Peru

In Peru textiles were produced as early as 2500 B.C. They served as the major vehicle for abstract social and religious expression until the end of the Inca state in 1532 A.D. Textile styles developed throughout the successive Peruvian cultures of Paracas, Chavin, Nazca, Tiahuanaco-Wari, Chimu, and Inca, and continue today. For almost 5,000 years, until the Spanish conquest, Peruvian textiles enjoyed an uninterrupted freedom from foreign influence. Thus a clear, strong indigenous style evolved.

Most accounts attribute this activity to women by implicit assumption, not stating it as actual fact, which suggests that to formally attribute to women a cultural legacy of such artistry and expertise is to go out on a limb and to risk being dismissed as biased and unscholarly. One prominent authority, in a classic essay on Peruvian textiles, indicates the weaver's sex only once by using the pronoun "she" to clarify a sentence at the end of the article’s seventeen pages. However, reports and excavated artifacts exist which confirm that Peruvian spinning and weaving was predominantly a woman's art. Spindles, pottery, and cloth dolls portraying women weavers (sometimes with a male overseer) have been found at gravesites. Early Spanish chronicles and contemporary accounts also describe women’s prevalent role as weavers.

The sandy soil and dry climate of coastal Peru have preserved ancient textiles well. Despite extremely simple technology, the level of manufacture was very high, with variations impossible to duplicate today on machine-powered looms. Peruvian spinners could produce yarn of great fineness and consistency, measuring 1/250th of an inch in diameter, thus enabling the weaver to produce a textile as tightly woven as 250 threads per inch. These women dealt with more than a simple grid structure. Technical ingenuity was shown in the variety of twined, embroidered, and knitted threads creating rich surfaces and detailed motifs. Patterning began about 1800 B.C. with the techniques of brocade, tapestry, double-cloth, and pattern weave being invented and often brilliantly combined. Subtle and varied color combinations from vegetable and mineral dyes existed from Paracas times onward.

Early cotton fabrics made by weft-twining were replaced when a loom with heddles was introduced which expanded an annual production to tens of thousands of square meters of textile and implemented the use of llama, alpaca, and vicuna wool. Despite their basic rectilinear shape, weavings were put to use as varied as ponchos, mantles, wall hangings, and mummy wrappings. As much as 200 pounds of textiles, depending on the person’s wealth, were accumulated for burials. In life as well as in death, possession of fine textiles symbolized status. Sex, age, marital status, and occupation were also signified by wearing textiles of a certain color, size, material, or motif.

Accounts after the Incan empire was conquered chronicled textiles' social significance. A wife's desirability was measured by the quality of her weaving. Wives of one household would compete as to who embroidered the best blanket. At Incan weddings husbands gave brides a fine cloth to indicate their joint control of the new household. Incan initiations required four clothing changes, to be woven in a single day by the initiate's mother and sisters.

A textile's sacred quality was heightened by the compression and "density" of energy in the garments being transferred to the wearer. Incan shrines of venerated female ancestors included their spindles, handfuls of cotton, and unfinished webs of tapestry as offerings or for keeping fingers busy in the next world. These tools were protected in case of an eclipse, when it was thought a comet would destroy the moon, a female symbol. The spindles would then be in danger of turning into snakes, the looms into bears and jaguars.

Throughout Peru's history, the distinguished quality of tapestry tunics, mantles, and diaphanous gauzes made part-time weaving unlikely for those engaged in multiple household duties. This indicates the existence of a class of specialist spinners, dyers, and weavers. All peasants under the Incan empire were required to work and weave for state needs during two-thirds of the year. At first, both men and women spun and wove to satisfy their obligation to the state. Houses were organized for specialized guilds called the aklla, weaving or "chosen" women. Aged or infirm men, exempted from mitta, labor services, made ropes, slings, nets, or sacks.

Under Spanish colonialism, any artisan manufacture competing with goods of the mother country was initially suppressed. The Spanish introduced a new weaving technology. Today men still use medieval Spanish looms, while Andean women hand spin and weave on indigenous looms and follow original patterns, although their weavings lack the earlier intricacy and subtlety. Factory-produced textiles are also manufactured. A strong textile workers' federation in the 1940s defended the rights of women, despite the fact that female suffrage was not legal until 1955. This union caused Peru to be the only country with a large textile industry to legally prohibit sex discrimination in wages. The history of Peru documents a long tradition of superlative textile art made by women. These works emerged as the product of traditional cultural values. Peruvian weavers were ingenious and dexterous; they utilized natural materials sensitively in what now seems a simpler and temporally slower reality. Within a society with rigidly defined sex roles, women lacked many options. Weaving paradoxically served to focus their vision and allowed their inner resources to be realized. Complexity and beauty glow in the work, which resists grandiosity as false and alien. These works, in which women wrapped and shaped the history of Peru, are true to themselves.

