The fact that two scholars have made related but distinct points about notions of masculinity in eighteenth‐century Europe using the same objects and paintings is telling of the fact that men were testing the boundaries of what defined a “man” at the time. They used their ability to consume foreign objects as a way to mold new identities that reflected the changing mores of the societies they lived in.
Through the example of the silk garments in the eighteenth century we see that consumption was a gendered activity. Not only did men and women buy certain types of things based on their gender, but they used the things they bought, such as dresses and gowns, to create new ways of being feminine or masculine, thus giving shape to or creating new gender norms.
Gender, Material Culture, and Production
If the consumption of material goods is a gendered practice, then might production be gendered as well? We know that artisans could be male or female, but did their gender affect the way they made things? Historians of technology have been pioneers in showing that the production of objects and goods had an impact on gender and vice versa, that gender has had an impact on how things have been produced. An excellent example of this is the bicycle, a technology that we see both men and women using today, although this was not always the case. Initially, in the early nineteenth century, the bicycle was invented by men for men. While there was nothing about the physiques of men that made them more able to ride bicycles, the early designs of bicycles made them inaccessible to women because of the way they dressed and due to prevailing cultural norms. The frame of the bike was such that it was not possible to ride it with a long skirt and wearing trousers in order to ride bikes would have been frowned upon; thus the very design of the product was gendered, making the bicycle a male object (Oddy, 1996).
A “female” bike was produced by “accident”. The initial bike design was not very safe and a new design was introduced in the late nineteenth century which was rear‐driven, with wheels of similar sizes and inflated tires. All of these changes made the bicycle safer and this design was known as the “safety bicycle” (Figure 7.7). It was not intended for female consumers, but these material changes did, in fact, make the technology more accessible to women, who took it up enthusiastically. The bicycle changed women’s habits in a significant way. They were much more mobile than before and therefore also more independent. The invention led to a backlash from those who believed this mobility to be a danger to the gender norms of the time, and unsurprisingly the bicycle was a tool that the suffragists promoted as they fought for women’s rights (Marks, 2015; Macy, 2017). While it is easy to see how an object such as the bicycle, and especially the material changes in its designs, had an impact on gender norms and relations, the reverse is also true: gender played a role in the development of the bicycle as well. It was only after women started using bicycles that it become a widespread technology used by broad sections of society (Oldenzeil, 2001: 136). The history of the development of the telephone similarly depended on women’s use of the technology even though initially it was devised for the use of men.
Beyond the history of technology there are other intersections of the history of production and gender that are also revealed through the material culture studies approach, particularly of production in colonial contexts. A good example of this is the production of African lace‐bark in colonial Caribbean. The history of this good is not well known partly because the craft does not survive and nor does the tree from which the bark would have been harvested. However, surviving objects made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are telling of a sophisticated craft (Figure 7.8). Analysis of these objects as well as written sources reveal that they were an important part of the cultural lives of the enslaved African populations in the Caribbean.