Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1 doi:10.

1093/jdh/epk002

‘Home is Where the Art is’:

Women, Handicrafts and Home Improvements 1750–1900

Clive Edwards

The crafts produced and consumed by women during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries for the domestic interior are worth investigating to try to unravel why women
at various levels of society took up home crafts and what their motives were for doing so.
At one level, it may have been artistic self-expression; at another level a product of a

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commitment to household duty or financial necessity, or on a third level it may have been
for entertainment or pastime. These motivations seem to reflect the more recently labelled
DIY home improvements. The fact that particular crafts were associated with women was
based partly on the determinist philosophies of the eighteenth century. These were predicated
on distinctions that supposed that each gender had inherently different faculties. In the fields
of art and crafts, this led to the distinction between amateur women and professional men,
and more especially, the equating of specific crafts with women’s work and homemaking.
This gendering, which was preached both in school and in print, meant that by the mid-
eighteenth century, any visual sensibility women had developed was particularly directed
towards their homes. The broad aims of this paper are therefore to investigate the nature
of the work undertaken, the role it played in certain women’s lives, how it reflected social
attitudes of the period, and its relationship with the home during the period 1750–1900.
Finally, the article will reflect on how and in what different ways women’s domestic arts
and crafts could be considered as precursors to the DIY of today.
Keywords: crafts—Do-It-Yourself—domestic arts—leisure—home improvements—women

Introduction mediation, gender and identity will all be considered

Do It Yourself (DIY) is both a producing and a con-
suming culture. The ‘raw materials’ that are worked
upon by amateurs are transformed and manipulated
into an artefact which is then consumed by them and
their family.1 It is also more than this. DIY represents
the individual through self-expression and a sense of
self-worth; it may be a pastime or hobby; and it is
good ‘husbandry’ or ‘housewifery’ as it is usually
practical, thrifty and often self-sufficient. It is also
culturally expressive. Given these factors, investiga-
tions into versions of DIY will benefit from the
interdisciplinary approach that is taken here to con-
sider them. The issues of production, consumption,
as links contributing to the domestic creativity that is
an important part of the making and the meaning of
homes. Kevin Melchionne suggests that this ‘creativ-
ity resided not just in the construction of the meaning
of the commodity, but more importantly in the phys-
ical fashioning of the final product’.2 This domestic
work provides added meaning, thus enshrining the
personal ‘value added’ to projects and objects, and
making DIY a fascinating conjunction of production
and consumption. It seems clear that this process is by
no means new. On the face of it, DIY, (in the sense
that it relates to the improvement and decoration of
the home by the occupier), seems to have many sim-
ilarities with handcrafted artefacts made by women in

© The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved. 11
 Clive Edwards
and for the home throughout the period under
review. The work undertaken to improve the home
was unpaid, it occupied spare time, it sometimes used
kits of partly finished materials and was at times a
way of being thrifty. There was also often a sense of
satisfaction in being able to personalize and custom-
ize the home.3
As Melchionne points out, however, modern
DIY is handwork but not craft, is labour saving but
not a convenience, and is done in leisure time but is
often not a hobby. 4 Melchionne distinguishes
between handwork and craft where craft allows
diversity, uniqueness and individuality, as opposed
to regulated work using standardized parts.
Nevertheless, certain aspects of craftwork do have
regularity and a repetitive aspect to them, and hand-
work can clearly be diverse and unique, hence the
distinctions are not so clear-cut. Melchionne’s sug-
gestion that DIY ‘represents a theoretically impor-
tant hybrid of modern consumerism and traditional
handiwork’5 makes a tentative link with historical
crafts, which must include the products of women’s
domestic handicrafts.
This prehistory of DIY offers an opportunity to
investigate the reasons why people want to ‘do-it-
themselves’ and to see if there is some common
ground between the historic and the contemporary
attitudes. I will also argue that the early history of
modern DIY shows that ‘handwork’ and ‘craftwork’,
especially that undertaken by women in a domestic
situation, could be considered as creative or inter-
pretative consumption. Although it was inherently
labour intensive it may also have been undertaken
as a leisure pursuit of sorts. The same could be said
for modern DIY.
Women and handicrafts
Women’s activity in the home, in a non-commercial
capacity, has often been regarded as essentially selfless.
‘Keeping up appearances’ has, however, been a moti-
vation for much domestic work and it may be argued
that crafts, especially in the form of DIY, may bridge
the gap between altruism and self-respect.
The crafts produced and consumed by women
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for
the domestic interior are therefore worth investigat-
ing in an attempt to try to unravel why women at
various levels of society took up craftwork and what
12
their motives were for doing so. On one level, it may
have been artistic self-expression. The acquisition of
craft expertise also gave women a marketable skill.
Conversely, accomplishments helped class discrimin-
ation where particular craft knowledge could act as
an exclusionary device. On another level, it became a
product of a commitment to household duty, where
the role of women as ‘arrangers’ and often producers
of comfort helped to reflect their household’s social
status. This is not straightforward. The use of art and
craft skills was clearly a financial necessity in some
households, whereas in others this element was far
less important. On a third level the work may have
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been for entertainment or pastime. In addition, this
was also linked to the issue of encouraging women
to use their ‘spare’ time productively. There was also
a tendency for women to be regarded as capable only
of copying but not of using their own imagination.