New Zealand Maori

Note: 14th to the 19th century.In the beginning, Rangi-nui (sky father) and Papa-tua-nuku (earth mother) embraced. Their love produced 70 supernatural beings who, embodied in natural phenomena, were everyday deities. Tane, the oldest child, convinced his brothers and sisters to force their parents apart so that the earth could have light. In this way he became the god of light and took the form of the sun. Tane wanted to create a race of mortals for the earth, and he began a wide search for uha, the female element. In his wandering, he reached the twelfth heaven where he sought the aid of Io, supreme god. Io's attendants sent him to Kurawaka, the public region of his mother Papa. There he created a woman from mud and earth, breathing on the inanimate figure until she came to life.

Such myths simultaneously reflected and created the status and treatment of women in New Zealand Maori society. Man was considered the sacred provider of life-giving elements while woman was regarded as his profane, passive receptacle; men were associated with life and strength, women with death and destruction. Female reproductive organs were called the "house of misfortune and disaster." Distinctions between men and women colored every aspect of life in Maori society: the right side of the body was male and vital, the left female and degraded. These designations had tactical implications in battle and were used to explain good and bad fortune. Women were excluded from access to esoteric knowledge and ceremonial rituals because they were not tapu (sacred). Only highborn men could become tohunga (priests) and only tohunga knew Io. Women knew only Io's familiar manifestations. Nevertheless, women had their own rituals: they greeted the reappearance of certain constellations—Pleiades (Maori new year) and Canopus (first frost)—with song and dance. The moon, regarded by women as their true husband, was similarly welcomed.

A distinct sexual division of labor began after birth when children were dedicated to masculine and feminine roles. When the sacredness of an activity might be destroyed by the presence of women, these tasks were done by men. When the sacredness of men might be degraded by doing certain tasks, these were done by women. In practice, this meant that men's tasks were physically dangerous and seen as challenging: hunting, open-sea fishing, tattooing, and carving wood and greenstone. Women's tasks followed the rhythm of domesticity: collecting food, water, and firewood, cultivating and preparing flax, weaving, and offering hospitality through singing and dancing.

Women's decorative impulse found form in the taniko designed borders of the cloaks they wove. Weaving was the last stage in a complicated, arduous, even painful process which began with the cultivation of flax and continued through the scraping, plaiting, pounding, and rolling of flax fibers into twine. Girl children learned early that they were destined to become weavers. As babies, their first thumb joint was bent outwards in anticipation of certain tasks. As children, they played to the accompaniment of ditties like: "The woman with nimble hands and feet, marry her; The woman who chatters, cast her out" and "Who will marry a woman too lazy to weave garments?"

By the age of nine or ten, girls began complex and ritualized training. They were made tapu through a ritual, sitting inactive while a male instructor recited a charm. They were then instructed to bite into the upper part of the right weaving stick which was tapu (masculine). Until their first sampler was finished, they were not allowed to communicate with anyone other than the priest or instructor. Eating sow thistle removed the tapu.

Flax was woven on primitive looms consisting of two sticks in the ground. Taniko elements included triangles, chevrons, diamonds, and hourglass shapes; the predominant colors were red, black, white, and yellow. Feathers were used decoratively in the weaving of garments, kiwi feathers being highly valued, parrot feathers adding bright color. Since they were inserted as the garment was woven, the overall pattern had to be kept in mind. Sometimes, hard strips of flax were curled into tubular forms and hung from a band. This produced a rattling sound during dancing, serving as the unique percussive instrument in Maori culture.

Carving was forbidden to women; weaving was open to men. Women used only the taniko patterns in their decoration. Men used the taniko patterns in carving a single wallboard (heke tipi) high above the house porch, but typical male iconography directly represented feared or revered aspects of their environment: stylized human figures, mythic long-tongued sea monsters, lizards and ancestors. Even the more abstract male patterns were related to such elements in their surroundings as sea waves, hammerhead sharks, ferns and sand flounder.

