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Made in Patriarchy II: Researching (Or Re-Searching) Women and Design Cheryl Buckley

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Made in Patriarchy II: Researching (Or Re-Searching) Women and Design Cheryl Buckley Made in Patriarchy II: Researching (or Re-Searching) Women and Design Cheryl Buckley More than 30 years ago, women’s relationship to design underwent 1 By the late 1970s and through the 1980s, a process of critical questioning by historians, practitioners, cura- women design and architectural histori- tors, and critics that continues today.1 At the core was feminist pol- ans influenced by second-wave feminism itics, and as feminists began to look to all areas of women’s lives, and a handful of pioneering texts began to approach these questions armed with asserting that the “personal is political,” design inevitably came feminist theories. In this context, notions under scrutiny. The Swiss Design Network research summit in of design value, taste, and significance 2018, titled “Beyond Change,” invited a response to the provoca- were seriously undermined; in fact, the tion, “Design cannot change anything before it changes itself.” basic premises of academic disciplines This article, developed from a keynote address delivered at the began to be questioned as the new disci- pline’s failure to account for women as summit, argues that what is essential to affect change is a recon- producers, designers, consumers, and sideration of women’s relationship to design.2 This reconsideration users of design became clear. See, e.g., is undertaken by reflecting on arguments made in the article, Anthea Callen, The Angel in the Studio: “Made in Patriarchy,” published in Design Issues in 1986; it asks if Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement the questions posed then are useful today.3 1870–1914 (London: Astragal, 1979); Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic It begins by considering the changing nature of debates Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs within feminism. It then revisits debates about the nature of design for American Homes, Neighborhoods, practice by examining definitions of design and the designer and and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, the role of the historian in interpreting and understanding the con- 1981); Philippa Goodall, “Design and nections between women and design. Insisting that design is a Gender,” BLOCK 9 (1983): 50–61; Gillian Elinor, Su Richardson, Sue Scott, Angha- vital part of everyday life that has shaped our public personas and rad Thomas, and Kate Walker, eds., individual identities, it proposes that thinking about the innumer- Women and Craft (London: Virago, 1987); able ways in which design is produced, where it is produced, and Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, eds., A by and for whom it is produced has the potential to prompt a View from the Interior: Feminism, Women changed understanding of design. and Design (London: The Women’s Press, 1989); and Ellen Perry Berkeley, ed. Archi- tecture: A Place for Women (Washington, Situating Myself DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). As a design historian who has been working in the field since the 2 Swiss Design Network Research summit, late 1970s, my intellectual framework was fundamentally shaped “Beyond Change: Questioning the Role of by the dual, intersecting formations of social class and gender as I Design in Times of Global Transforma- tions,” Basel, Switzerland, March 8–10, researched a diverse array of things that were produced and 2018; http://www.beyondchange.ch/font designed: domestic tableware, working-class housing, dress-mak- (accessed August 8, 2018). ing at home, and, most recently, fashion in everyday lives.4 Impor- 3 Cheryl Buckley, “Made in Patriarchy: tantly, this research was informed by my teaching, mainly of Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women practice-based design students (i.e., fashion, industrial design, 3-D and Design,” Design Issues 3, no. 2 (1986): 3–14; and Cheryl Buckley, Women design), as well as by PhD research. Although the latter was Designers in the North Staffordshire focused on the producers of design, an interest in the processes of Pottery Industry, 1914–1940 (PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 1991). © 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00572 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 1 Winter 2020 19 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00572 by guest on 28 September 2021 representation and identity construction emerged, along with a growing concern for women users and consumers of design in the process of teaching practice-based design students. Exploring the roles of women designers in the North Staf- fordshire ceramic industry, my doctoral research led to the discov- ery of numerous examples of ceramic designs in archives (e.g., the Josiah Wedgwood Archive) that had barely registered in design’s histories. This recognition prompted a number of theoretical and methodological questions about the nature of design history. These ceramic designs—largely conventional, routine, and everyday— were predominantly domestic neither technically nor visually innovative; they made only an occasional nod to modernity. How- ever, these designs were fundamentally decorative and clearly shaped by the strong traditions inherent in the British ceramic industry. The “designers,” and what was understood by the term “design” in this particular industry didn’t conform to “accepted” 4 Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion definitions of design. In these definitions, a marked division, in and Everyday Life: London and New York, design terms, was made between the production of shape and pat- (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). tern design.5 Some who “produced” these designs were called 5 See Cheryl Buckley, Potters and Paint- designers, while others were described as paintresses or produc- resses: Women Designers in the Pottery tion managers. The line between craft, machine, and new technolo- Industry 1870–1955 (London: The Wom- en’s Press, 1990). gies was also blurred—although ceramics in north Staffordshire 6 See Edward P. Thompson, The Making of ostensibly were made by industrial methods, new technologies the English Working Class (London: Peli- were not always what they seemed; certainly in the first half of the can, 1963); and Sheila Rowbotham, Hid- twentieth century, craft techniques were intrinsic to the whole pro- den from History (London: Pluto Press, duction process. Assessing these archives prompted further ques- 1980). See also Betty Friedan, The Femi- nine Mystique (1963; repr. London: Pen- tions about what doing “design” actually meant, what being a guin Classics, 2010); Juliet Mitchell, “designer” involved, and crucially, who designed. Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Oxford: My approach and thinking, influenced in part by Marxist Pantheon, 1974); and Kate Millet, Sexual historians, such as E. P. Thompson (author of The Making of the Politics (1970; repr. New York: Simon & Working Class), were also shaped by immersion in second-wave Schuster, 1990). 6 7 Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage feminist texts, including Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden From History. of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a The joint interest in Marxism and feminism led me to reconsider More Progressive Union,” in Women and the meaning of patriarchy, and the works of Heidi Hartmann and Revolution: The Unhappy Marriage of Sheila Rowbotham were especially useful in doing so.7 In particu- Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sar- lar were their thoughtful conceptualizations of patriarchy as nei- gent, (London: Pluto Press, 1981); and Sheila Rowbotham, “The Trouble with ther a universal nor trans-historical concept, but as situated in time Patriarchy,” New Statesman 98 (Decem- and place. Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker’s critique of the ber 1979): 970–71. ideological underpinnings of disciplines—in their case, art his- 8 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old tory—was also vital.8 And working with colleagues who were Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology interested in women and gender—not just design historians, but (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). 9 See, e.g., Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in also those working in film studies, fashion history, and architec- 9 Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: tural history—also shaped my thinking. Virago, 1985); Jane Gaines and Charlotte In the midst of my PhD research, my article, “Made in Patri- Herzog, Fabrications: Costume and the archy: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design,” was Female Body (New York: Routledge, published. Its purpose was to provide theoretical and methodo- 1990); and Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill, NC: University of logical tools for this empirical doctoral study of women’s role in North Carolina Press, 1992). 20 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 1 Winter 2020 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00572 by guest on 28 September 2021 design in the ceramic industry. This theoretical questioning had four key propositions. First, women had interacted with design in numerous ways, but they largely had been ignored; when women’s involvement with design was acknowledged, it was within the con- text of patriarchy. Second, patriarchy was reshaped and reconfig- ured depending on specific social, economic, and political circumstances, as well as geography and history. The consequences for women’s roles in design were clear: women were categorized; they had sex-specific skills and attributes; they were deemed “fem- inine,” “natural,” “decorative,” “instinctive.” Third, although the various ideologies of patriarchy and its concrete and diverse mani- festations were powerful, an array of assumptions about design, the designer, and the meaning of design compounded these views. In the language of writer
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