Reframing the scholarship on women and material culture, this volume explores how women from widely different times and places made meaning, and formed identities, through the materials they created and consumed, with focus on the fiber arts, consumption and collecting, and the production of material objects.

With the volume's global perspective and comparative framework, this collection contributes to the ongoing scholarly examination of consumption by taking the topic of women, material culture, and consumption into new arenas. The essays explore the connections between consumption and subjectivity; they build upon and complicate the idea that consumption, as a form of meaning making, is key to the construction of gendered, classed, and national identities. Providing a cross-cultural perspective on consumption, the essays are historically specific case studies. While some essays examine women's consumption in a range of Anglophone and Francophone locations, primarily in Britain, France, Australia, Canada, and the US, other essays on Chinese, Senegalese, Indian, and Mexican women's consumption, particularly as it relates to fashion and design, provide a comparative framework that will recalibrate ongoing discussions about consumption and domesticity, dress and identity, and desire and subjectivity. In addition to its focus on gender and consumption, this volume addresses gender and collecting, exploring the tensions between accumulation and systematic collecting. Also examined is the way in which the display of collected objects?in Impressionists' paintings, in mass-produced illustrations, in the glass cases of museums and department stores?participates in the construction of particular identities as well as serving as a kind of value-producing material practice.

Reframing the scholarship on women and material culture, this volume explores how women from widely different times and places made meaning, and formed identities, through the materials they created and consumed, with focus on the fiber arts, consumption and collecting, and the production of material objects.

With essays on a range of fiber art practices, including embroidery, knitting, crocheting, machine stitching, rug making, weaving, and quilting, this collection contributes to the ongoing scholarly redefinition of women's relationship to creative activity. Focusing on women as producers of cultural products and creators of social value, the contributors treat women as active subjects and problematize their material practices and artifacts in the complex world of textiles.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the relationships between women and built space in England between the 1870s and the 1940s. Historians working in cultural, literary, architectural, urban, design, labour, and social history approach the topic through case studies of often neglected organisations, individuals, practices and initiatives. Included are East End rent collectors, tenants, diarists and correspondents, the All-Europe House, the Women's Co-operative Guild, the Housewives Committee of the Council of Industrial Design, provincial and metropolitan exhibitors, and activists of varying kinds. Moving beyond the study of buildings and their designers, the volume considers the making of space in its broadest sense, from the production of discourses to the consumption of domestic appliances and the performance of roles as diverse as social reformers, committee members and homemakers. It thereby demonstrates that women made a significant contribution to the creation of modern built environments in both public and private spheres.

The purpose of this essay collection is to recover color's complex and sometimes morally troubling past. By emphasising color's materiality, and how it was produced, exchanged and used, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts.

Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture revolutionized the understanding of modernism in architecture, pushing back the sense of its origin from the early twentieth century to the 1750s and thus placing architectural thought within the a broader context of Western intellectual history. This new edition of Peter Collins's ground-breaking study includes all seventy-two illustrations of the original hard cover edition, which has been out of print since 1967, and restores the large format.