Both male and female designs were subject to strict rules; although there were accepted evaluative criteria such as symmetry, rhythm and dramatic use of color, designs were not copied and within formal constraints, originality was expected. Although choices of material and iconography were socially defined for both sexes, men enjoyed more latitude. If art is that which approximates the autonomous, then there was a curious freedom in the restricted iconography of women, since the abstract elements of taniko were not reality dictated. But men could use taniko too. Since they also had access to schools of weaving, even if they rarely exercised the option, role flexibility was greater for them. Men's political and religious power enabled them to structure language and assign values in Maori society. The actual reciprocity on which the society was based was not acknowledged. Maori mythology reinforced the ideology of male superiority which devalued the tasks and art produced by women.

The Chilkat

North of Oregon, south of Alaska, is a coastal area abundant with game, fish and vegetation. Here in the late 18th and 19th centuries lived a subgroup of the Tlingit tribe—the Chilkats. Their neighbors were the Tshimshian, Kwakiutl and Haida, with whom they traded, fought, and intermarried.

Basic survival needs could be met with relative ease among the Chilkats because of the lush environment. The Chilkat society was a chiefdom, based economically on the redistribution of goods within a network of family groups linked through matrilineal descent. Resources were owned communally, while special highly decorated objects were accumulated to give prestige to heads of the individual clans. Among these objects was a type of shawl or robe, popularly referred to as a "blanket."

The story is told that a Chilkat bride of a Tshimshian chief learned the art of making cedarbark dance aprons and leggings. When she died, a dance apron was sent home to her relatives, who unraveled it in order to understand how it was made. They began then to make blankets in the same fashion, although eventually they became far better-known as weavers than the Tshimshian.

Blankets were woven with yarn spun from mountain goat wool with a core of yellow cedarbark twine. Men hunted the goats and made the half-loom; women spun and dyed the yarn black, blue, yellow, and white from hemlock, copper, and vegetable dyes. In all instances, women were the weavers. They set up the loom and tied off the warp bundles to form a shallow curve along the lower edge of the blanket. While in certain cases they copied patterns painted on boards by men, in others they designed their own weaving patterns. There were two distinct styles of Chilkat blankets. The first was abstract with chevrons, stripes, enclosing borders, and squares. This was the women’s style. The second, the men's style, was representational using signs or symbols for man, animals, and water life.

The abstract and representational styles shared many characteristics. In addition to the unique curved shape of the lower edge, the visual field in both is highly active and extremely dense, although the mode of expression looks dissimilar.

The male-style blankets reflected men's foraging activities through bilateral symmetry and x-ray and transparent portrayals of animal motifs. The blanket, organized by a central panel and two flanking sides, was itself like a flayed animal skin. Because of the Chilkat's desire for design density, the overlay of motifs sometimes made interpretation of the blankets difficult, if not impossible. The animal characteristics portrayed were often determined by a dream that the male artist or the patron had. As designers of the representational blankets, men brought their dreamlife into the waking world as a record of their encounters with the supernatural. We have no such record of the women's dreams.

Women were prohibited from creating designs involving life forms, so that while simultaneously producing men's blankets, women wove their own using a purely abstract design system. Variation of visual elements, contrast of yarn color, and variety of texture created blankets with strong graphic and sensual impact. The geometric patterns with alternating areas of linear density created a rhythmic variation which broke the uniformity of the field. Design in the women's style was even denser than in the men's. By filling the space from edge to edge, the weavers virtually eliminated any illusion of shallow planar recession. Instead, they created an advancing plane by the addition of wool and bark fringes protruding from the body of the robes which emphasized the flatness and frontality of the surface conception. Instead of the dreamlike meditations implied in the men's blankets, the female style was at once more accessible and more reserved: accessible through the emphasis on the physicality of the textile, reserved because of the impenetrability of the design. Because of the limited number of design elements, the variation of combinations gave richness to the weavings. Just as the women were not at the center of the power hierarchy of the Chilkat clans, their art did not rely on signs central to the culture. The limited motifs available to women were indicative of the women’s position in relation to the status quo, the fabric out of which the blankets were created.