This last concern reflects the nature of some DIY
projects where ready-made plans, advice books and
designs, as well as pre-prepared materials were the
mainstay of the process of assemblage.
Wherever one looks, there is a basic premise that
must be borne in mind; this was that the eighteenth
century saw the beginning of a decline in home-based
economic production and much work that was done
for the home had little commercial value. In addition,
the fact that particular crafts were associated with
women was in part based on the determinist philoso-
phies of the eighteenth century. These were predi-
cated on gendered distinctions, which supposed that
each gender had inherently different faculties. This
meant that for women, gendering as it affected craft
was based on the male-expressed precept that ‘Nature
appears to have formed the faculties of [the female] sex
for the most part with less vigour than those of ours’.6
For these men, women were endowed with the senses
and had the capacity for simple thought, but were
unable to exercise judgement. In the fields of ‘art and
crafts’, this led to the distinction between amateur
women and professional men, and more especially,
the equating of specific crafts to ‘women’s work’. This
gendering, which was preached both in school and in
print, meant that by the mid-eighteenth century, any
visual sensibility women had developed was particu-
larly directed towards their homes. It was no less than
their duty to beautify and ornament them.7
It has already been pointed out that there is more
than a suggestion that a particular notion of femininity
 ‘Home is Where the Art is’
and certain of the home-making crafts apparently
went together. This occurred at many levels of soci-
ety whether the craft was that of a working-class
woman employed as a seamstress or milliner, a deco-
rative painteress or polisher, or of a middle-upper
class ‘lady’.8 It is in the latter case that particular craft
media were seen as peculiarly appropriate for these
women, as the products functioned both as custom-
izing work and as decoration in a domestic (self-
expressive?) context. In addition, many of these crafts
represented the female virtues of diligence, patience
and perseverance especially where careful and
detailed work was required [1, 2]. Rozsika Parker
neatly sums this all up by saying that ‘when women
embroider, it is seen not as art, but entirely as the
expression of femininity’ and crucially it is catego-
rized as craft.9
This ideology of femininity connects to a histori-
cally constructed division of art and craft, which has its
roots in the Renaissance.10 The connection between
women and craft has a very long history, and women
have been associated particularly with the crafts of the
domestic sphere. These notions were reinforced by
male commentators. Whether it was Thomas Milles in
1613 saying, rather contradictorily: ‘Fear God and
learn woman’s housewifery/not simple samplers or
silken folly’,11 or John Ruskin in his Sesames and Lilies,
Fig 1. Pattern for orné wool work antimacassar, Ladies
Companion, 1857
13
(1865), maintaining that ‘the woman’s power is not
for rule, not for battle—and her intellect is not for
invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, man-
agement and decision’ [i.e. interpretative consump-
tion],12 the sentiments remained the same.
The gendered distinctions of craft production and
consumption in the period under review show that
generally the idea of the female as the natural home-
maker developed throughout. This had the effect of
confirming the dichotomy of art and craft in gender
terms so that even when women became increasingly
ingenious and imaginative in the choice of materials
and techniques with which to express themselves, it
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was still ‘only domestic craft’. Typical later nineteenth
century advice for young women went as follows:
‘girls who are clever with their fingers can do very
much towards making the home beautiful, not only
by needlework, painting and drawing, and the
various kinds of fancy work, but by the practice of
amateur upholstery’.13
As has been shown, the idea of creativity was anti-
thetical to the determinist’s idea of the soft female
character. Nevertheless, women were increasingly
able to express a high degree of inventiveness, espe-
cially in the crafts associated with interior decoration.
This was recognized in c.1856 when shell working
was recommended in a woman’s journal as being
both ‘an elegant drawing room occupation, as well as
one calculated to call forth the artistic taste and inven-
tive powers of the worker’.14 An examination of the
motives for undertaking these sorts of project will
begin to explore the driving forces behind these early
DIY projects.
Fig 2. Crazy patchwork pelmet, late nineteenth century.
Norfolk Museum and Archaeology Service
 Clive Edwards
Leisure
The nature of women’s upbringing had an important
bearing on the defining of their relationships with art
and craft and much else besides. Dr John Gregory
identified these interactions in 1774, when he
explained that female education was calculated to
draw out their ‘natural softness and sensibility’. He
went on to say that the role of education was to
develop character and roles, although there seems to
be more truth in his last sentence regarding sewing
accomplishments:
The intention of your being taught needle-work, knitting
and such like is not on account of the intrinsic value of all
you can do with your hands, which is trifling, but to enable
you to judge more perfectly of that kind of work, and
to direct the execution of it in others. Another principle
end is to enable you to fill up, in a tolerable agreeable way,
some of the many solitary hours that you must necessarily
pass at home.15
A later (male) author states the case more strongly
with three good reasons why a woman should acquire
skills. In 1795, John Bennett, in his Letters to a Young
Lady, recommended his audience to acquire knowl-
edge to ‘fill up your leisure hours, raise your taste
above fantastic levities, render you an agreeable friend
and acquaintance, [and] qualify you for the solid
duties of your station’.16
The role of companionship in craftwork is also
obliquely referred to by Lady Hertford (1741), when
she tells how ‘within doors we amuse ourselves (at
the times we are together) in gilding picture frames,
and other small things; this is so much in fashion with
us at present, that I believe if our patience and pock-
ets hold out, we shall gild all the cornices, table and
chairs and stool about the house’.17 These examples
demonstrate the issue of inclusion by class and gender
well, but the situation was sometimes more relaxed.
