Читать книгу A Companion to Global Gender History - Группа авторов - Страница 62

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.

Figure 7.7 Advertisement for a safety bicycle in England, 1887.

Figure 7.8 A pair of lace‐bark slippers, Jamaica, c. 1827. EBC 67770, Economic Botany Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Photographed by Andrew McRobb.

The production of such objects was carried out in several steps, and there was a division of labor. Men were responsible for gathering the bark, while women were the ones who fashioned it into usable objects. In his history of these goods, Steeve Buckridge shows that a cottage industry formed around the production of lace‐bark products that allowed both enslaved and free black women to gain some financial independence at a time when their liberties were severely limited (Buckridge, 2016). A material culture analysis of the objects and comparisons with objects from the nineteenth century that contained European lace show that in their production of these goods, women in Jamaica were also fashioning an identity for themselves. They were producing goods that borrowed from European fashions and in so doing also challenged the racial and class boundaries in the colonial societies in which they lived. A study of these objects highlights the intersection between production and gender by showing the economic and culturally significant roles women played in Jamaican society.

In other colonial contexts, the study of the production of “souvenir” or “tourist” art reveals how such objects were sites of contact between two cultures and where the process of acculturation was visible. In the case of Mangbetu art, from today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, especially in the case of ceramics, we see that the arrival of Westerners had an impact on who produced the objects and the form they took. Traditionally, pottery in many places in central and west Africa was done by women, but during colonial times this began to change as Western, mostly male, preferences began to dictate what was produced. We can see the change by comparing earlier examples with those that were produced in the early twentieth century when Western collectors took a special interest in Mangbetu art. In the later period we see the objects, specifically representations of female bodies, becoming increasingly sexualized (Figure 7.9). Moreover, the women artisans who had been making the pottery were displaced to a certain extent from the production process, especially from what was produced for the lucrative export market (Schildkrout, 1999; Berns, 1993). In contrast to lace‐bark production in Jamaica, production of tourist art by Mangbetu men actually disenfranchized women.

Figure 7.9 Anthropomorphic ceramic pot, early twentieth century, Democratic Republic of Congo. The Stanley Collection of African Art, University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art.