Both men's and women's blankets were highly valued and were used in a variety of ceremonies. Given as dowry, along with songs, dances and titles, they were commonly made for the potlatch. Potlatch was integral to Chilkat life. These were competitive ceremonies involving the distribution and destruction of wealth. Blankets were often cut up and handed round or burned in vast quantities of salmon oil. Guests sometimes collected pieces of blankets they received as gifts and later reassembled them into new blankets, shirts, or dance aprons. In this way, they created collage motifs and symbols. The recipient was obliged to pay back the gift, preferably with interest. Blankets therefore were a currency of obligation. The Chilkats based their interpersonal relations on desire for power and control, intense competition coupled with a philosophy of conspicuous consumption. The many social ceremonies in which the Chilkats demonstrated these characteristics created an unending demand for prestigious art objects, like the blankets. At some point in their history, the Chilkats began to support professional artists to meet these needs. Partly as a result of the desire to consume or destroy costly items, the Chilkats valued objects that were very difficult to produce. The intricacy of the men's style blanket patterns made them more highly valued than the women's style; these considerations were central to the Chilkat ideas of aesthetic appreciation.

Men's concerns were at the center of their society's power structure – represented in blankets by hunting and mythological motifs. However, even though the women's style did not demonstrate the same access to the culture's core concerns, their blankets were highly regarded. The competitive give-aways which commissioned the prestige-laden blankets of both styles raised the weavers' status. As European contact increased, European standards infiltrated the Chilkat community and affected the production of female-style blankets. The increased demand for representational blankets, sought after for their unique yet recognizable images, limited the time the weavers had to produce their own type of textile. It is partly as a result of this influence that the female-style Chilkat blankets have received so little attention.

The Navajo

Spider Woman instructed the Navajo women how to weave on a loom. The warp was of spider web. There were crosspoles of sky and earth cords, warp sticks of sun rays, and healds of rock crystal and sheet lightning. The batten was sun halo, and white shell made the comb. The four spindles were of flash lightning with a whorl of turquoise, lightning with a whorl of abalone, a rain streamer with a whorl of white shell and zigzag lightning with a whorl of coal. —A Navajo Legend

The Navajos explained the origins of weaving through the myth of Spider Woman. As an art form weaving reflected a changing Navajo culture and therefore serves as a valuable and permanent record. Through their vigorous design and color, and the technical skill involved, Navajo blankets expressed women’s vision and artistry.

Blankets were woven for many needs but were essentially used for clothing and warmth. Their other uses were as bedding, saddle blankets, and floor coverings for sitting. They were also used as doorways to Navajo homes, called hogans. The blankets were secular, not ceremonial, textiles through which the women expressed a strong personal connection to the people using them. Blankets represented, and perhaps symbolized through their design, the life of the wearer. When worn, the blanket's linear design emphasized the verticality of a standing person. The wearing of blankets enlivened the environment, not only visually, but also through the symbolic meanings of color. To the Navajo red meant Blessed Sunshine, white the East or Morning Light, blue the South which was cloudless, yellow the West or the Sunset, and black the North where dark clouds originated. Combinations evoked naturalistic images. For example, black vertical lines might represent rain, and on a yellow background, the rain in the evening sky. Women followed certain traditional forms, but each weaver made her own interpretation and wove the blanket herself. Individuality of the blankets was highly regarded; each weaver's ideas and feelings could be expressed in unique designs which were never repeated.

In Navajo society, women historically have been greatly respected and thought the equal of men. Deep religiosity and mythology permeated daily life, explaining natural phenomena and daily tasks, and creating their history. Woman was deified in Navajo mythology as Changing Woman, a central figure who designed the hogans. By hanging her blankets as a doorway and designating their colors as those of "Dawn, Sky Blue, Evening Twilight, and Darkness," women connected the domestic, natural, and religious spheres, a synthesis typical of Navajo life structure. Women headed the separate family units and managed their economic affairs. In this matrilineal society, women’s participation in rituals and in political activities was considered essential. Their chores included cooking, sewing, caring for the house and children, gathering wood, hauling water, butchering livestock, and herding the sheep from which they prepared the wool for their weaving. This preparation included shearing the wool and carding, spinning and dyeing it. Frequently women built their own looms, which were set up outside in summer and inside the hogan in winter. Looms were made of logs placed vertically and could be dismantled for transport from summer to winter grazing grounds. The women designed and wove their blankets, without prior drawings, as their time and chores allowed. The earliest-known examples of the Navajo blanket date from 1805. However, the first Navajos who migrated to the Southwest United States in 1000 A.D. probably used tree and bark fibers. It was not until the fifteenth century when Spanish livestock was brought to the neighboring Pueblo Indians, that Navajo weaving changed significantly. Through trade and raids, the Navajo got sheep which provided the women with softer threads and the varying colors of natural fleece. Exposure to the weaving techniques of the Pueblos in the late seventeenth century influenced Navajo weavers to experiment with new techniques and develop a style of alternating bands of natural wool colors.