In 1856, Elegant Arts for Ladies in discussing the craft
of potichomanie (decorating pots with pasted images)
noted that when preparing the work, ‘gentlemen
always enliven the circle, they assist the fair manufac-
turer with their advice and aid … although we doubt
their ability in the niceties of cutting out… ’.18
In order to support the growing interest in a wide
range of crafts, tutors and teachers were employed in
the tuition of young ladies. In addition, many text-
books were published with instructions in a wide
range of crafts. Early examples include James Boles’
14
The Needle’s Excellency of 1631, which included illus-
trations for tracings to create embroidery. Robert
Sayers’ The Ladies Amusement or the Whole Art of
Japanning Made Easy, published in 1762, which had
designs ready prepared to cut out and be glued on a
surface; and in 1777, Hannah Robertson’s The Young
Ladies’ School of Arts Containing a Great Variety of
Practical Receipts, in Gum-Flowers, Filigree, Japanning,
Shell-Work, Gilding, … &c. By the nineteenth cen-
tury, the range was plentiful, and included books,
journals and magazines, all encouraging consumption
of domestic crafts.
The need for something to do also encouraged
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the need for something new to do. In 1748, Lady
Luxborough explained a new fad:
Miss Meredith writes that the present fashion is all lead
carving, which ladies do themselves, by cutting India or
other thin lead themselves with scissors, and shaping it into
flowers, knots etc. and fixing it to wire which is afterward
nailed on in the form designed; and the carving is either gilt
or painted the colour of the stucco or wainscot, according
as suits the place.19
In the domestic sphere, where the craft of embroi-
dery was employed for embellishing the furnishings
and apparel of the upper classes, it is evident that the
motives of craftwork were often explicit. In 1770,
The Lady’s Magazine made clear its raison d’être:
The subjects that we may treat of are those that may tend to
render your minds less amiable than your person. But as
external appearance is the first inlet to the treasures of the
heart, and the advantages of dress though they cannot com-
municate beauty, may at least make it more conspicuous, it
is intended to present the sex with most elegant patterns for
the tambour, embroidery or every kind of needlework.20
In an attempt to justify the craft of needlework,
especially as a gender comparison, Carmen Silva said,
‘I have often pitied men—in the first place because
they can’t know motherhood, in the second, because
they are bereft of our greatest comfort - needlework.
Our needlework is so much better than smoking, it is
so unobtrusive’.21 The last phrase of this quotation is
resonant of the physically small space many women’s
domestic crafts took up.
It could be argued that during the eighteenth cen-
tury some ‘crafts’ were used as an alternative art prac-
tice for women denied access to the traditional
pathways, but as has already been shown, these were
more often encouraged as ‘something to do’ with
 ‘Home is Where the Art is’
one’s leisure time. By the nineteenth century, middle-
class women were even more involved in the con-
sumption of goods for the home and the maintenance
and arrangement of their interiors. If anything, there
were increasing pressures on women to apply their
artistic endeavours to decorate and enhance the home
for the family. Even though the range of crafts under-
taken by women widened, with variations on existing
themes such as Berlin woolwork and the addition of
specific Victorian crafts such as featherwork and fern-
work, the reasons for their adoption remained the
same [3, 4]. The Habits of Good Society, 1859, explained
that ‘all accomplishments have the one great merit of
giving a lady something to do: something to preserve
her from ennui: to console her seclusion: to arouse her
in grief: to compose her to occupation in joy’.22 Dis-
cussing the production of screens using scraps of paper,
Cassell’s Household Guide suggested that it was useful as
‘an employment that fills up a good deal of spare time,
and may be done at small expense, beyond that for the
mere frame of the screen with a simple covering of
black paper’.23
The development of home crafts could indicate
the application of female talents and industry or
Fig 3. Berlin woolwork counted canvas pattern, Caulfeild and
Saward Dictionary of Needlework, 1887
15
alternatively it could represent the borders of angst
and misery. Logan proposes that ‘the sheer number of
useless decorative objects produced by women might
be better viewed as a manifestation of anxiety, bore-
dom and depression rather than a satisfying and
healthy engagement with art’.24 To convey the idea
that products made at home are ‘useless’ misses the
point. Not only were the objects useful as decoration,
but they also carried meanings for the makers who
often became the users.25
Self-expression
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Although the range of craft (or DIY) techniques was
varied, such techniques often had common ground in
their need for manipulative skills, and the use of materi-
als that were clean, ready to use, easy to prepare and
commercially available. For example, scrollwork or
quilling, which employed paper and small decorative
beads, seeds, etc. was apparently ideal. It was clean and
could be completed by beginners or experienced
Fig 4. Macramé lace mantelpiece trimming, Caulfeild and
Saward, Dictionary of Needlework, 1887
 Clive Edwards
workers alike. As with many other crafts, it had its own
patterns and specialist suppliers. In 1786 The New Lady’s
Magazine, supplied ‘a profusion of neat elegant patterns
and models of ingenuity and delicacy, suitable for tea-
caddies, toilets, chimney-pieces, screens, cabinets,
frames, picture ornaments etc.’ It was added that ‘the art
[of filigree] affords an amusement to the female mind
capable of the most pleasing and extensive variety; it
may be readily acquired and pursued at a very trifling
expense’.26 Not only was it amusing, it also offered the
possibility of decorating and personalizing domestic
objects.
