Reading for Oct 1

Relationships between objects and social issues are fundamental subjects for this week’s readings. Through small objects, spaces, and architectures, four authors describe the issues of race, class, and gender in their articles and book.  

   Ulrich explores in her book, The Age of Homespun, the New England republicans’ identity through objects. In her chapter 8, she talks about a role of linen tablecloths in eighteenth century. The invention of waterpower spinning and cotton gin in the 1790s created the new industrial economy.  Following the agricultural development in south, cloth making industry developed in north. She describes how the roles of house works of flex productions changed women’s characteristics during the time period. The spinning meetings created the public space for women. Their work diaries and participating meetings created women’s identity as an industrious worker. Also women connected each other within neighbors because they shared labors and equipment for their works. Not only they shared materials, but also they shared social and cultural ties within women. Their connections between neighbors and ties of women created collective women’s identity as sisterhood.

   Przybysz also analyzes gender roles through colonial kitchens and quilts in her article, “Quilts, Old Kitchens, and the Social Geography of Gender”. She explores how old kitchens publicly focused in the nineteenth century through feminist historiographical perspectives. She analyzes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stories and insists romantic and nostalgic features of kitchens’ functions in the nineteenth century middle-class females. Colonial kitchens worked as private and public spaces, and created moral, productive, and intellectual roles.

   Both Weyeneth and Upton describe relationships between race and architectures in their articles, “The Architecture of Racial Segregation” and “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia”. It is interesting approach to analyze race from how architecture build. Especially Weyeneth’s detailed analysis of architecture of racial segregation showed how those buildings took the roles of segregation from late nineteenth to twentieth century. Upton focuses on the time of slavery in Virginia. He explores the landscape of slavery and separation from whites created strongly ties in African Americans communities.

   All articles and book talk about different time periods and places, but their methodologies of cultural analysis from objects are common. From tablecloths, kitchens, quilts, and architectures, they analyze complex system of social and cultural issues of race, class, and gender.