As dyes and yarns were obtained through trade, new colors began to be used. One of the earliest colors was a red whose source was the unraveled, respun, and rewoven threads of an English fabric called "bayeta," imported by the Spaniards and traded to the Pueblos. Because of their complexity and technical skill, these "bayeta" blankets were renowned among the Spanish and other tribes. To own a Navajo blanket was considered a sign of honor.

Stylistic changes also occurred after contact with North American culture. In the 1860s the Navajos fought with and finally surrendered to Kit Carson at Fort Sumner, where they were imprisoned for four years. Although conditions there were not good, the Navajos assimilated many new influences. One of the dominant and most startling styles to come out of this period was the "Eye-Dazzler," so called for its interplay of expressive pattern and vivid color. This style, as well as others, showed the weaver’s mastery in its finely spun wool, even and tightly woven texture, boldness and energy of design, and subtlety in its skillful handling and control. In relation to this highly developed artistic decísion-making Gladys Reichard, in Weaving a Navajo Blanket, speaks of the weaver Atlnaba who "spends hours experimenting with the colors at her command... She may discard a dozen greens and yellows before she accepts one.

Men and women in Navajo society used different aesthetic systems to filter and express their perceptions. Men’s art, unlike the women's, was religious. Sand paintings, whose powers were guarded in secret and destroyed after the ritual, used figurative imagery to summon the spirits and gain vicarious control over nature. Women’s art, however, was visible in everyday use. Women employed a nonfigurative and abstract imagery, powerfully reflecting the desert landscape in which the Navajo lived, a landscape of horizontality, expansiveness, drama, and vivid color. The strength of their aesthetic language and the power of its expressiveness reveal the great pride Navajo women felt in their social and economic importance and the value of their activities.

Lacemakers of Western Europe

Wearing and making lace was important in Europe from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Lace appears to us today as a delicate and innocent fabric. The world in which it existed was far from innocent, and despite its appearance, lace and its history illustrate this. Like other luxuries, most lace could be had only by the wealthy. The women who made it rarely benefited from it. While their products were coveted, they worked under poor and sometimes hazardous conditions. As symbols of status, laces left the humble homes of lacemakers to enter a world removed from their lives.

The two most highly prized laces were "needlepoint," which depended entirely on the buttonhole stitch, and "bobbin," in which thread was woven, twisted, and braided around bobbins. These laces were made by women of all classes. Wealthier women made it for recreation and because it befitted their roles as "cultivated ladies." Poorer women made it to sell. Lace made for personal use contained any design of the woman’s imagination and cultural heritage. Motifs included fantastical animals, birds, human figures or religious scenes or symbols. Designs for commerce were more limited. They were usually created by male patternmakers according to prevailing fashion, although commercial lacemakers' own interpretations were also highly valued. Each country and region had indigenous designs, but if lacemakers moved to new areas, they took their patterns and drawings with them. Many towns were financially dependent on this female industry despite the low wages paid.

The process of making lace was painstaking and required close scrutiny. The thread was so fine that complicated means were necessary to magnify it. Many lacemakers went blind by the time they were thirty. Every effort was made to keep the lace clean and delicate, mostly at the expense of the lacemaker's health. Often thread spinning and lacemaking were done in damp cellars to prevent the thread from becoming brittle and breaking. In winter lacemakers worked in lofts above cowsheds for warmth so that the lace was kept away from smokey fireplaces. Its production was time-consuming; a woman could spend a whole year on a single piece of Valenciennes. In 1855 Napoleon III ordered a dress for Princess Eugenie which took 36 women 18 months to complete. Even when not involved in such ambitious projects, women might spend 12 to 15 hours each day making lace.

Lace was produced in whole pieces or in parts depending on the design. Making separate parts entailed a division of labor determined by specialization and skill. Some women were better at making the ground net, others at filling in the flowers, etc. The most skilled worker assembled the entire piece.