Pen work was a similar case, being something that
women were also encouraged to take up. Pen work
was essentially fine painting and japanning, usually
black and white, on small domestic items. In 1822,
Ackermann’s Repository featured a shop called ‘The
Temple of Fancy’, which held ‘an extensive collec-
tion of handsome screens, both plain and orna-
mented, screen-poles, elegant stands for table-tops
and chess boards, card-racks, flower ornaments, and
white-wood boxes, in a variety of shapes, for paint-
ing the inlaid ebony and ivory, with every requisite
useful for painting and ornamenting the same’.27
A little later, in 1827, Nathaniel Whittock’s The
Painters’ and Glaziers’ Guide included instructions
to workmen for preparing pieces in readiness for
ladies to decorate:
As the work in imitation of inlaid ebony and ivory is now
so fashionable, and the process is in every respect similar to
any other kind of japanning, it is mentioned in this place, as
great inconvenience is felt by many painters from their not
having the knowledge of the proper method of preparing
the ground for ladies to paint upon, or of varnishing and
polishing it after the painting is finished.28
This example demonstrates the limitations of those
home crafts (DIY) where a professional has to prepare
the groundwork.
For many consumers, the demands of skilled craft-
work, as well as limitations of time and money, meant
that the adopting of pre-prepared ideas and materials
to create individualized products was very satisfac-
tory. One such idea was published in a work entitled
The Elegant Arts for Ladies (c. 1856) which suggested
that ready-made stencilled designs on velvet would
‘look very handsome [on] a music stool, the front of
pianos, ottomans, banner screens, pole-screens and
borders for table cloths’.29
16
The importance of these ideas and practice in rela-
tion to the concepts of DIY may be seen by consider-
ing Daniel Miller’s ideas about the re-working of
purchased goods: ‘[The re-working] may be defined
as that which translates the object from an alienable to
an inalienable condition: that is, from being a symbol
of estrangement and price value to being an artefact
invested with particular inseparable connotations’.30
The second motive that Miller identifies: creating
objects with individual meanings, is particularly
related to homemaking itself. Penny Sparke has em-
phasized the role women played in this re-creation,
which was also recreation.
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The distinction between production and consumption in
the Victorian interior was eroded as objects acquired in the
marketplace, such as pianos and chairs, were transformed in
the domestic setting by their aesthetic integration with
pieces of needlework and other objects, natural and other-
wise, both made and acquired by the housewife, and with
‘artistic’ arrangements also created by her.31
This process has continued into the twenty-first
century. Home produced crafts and DIY projects
remain important markers of self:
Where the maker of the object is also its consumer, the
display of the object becomes highly significant in demon-
strating the identity of the maker and the ideology of the
household … then display of home crafts as the expression
of symbolic creativity can be seen as demonstrative of the
makers’ personal identity and relationships with others [and]
their class, gender, race … and also their achievements, the
ways in which the sewing demonstrated learning, time
spent, and aesthetic sensibility or ‘taste’.32
Mediation
Although self-expression was one aspect of DIY prac-
tice, in most cases, these techniques had been medi-
ated by other agents. In some cases, daughters might
have been taught the skills by artists, in other cases,
prepared schemes that only required ‘assembly’ of
some sort or another were increasingly available from
the eighteenth century. It was the role of advice
books and other literature, however, that became
increasingly important, especially in the nineteenth
century. As Grace Lees-Maffei points out in a discus-
sion on domestic design: ‘Advice is situated firmly
within the category of mediation, operating as it does
between the realms of production and consumption’.33
 ‘Home is Where the Art is’
Examples of mediation have been noted above, often
in relation to specific home crafts, but it was often the
case that advice was offered under the broader
umbrella of homemaking in general. Mrs Orrinsmith
in her 1877 work entitled The Drawing Room was
clearly ambivalent about advice for homemaking. On
the one hand, she decried decorators and retailers for
giving advice, but on the other wrote her own trea-
tise on what was and was not tasteful. She explained
in her introduction: ‘Should we continue to be con-
tented to be told, not caring to learn to feel, that cer-
tain harmonies of form and colour are admirable and
desirable? In the hope to assist to a more self-helpful
Art-knowledge, the following chapters have been
written’.34 In the chapter on draperies, in their Sugges-
tions for House Decoration, the Garrett sisters emphasized
that the ‘refinement and beauty of a house will, in the
main, depend upon the trouble which she [the house-
wife] is willing to bestow upon small and comparatively
insignificant details’.35 It was these details that they
went to great length to explain. Advice books often
went further than the house furnishings. Mrs Haweis,
for example, included chapters on ‘Anti-Smuts’, ‘Drain
Ventilation’ and ‘Pumps and Pipes’, demonstrating a
need to be conversant with, if not actually involved
in, the installation of home technologies.
