Feminine Fabrications: Textiles and the Representation of Women in Museums

Through textiles, women in the past constructed and reinforced their identities, gave voice to words they could not utter aloud, and crossed the line from the domestic to the public sphere. This makes textiles in museums extraordinarily powerful vehicles of communication. While this communication can and does take many different forms, gender is an especially potent factor in textiles throughout history. This thesis sets out to investigate the ways and extent to which museums use their textile collections to represent women in public displays, and to consider what this tells us more broadly about the representation of women and the use of textiles to tell gendered stories. In order to do this, I apply a feminist methodological approach to ascertain the nature of women’s representation through textile displays in three large UK museums: the Museum of London, Ashmolean, and V&A. Through this method, I uncover the ideologies and meanings embedded in these representations, using a three-pronged analytical framework: Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, Visual Analysis, and Object Analysis. This research aims to facilitate greater understanding and awareness of the nature of textile displays in museums, and the nature of women’s representations via textile displays, in order that we might gain a broader view of the advantages and disadvantages of such approaches. This, in turn, will enable museums in the future to make more informed choices about how they incorporate gendered narratives into the interpretation of textiles.