To sell their work, lacemakers were immersed in a cumbersome commercial process, called the "facteur" or middleman system. A commercial house (manufacturer) was represented by a facteur who, acting as its agent, supplied lacemakers with patterns and raw materials on credit. Finished pieces were then sold to the facteur who in turn resold them to the manufacturer. There was little or no contact between lacemakers and manufacturers. Facteurs were usually women—former lacemakers who could supervise other lacemakers and who were counted on to drive a hard bargain for the manufacturer. Since lacemakers were totally dependent on facteurs for their work and raw material, they were unable to bargain for better pay or working conditions. Their only other option was to become facteurs. The contradiction of this system is that through personal advancement the women who became facteurs helped to perpetuate the exploitation of their former peers.

For aristocratic women instruction in lacemaking prepared them for futures as "noble ladies." Poor girls were taught at home, in convents, or in charitable institutions. Convents established apprenticeships where girls began their training at five and by ten were able to earn their keep. They were taught lacemaking not to master an art but to make a living. Women of both classes were denied the opportunity to direct their own lives. The notion that women were suited to work which required patience and perseverance directly resulted from the constraints imposed upon them by society.

Ironically most lacemakers did not benefit from the beauty and romance of lace. In addition, their products became symbols in a world in which they did not participate. Lace was highly valued by the rich because it represented their position in society. Men boasted about how much land their lace was worth; they appeared in ballrooms wearing as much of it as they could. Women wore it as a reflection of their husbands' or fathers' wealth. Lace became a nationalistic emblem. Countries were highly competitive in its display and production. Monarchs decreed that only their favorite native laces could appear in court. Edicts were proclaimed banning the use of foreign laces to protect home industries and black markets involving smuggling and kidnapping developed to undermine these laws. When lace designs were traded, they were secretly guarded. When Belgium tried to prevent the theft of lace imported from France, these designs were so cut up when distributed to lacemakers that their entirety was unknown to any individual woman. It was feared that a lacemaker would attempt to smuggle or to sell the design.

Lace made by women for personal use was often kept by their families which also preserved the memory of the lacemakers. Lace made to sell was and is perceived as anonymous. Although most lacemakers remain unknown to us, their art is silent witness to the arduous and creative work which was their tradition.

Speculations

Because art, its creation, and the theories surrounding it are political, we have placed the textile art made by women in traditional societies into a cultural context, instead of simply considering the artifacts. We have explored aspects of women's art in each of five cultures, relating them to women's broader social identities. Our assumption that art dialectically reflects and contributes to the creation of society was basic to our study and revealed in our research.

Peruvian textiles were viewed as sacred; as such, women making them performed this task as a ceremonial act of creation. Textiles reflected status within Peruvian culture, making the weavers responsible for visibly defining differences of rank.

In Maori society, women were considered nonsacred and socially inferior. Activities like wood and greenstone carving were forbidden to them. It was possible for men, on the other hand, to weave and use women’s designs, although they usually undertook women's tasks only as instructors in weaving schools where they initiated girls into the ritual, technique, and aesthetics of weaving.

In Chilkat society, rank and privilege were inherited matrilineally, but women did not really own the titles passed down to them by birthright. Instead, titles were given by women's fathers to their husbands at the time of marriage The distinctions of female/male status can also be seen in relation to blanket making. While men designed the representational blankets, women executed their designs. Despite a certain lack of legitimate power, women exerted covert power as weavers by inserting disruptive motifs into the spaces on and between male mythological designs. More importantly, women designed and wove blankets which were also highly valued by their culture, although not representational in style.

Women in Navajo society were well respected. Their responsibilities and powers were equal to those of men. Though it was possible for women to participate in the making of religious art, they rarely did so, preferring to maintain the female tradition of weaving. Their weaving used strong abstract imagery. Their textiles were highly valued both inside and outside the tribe.

Class differences in Western Europe affected the production of lace. Wealthy women made it as part of their required repertoire of ladylike leisure accomplishments. Poor women made it for a living. Paradoxically, this afforded them a certain autonomy that richer women did not achieve, but this autonomy did not extend to conceptual control over commercial lace design. Because our research has focused on particular aspects of five cultures, we are not making universal claims. Rather we have explored alternative ways of looking at and trying to understand women and their products. These have included:

• • working collectively in our research, discussions, and writing;
• • questioning our information sources, particularly in terms of their andro- and ethnocentrism;
• • articulating our own filters, consistent with our contention that objectivity in research or interpretation is neither possible nor even desirable.