Household creation
Although men were promoting the conflation of
women and the handicrafts,36 women themselves also
supported the value of teaching the arts and crafts, in
part as tools to help decorate the home. In 1798 Maria
Edgeworth wrote in her Essays of Practical Education,
that ‘every sedentary occupation must be valuable to
those who are to lead sedentary lives, and every art,
however trifling in itself, which tends to enliven and
embellish domestic life, must be advantageous, not
only to the female sex but society in general’.37 Nearly
one hundred years later, the comments of Frances
Power Cobbe, writing in 1881, expressed her notion
of the powerful role of home making for women
far more forcefully:
The making of a true home is really our peculiar and in-
alienable right;– a right, which no man can take from us;
for a man can no more make a home than a drone can make
a hive… . It is a woman, and only a woman,—and a woman
all by herself, if she likes, and without any man to help
her,—who can turn a house into a home.38
17
Although many women undertook various crafts
as paid labour, others were able to develop skills in
crafts that were associated with ‘work’ but not with
employment. This is an important distinction in DIY
as well. The fact that particular women enjoyed
‘leisure time’ reflected their position in society, so the
undertaking of certain craft skills in a private way
was used to control the status quo of class position
and exert control over entry to particular levels of
society. These accomplishments also gave social
approval and self-respect. In many cases they assisted
women in the marriage market where there was a
need to be regarded as a ‘proper’ complement to the
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male. Mothers passed these ideas to daughters via a
very particular education to create a continuum that
lasted well into the twentieth century.
The apparent expression of ‘proper’ female domes-
ticity, selflessness and love was developed through
education in home crafts. This creativity was extended
to the fashioning of the domestic interior, well beyond
the fancy work and accessories made by the women.39
A correspondent in The Spectator noted that his wife,
although well educated, skilled and well bred: ‘keeps
four French protestants continually employed in
making divers [sic] pieces of superfluous furniture,
as quilts, toilets, hangings for doors, beds, window
curtains, easy chair and tabourets all of which she
obstinately persists on thinking … a notable piece
of good housewifery because they are made at home
and she has some share in the performance’.40
In the eighteenth century, many creative domes-
tic handicrafts were the prerogative of the upper-
class women who were not employed and whose
role was to organize the running of the family home.
This was based on a leisured class who were distin-
guished from others by their lack of need to ‘work’
in the traditional sense, but who required something
to do to fill their leisure hours. These women were
able to justify this role by using their time creatively
in domestic pursuits or crafts, although interestingly
the work was often referred to as art rather than
craft. The distinction could often be blurred. Mrs
Lybbe Powis collected china, fossils, shells and
coins. She also painted on silk and paper, and made
embroidery, feather work, plaited straw, pillow
lace, paper mosaic, and dried flowers. The well-
known Mrs Delaney, famous for collaged flowers,
also painted chimney boards, made shellwork gar-
lands, etc. etc..
 Clive Edwards
Whereas craft work generally, and modern DIY
particularly, is often a solitary occupation, the work
undertaken by certain groups of women was part of a
wider range of opportunities for social intercourse,
enabling women to exchange ideas as part of a ritual.
The example of ‘quilting bees’ reflects this, but there
are many others.41 The idea of communal bonding to
develop and retain the social codes already mentioned
was clearly part of the process. In this way, they had a
degree of control over their immediate environment.
Rooms, such as boudoirs, drawing rooms and infor-
mal workspaces were made to suit the needs of the
occupants and their interests. Indeed, the print room
may well have been such a space where some women
could exploit the crafts of collage and découpage,
along with framing and the connoisseurship of art
works. It is useful to see that Mrs Delaney, at least,
considered her craft as a somewhat private affair on
occasion. Writing to her sister, she said:
I am going to make a very comfortable closet: … to have a
dresser, and all manner of working tools, to keep all my
stores for painting, carving, gilding, &c: for my own room
is now so clean and pretty that I cannot suffer it to be
strewed with litter, only books and work [needlework], and
the closet belonging to it to be given up to prints, drawings,
and my collection of fossils, petrifications, and minerals.42
It seems clear that one of the main uses of the
products of craftwork in the eighteenth century was
to decorate and adorn the person and the home: in
other words, to be consumed. Despite the idea of
self-expression that might be aspired to, this was
often in practice limited. In 1768, Lady Louisa
Connolly explained in a letter how she was, ‘busy
with a new work, [which] is painting flowers with
the stamps I got from Paris on a white satten with
which I intend to hang a little closet’.43 Even if
women were encouraged to express themselves, it
was often limited to superficial matters. In 1795,
John Bennett explained:
Whilst men with solid judgement and superior vigour are
to combine ideas, to discriminate and examine a subject to
the bottom, you are to give it all its brilliancy and all its
charm. They provide the furniture, you dispose it with
propriety. They build the house; you are to fancy and to
ornament the ceiling.44
Despite these seemingly negative aspects, embroidery
was one craft in which women could excel. The
examples of samplers, stumpwork, beadwork, crewel,
18
quilting and patchwork, to name a few, can all bear
witness to the quantity and quality of women’s crafts.
