Disruptive Threads and Renegade Yarns: Domestic Textile Making in Selected Women's Writing 1811-1925

Images of domestic textiles (items made at home for consumption within the household) and textile making form an important subtext to women’s writing, both during and after industrialization. Through a close reading of five novels from the period 1811-1925, this thesis will assert that a detailed understanding of textile work and its place in women’s daily lives is critical to a deeper understanding of social, sexual and political issues from a woman’s perspective. The first chapter will explore the history of the relationship between women and domestic textile making, and the changes wrought to the latter by the Industrial Revolution. The second chapter will examine the role of embroidery in the construction of “appropriate” feminine gentility in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). The third chapter, on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), will explore how the older female body became a repository for anxieties about class mobility and female power at the beginning of the Victorian era. The fourth chapter will compare Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure (1890) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) to consider how later Victorian women both internalized and refuted public narratives of domestic textile making in a quest for “self-ownership.” The last chapter, on Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925), examines the corrosive, yet ultimately redemptive, relationships of a family of women trapped by abuse and degradation. For all five authors, images of textiles and textile making allow them to speak to issues that were usually only discussed within a community of women: sexuality, desire, aging, marriage, and motherhood. In all five works, textile making “talks back” to the power structures that marginalize women, and lends insight into the material and emotional circumstances of women’s lives.

A Framework for Citizen-Centred Social Statistics and Analysis (Working Paper 48)

Economic policy-making has long been more integrated than social policy-making in part because the statistics and much of the analysis that supports economic policy are based on a common conceptual framework – the system of national accounts. People interested in economic analysis and economic policy share a common language of communication, one that includes both concepts and numbers. This paper examines early attempts to develop a system of social statistics that would mirror the system of national accounts, particular the work on the development of social accounts that took place mainly in the 60s and 70s. It explores the reasons why these early initiatives failed but argues that the preconditions now exist to develop a new conceptual framework to support integrated social statistics – and hence a more coherent, effective social policy. Optimism is warranted for two reasons. First, we can make use of the radical transformation that has taken place in information technology both in processing data and in providing wide access to the knowledge that can flow from the data. Second, the conditions exist to begin to shift away from the straight jacket of government-centric social statistics, with its implicit assumption that governments must be the primary actors in finding solutions to social problems. By supporting the decision-making of all the players (particularly individual citizens) who affect social trends and outcomes, we can start to move beyond the sterile, ideological discussions that have dominated much social discourse in the past and begin to build social systems and structures that evolve, almost automatically, based on empirical evidence of ‘what works best for whom’. The paper describes a Canadian approach to developing a framework, or common language, to support the evolution of an integrated, citizen-centric system of social statistics and social analysis. This language supports the traditional social policy that we have today; nothing is lost. However, it also supports a quite different social policy world, one where individual citizens and families (not governments) are seen as the central players – a more empirically-driven world that we have referred to as the ‘enabling society’.