We came to our project curious, confused, angry that even within the already denigrated category of "traditional art," women's objects had often been overlooked or misrepresented. We were ready to be sympathetic to the women whose objects had attracted us to this research in the first place.

But we wanted to avoid merely replacing one set of distorting biases for another. We wanted to understand our curiosity, clarify our confusion, find the sources of our anger without anachronistically using contemporary Western notions like oppression of women to explain sex hierarchies. We were wary of our sympathy for the objects and their makers and did not wish to impose a simple translation of Western definitions of art onto societies where art had a very different meaning. All the speculations that follow should be read in the context of these qualifications.

There is a contradictory freedom in the abstract style of women's art in some of these cultures (Maori, Chilkat, Navajo). Women's iconography did not directly function in the service of male religion and therefore was not subservient to male mythology. The "abstractness" of women's art has to be questioned. Men, investigating New Zealand Maori male design, have taken great pains to discover that, though abstract, this iconography is an exaggerated stylization of natural objects in the Maori environment. Yet the literature on women's styles denies that their abstractions also have meaning. Chilkat men designed their dreams into the blankets woven by their women. Because their symbols have been interpreted more than the designs of the women does not negate the possibility that female abstractions have symbolic meaning too. That the making of Navajo blankets was embedded in the myth of Spider Woman and that their colors and designs call to mind so evocatively the atmosphere of the Navajo environment suggest the possibility of a latent symbolism.

Even the claim that men have often tended to be the designers and women the makers (of Chilkat blankets, of lace) cannot be accepted at face value. In the Chilkat society, women challenged the constraints imposed by male designers by inserting their own motifs. By the time lacemaking had become an industry men were the acknowledged designers, although the industry drew on the long tradition of cottage lacemaking. Women had been sovereign over the whole process, and undoubtedly many designs had their origins in what women had been creating for centuries.

Though our focus has been on the female/male contradiction, other forms of stratification existed in Peruvian, Maori, Chilkat, and European society. Status distinctions separated women from each other as well as women from men. Lace was made in the context of early capitalism in which old feudal distinctions between the high and low-born were giving way to class structures. As lace was produced for commerce, the opportunity for some poor women to become facteurs developed. This created additional inequalities in income and status between lacemakers. In Maori society the advantages of being a puhi or woman aristocrat (more elaborate clothing, ornamentation, responsibilities for organizing entertainment) were tempered by restrictions, particularly on her sexual freedom, her choice of husband and lovers. The Chilkat social structure was stratified into chiefs, commoners, and slaves; women occupied all three ranks. As has been discussed, though rank was matrilineally inherited, the women who owned titles tended, in turn, to be the property of men. The Navajo society, where women enjoyed equality with men and there was mutual respect between the sexes, was not hierarchical. Apparently, the more stratified a society is and the more its production depends on the existence of castes and classes, the more likely it is that women in general, and women in less prestigious groups in particular, will be designated inferior in practice, ideology, and myth.

What strikes us is that despite the potential of traditional social structures to muffle and distort the artistic expression of women, the effect on women’s artmaking was contradictory. Conceptualization was separated from execution of design in Chilkat and Peruvian societies and, most extremely. among employed lacemakers in Western Europe. The range of media and motifs available to women was restricted in Maori and Chilkat societies, and women's art was designated as nonreligious in societies such as the Navajo and Maori where religion was valued. Despite these limitations, women's textiles asserted themselves as beautiful art objects. Out of this contradiction, women invented a varied abstract visual language. We are not attempting to resolve that contradiction, which is a real one. It is not our point that the objects women made were, or need to be, judged qualitatively as equal, inferior, or superior to those of men. What we are saying is that we do not subscribe to these categorizations.

We cannot neglect the contexts, both real and ideological, in which women's art has been made. Our critique questions the social and political structures which created and perpetuated discriminating hierarchies. By looking at traditional societies through our Western, female eyes, we can acknowledge the biased quality of our interpretations. We can also see how contemporary biases were anticipated by the discriminatory attitudes toward women characteristic of the cultures we have investigated.

We take for granted that women's self-expression in textiles was artistic expression. Social structures and supporting mythologies did have the potential to thwart creative needs of women. What was important was women's ability to break codes, to play with format, and to transcend limitations. Women often had to subvert societal dictates in order to gain access to a fundamental human need—that of artistic self-expression. Any attempt to deny this need is a painful form of oppression. That women in traditional societies have been resourceful and spirited in challenging this must be celebrated.