They also indicate that these were nearly all con-
sumed in the home as either dress or practical
decoration. Examples are myriad. Two will suffice to
demonstrate the practical nature of much of the work.
Celia Fiennes in 1712, recorded that in the Queen’s
Closet at Hampton Court ‘the hangings, chaires,
stooles, and screen the same, all of satten stitch done
in worsteads, beast, birds, images, and fruites [were]
all wrought very finely by Queen Mary and her maids
of honour’.45 In Bath ‘the Matrons of the City, their
daughters and their maids [were] flowering the [coarse
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fustian] with Worsted, during the intervals between
the Seasons to give the Beds a gaudy Look’.46 Like
modern DIY skills, domestic crafts were frequently
required for repairs, renewals and additions. The tes-
timony of Catherine Hutton, who was born in 1756,
demonstrates not only the volume of work but also
the commitment required over a lifetime. Her
account of her needlework labours noted that:
[she has] made furniture for beds, with window curtains,
and chair and sofa covers; these included a complete draw-
ing set. I have quilted counterpanes and chest covers in fine
white linen, in various patterns of my own invention. I
have made patchwork beyond calculation from seven years
old to eighty- five [years old]… . I have worked on embroi-
dery on muslin, satin, and canvas and netted upwards of
one hundred wallet purses, in combine colours, and in
patterns of my own invention.47
By the end of the nineteenth century women were
still defined by their ability to create crafts for the
home. In 1893, Helen Mather was portrayed as ‘a
great needlewoman, not only are the long satin cur-
tains by her own hand, but the pillow, cushions and
dainty lampshade’.48
Interestingly, the conflation of self-expression and
homemaking grew in the twentieth century, although
it was still closely tied to the home. Mary Barkdull
commented in Good Housekeeping (US) in September
1910 that ‘curtains, table covers and portières when
worked out by … [the housewife] for her own par-
ticular rooms, radiate an individuality absolutely
impossible to counterfeit with factory productions.49
Emily Post, in 1930, wrote of decorating the house:
‘Its personality should express your personality, just as
every gesture you make—or fail to make—expresses
your gay animation or your restraint, your old-
fashioned conventions, your perplexing mystery, or
 ‘Home is Where the Art is’
your emancipated modernism—whichever charac-
teristics are typically yours’.50
The role of homemaker meant that women became
more involved not only in the management of the
home but also in the practicalities of domestic crafts
that were often intended for utilization within the
home.
A different issue was the matter of adapting and
recycling. Swift, in his Directions to the Waiting Maid,
said: ‘Two accidents happened to lessen the comforts
and profit of your employment; first the execrable
custom got among ladies of trucking their old clothes
for china, or turning them to cover easy chairs, or
making them into patchwork for screens, stools,
cushions and the like’.51
On the contrary, and in rather different circum-
stances, the American authors, Beecher and Stowe
suggested: ‘if you have in the house any broken down
arm chair, … draw it out—drive a nail here and there
to hold it firm—stuff and pad, and stitch the padding
through with a long upholsterer’s needle, and cover
it with chints like your other furniture. Presto—
you create an easy chair’.52
This application of handwork to home furnishings
could also refer to practical matters as well as saving
money and being careful with budgets. For example,
Catherine Beecher wrote in 1869 in her American
Woman’s Home that prudence with fabric would allow
the covering of ottoman frames which ‘your men folk
knock up for you, out of rough, unplanned boards,
and to cover any broken down armchairs reposing
in the oblivion of the garret’.53 This reflects much
more of a democratic approach to homemaking
than, for example, the comments that recommended
shell working as ‘an elegant drawing room occupation,
as well as one calculated to call forth the artistic taste
and inventive powers of the worker’.54
In 1878, the American author, Hudson Holly, pub-
lished his work Modern Dwellings in Town and Country.
