In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future.

This volume is dedicated to examining the role and impact of gender relations during socio-environmental transformation processes as well as matters of gender equality in archaeological academia across the globe.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, a number of social and economic factors converged that resulted in the rural village of Deerfield, Massachusetts becoming almost entirely female. This drastic shift in population presents a unique lens through which to study gender roles and social relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The lessons gleaned from this case study will provide new insight to the study of gender relations throughout other historical periods as well. Through an intensive examination of both historical and archaeological evidence, the author presents a clear picture of the gendered social relations in Deerfield over the span of seventy years. While gender relations in urban settings have been studied extensively, this unique work provides the same level of examination to gender relations in a rural setting. Likewise, where previous studies have often focused only on relations between married men and women, the unique case of Deerfield provides insight into the experiences of single women, particularly widows and “spinsters”. This work presents a unique contribution that will be essential for anyone studying the historical archaeology of gender, or gender roles in the Victorian era and beyond.

In this volume, gender roles and relations in Deerfield, Massachusetts, are presented to illustrate the material and spatial expressions of the dominant Anglo-European ideologies (particularly corporate families, republican motherhood, and the cult of domesticity) of each respective time period in historic America.

This collection of original essays explores the historical and cultural diversity of the experience of gender reversal over an exceptional geographical and chronological range. Topics cove- red include anthropology, history, literature.

This volume expands understandings of crafting practices, which in the past was the major relational interaction between the social agency of materials, technology, and people, in co-creating an emergent ever-changing world. The chapters discuss different ways that crafting in the present is useful in understanding crafting experiences and methods in the past, including experiments to reproduce ancient excavated objects, historical accounts of crafting methods and experiences, craft revivals, and teaching historical crafts at museums and schools. Crafting in the World is unique in the diversity of its theoretical and multidisciplinary approaches to researching crafting, not just as a set of techniques for producing functional objects, but as social practices and technical choices embodying cultural ideas, knowledge, and multiple interwoven social networks. Crafting expresses and constitutes mental schemas, identities, ideologies, and cultures. The multiple meanings and significances of crafting are explored from a great variety of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, archaeology, sociology, education, psychology, women’s studies, and ethnic studies. This book provides a deep temporal range and a global geographical scope, with case studies ranging from Europe, Africa, and Asia to the Americas and a global internet website for selling home crafted items.