The chapter on Home Art is revealing of early forms
of DIY. He discussed how, for people (male and
female) who could not afford beautiful surroundings,
owing to a lack of income, the ‘desire for artistic
surroundings will lead them to master the arts for
themselves and produce with their own hands objects
that rival in attraction any for which the rich man
ignorantly and carelessly exchanges his money’.55 He
went on to observe how ‘a gentleman’ made his own
furniture as ‘a work of recreation’ and then talked
19
about the work his wife undertook. This ‘woman’s
work’ involved the decoration of the walls by using
painting effects, the production of imitation stained
glass using ready-made kits and, inevitably, the run-
ning up of curtains.56 The latter were particularly
commended by Holly with a note that pointed out
that: ‘As metal brackets for the support of the curtain
rods were also impractical on account of the expense,
a wooden scroll was designed, which she herself cut
out with a bracket-saw’.57
Conclusion
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This article began by suggesting that there were con-
tinuities between modern DIY and the crafts pursued
by women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Eighteenth century creative work was about
self-expression. Modern DIY appears to reflect aspects
of self-expression together with the turning of alien-
ated products into artefacts with personal associations;
of leisure pursuits and the desire to be creative, and
the need for economy. This prehistory has also pro-
vided an opportunity to investigate the reasons why
people want to ‘do-it-themselves’ and there is some
common ground between past and contemporary
attitudes.58
The change in the roles and status of, and attitudes
towards, women from the early to the mid-twentieth
century has allowed many of the gendered points dis-
cussed above to be consigned to the dustbin of his-
tory, however, there are many who still distinguish
between soft (decorative) DIY and hard (structural)
DIY with its gendered stereotypes. In addition, there
still exist elements of personal ‘handicraft’ that linger
alongside the home improvement or DIY projects
undertaken by people. Indeed, in an early DIY text
from the 1950s this ideal of crafts being part of DIY
was expressly stated: ‘Do-It-Yourself is an expression
of the ingenuity, enterprise and self reliance of
the individual, and in an age of automation it is good
that fundamental arts and crafts are not being lost’.59
These aspects of DIY, ingenuity, enterprise and
self-reliance, were originally established back in the
eighteenth century by female homemakers using
their own craft and design skills. From then onward,
women’s domestic arts and crafts reflected a process
of design democratization through self-expression,
which, although gendered, was altruistic in its
development, and in its continued use of ‘crafts’
 Clive Edwards
acted as a foil to ‘the age of automation’ through its
expression in DIY.
Clive Edwards
Loughborough University
Notes
1 B. Burman makes a similar point regarding home dressmaking.
B. Burman, (ed.) The Culture of Sewing, Berg, 1999, p. 3.
2 K. Melchionne, ‘Of Bookworms and Busy Bees: Cultural
Theory in the Age of Do-it-Yourselfing,’ Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, 57:2, Spring, 1999, p. 249.
3 See J. Turney, ‘Making and Living with Home Craft in
Contemporary Britain’, Journal of Design History, 2004, 17 (3),
p. 267–81 for a contemporary analysis of cross-stitch kits. See
also B. Burman, op. cit. for a range of essays dealing with the
same issues but applied to home dressmaking, particularly
sewing patterns.
4 Melchionne, op. cit., p. 249.
5 Ibid, p. 248.
6 J. Fordyce. Sermons to Young Women, 1778, 1, pp. 271–72.
7 B. Disraeli declared that ‘Woman alone can organize a drawing
room; man succeeds sometimes in a library.’ B. Disraeli,
Coningsby, 1844, Book III, Ch.2, cited in P. Tristram, Living
Space in Fact and Fiction, Routledge, 1989, p. 59.
8 One of the main issues was that of choice. Learning craft skills
might be imposed on girls by elite families, or it might be an
insurance against the vicissitudes of life for others.
9 R. Parker, The Subversive Stitch, Women’s Press, 1984, p. 5.
10 R. H. Bloch, ‘Untangling the Roots of Modern Sex Roles: A
Survey of Four Centuries of Change,’ Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society, 4:2, Winter, 1978, pp. 237–52.
11 R. Parker, op. cit., p. 90.
12 Cited in A. Forty, Objects of Desire, Thames and Hudson, 1986,
p. 105.
13 Young Ladies Treasure Book, Ward Lock, 1881–2, p. 161.
14 Elegant Arts for Ladies, Ward Lock, London, 1856, p. 16.
15 Dr Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, Dublin,
1774, p. 30.
16 E. Messer-Davidow, ‘For Softness She: Gender Ideology and
Aesthetics in Eighteenth Century England’, in F. Keener and
S. Lorch (eds.), Eighteenth Century Women and the Arts,
Greenwood Press, New York, 1989, p. 47, p. 50.
17 J. Fowler and J. Cornforth, English Decoration in the Eighteenth
Century, Barrie and Jenkins, 1974, p. 219.
18 Elegant Arts for Ladies, p. 150. In the later twentieth century,
companionship was often between man and women in the
DIY work associated with their own home. Many advert-
isements show ‘husband and wife’ teams working on a project
together, e.g. see illustrations in C. Goldstein, Do-It Yourself
Home Improvement in 20th-century America, Princeton Architec-
tural Press, 1998.
19 Fowler and Cornforth, 1974, op. cit., p. 252.
20 A. Adburgham, Women in Print, Allen and Unwin, 1972,
p. 128–9.
20
21 Cited in Parker, op. cit. p. 151.
22 Cited in P. Nunn, Victorian Women Artists, Women’s Press,
1987, p. 8.
23 Cited in P. Hodges, Period Pastimes, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1989, p. 81.
24 T. Logan, ‘Decorating Domestic Space, Middle-class Women
and Victorian Interiors’, in V. Dickerson (ed.), Keeping the
Victorian House, Garland Press, 1995, p. 213.
25 The literature on objects in the home and their meanings is
large. See for example, M. Csikzentmihali and E. Rochberg-
Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self,
Cambridge University Press, 1981; H. Dittmar, The Social
Psychology of Material Possessions: To Have is to Be, Harvester,
1992; J. Friedman, Consumption and Identity, Harwood, 1994;
K. Halttunen, ‘From Parlour to Living Room; Domestic
Space, Interior Decoration and the Cult of Personality’, in S. J.
Downloaded from http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/ at New York University on June 1, 2015
Brunna, Consuming Visions, Norton, 1989; M. J. Lee, Consumer
Culture Reborn: The Cultural Politics of Consumption, Routledge,
1992; R. Madigan, and M. Munro, ‘House beautiful: Style
and Consumption in the Home’ Sociology 30: 1: 1996.
26 R. Edwards, The Shorter Dictionary of English Furniture from the
Middle Ages to the Late Georgian Period, Country Life, 1964, p. 318.
27 R. Ackermann, The Repository of Arts, January 1822.
28 N. Whittock, The Painters’ and Glaziers’ Guide, 1827, p. 98.
29 Elegant Arts for Ladies, 1856, p. 19.
30 D. Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, 1987, p. 190.
See also Lisa Cohen, ‘Embellishing a life of labour: An inter-
pretation of the material culture of American working-class
homes, 1885–1915’, in T. J. Schlereth, Material Culture Studies,
Nashville, 1984, pp. 289–305.
31 P. Sparke, As long as it is Pink. The sexual politics of taste, Pandora,
1995, p. 41.
32 J. Turney, ‘Making and Living with Home Craft in Con-
temporary Britain’, Journal of Design History, 17 (3), 2004, p. 276.
33 G. Lees-Maffei, Introduction to ‘Special Issue: Domestic
Design Advice’, Journal of Design History, 16 (1), 2003, p. 3.
34 Mrs Orrinsmith, The Drawing Room, Macmillan, London,
1877, p. 9.
35 R. and A. Garrett, Suggestions for House Decoration, Macmillan,
London, 1877, p. 84.
36 See notes 6 and 15 above.
37 Parker 1984, op. cit., p. 142.
38 F. Power Cobbe, The Duties of a Woman, 1881, p. 139. For a male
interpretation of the same issue see ‘Woman’s Aesthetic Mission’
in J. von Falke, Art in the House, US edition, 1879, Chapter X.
39 See for example C. Saumarez-Smith, ‘Women and Decoration’
in Eighteenth Century Decoration, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1993, pp. 162–169.
40 Cited in J. Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste, Yale, p. 183.
41 Sewing circles, knotting groups, etc.
42 D. Hayden, Mrs Delaney, her Life and Flowers, British Museum
Press, 1980, p. 95.
43 Fowler and Cornforth, op. cit., p. 252.
44 E. Messer-Davidow, ‘For Softness She: Gender Ideology and
Aesthetics in Eighteenth Century England’, in F. Keener and
S. Lorch (eds.), Eighteenth Century women and the Arts,
Greenwood Press, New York, 1989, p. 50.
 ‘Home is Where the Art is’
45 C. Fiennes, The Illustrated Journeys, Webb and Bower, 1982,
p. 241.
46 J. Wood, A Description of Bath, 1742, Vol. 2, pp. 3–4.
47 C. H. Beale (ed.), Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last
Century: Letters of Catherine Hutton, Cornish Bros. Birmingham,
1891. My thanks to Penny Alfrey for this reference.
48 Nunn, 1987, op. cit., p. 7.
49 M. Barkdull, ‘Curtains, Portières and Cushions’, Good
Housekeeping, 51, September 1910, pp. 324–7, Cited in Gordon
and McArthur, ‘Popular Culture, Magazines and American
Domestic Interiors, 1898–1940’, Journal of Popular Culture,
1959, 22:4, p. 45.
50 E. Post, The Personality of a House, New York, 1930, p. 3.
51 J. Gloag (1990), Dictionary of Furniture, Unwin Hyman, rev.
ed. p. 496. ‘Trucking’ refers to the bartering or exchanging of
goods.
52 C. Beecher and H. B. Stowe (1870) The American Woman’s
Home, H.P. Brown, p. 89.
21
53 Ibid, p. 87.
54 Elegant Arts for Ladies, Ward Lock, 1856, p. 16.
55 H. H. Holly, Modern Dwellings in Town or Country Adapted to
American Wants and Climate, Harper & Bros, New York, 1878,
p. 210.
56 The impact of the domestic sewing machine made this process
easier. See for example essays by Putnam, Helvenston and
Bubolz, in Burman op. cit. (1999).
57 Holly, op. cit., p. 213. The advice literature published from
c. 1850 is myriad, and many examples have instructions for
DIY projects.
58 For contemporary attitudes see J. Turney, “Here’s One I
Made Earlier”: Making and Living with Home Crafts in
Contemporary Britain’, Journal of Design History, 17 (3), 2004,
pp. 367–81.
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59 F. J. Camm, Practical Householder, October 1956: Cited in
S. Oram, ‘Do-It-Yourself,’ Dictionary of Interior Design, 1997,
p. 381.