> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: [[Aarti Kawlra]] > Date:: 2024-08 > WeftLinks:: [[Equity value of craft]] Asking the question ‘Where are the women?’ in the sphere of crafts, as does Cynthia Enloe (2014) in the sphere of international politics, sheds light on the different spaces and roles women occupy in crafts. In their influential volume on Cloth and Human Experience (1989), social anthropologists Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider provide direction to the women’s question in craft – “Women are by no means the universal producers of cloth, but in many societies they monopolize all or most of the manufacturing sequence, giving them a larger role than men. Many societies also assign women, rather than men, to exchange or give the cloth that tie the living to the dead, the bride’s family to the groom’s family, the politically dominant to their dependent clients. In ceremonies of rulership, cloth is generally in the hands of the men, but here, too, women may participate as producers or handlers of sanctified materials…. the study of cloth can illuminate women’s contributions to social and political organization that are otherwise overlooked” Foregrounding women’s home-based craft skills and capacities opened up key spaces for women’s empowerment in the first half of the 20th century. In India, for example, anonymizing occupational caste identities through craft skills training created possibilities for the remaking of women’s subjectivities around dignified work. In south India, Muthulakshmi Reddy fought against prevailing norms of caste and patriarchy by introducing training programs for socially ostracized women that emphasized moral hygiene (house-keeping, midwifery, nursing, weaving, needle-work, dress-making, home-science), thereby ensuring their acceptance and integration within caste society. It was ‘the promise of jacket’ or respectability and freedom from the rules and restrictions of caste, that lured many lower caste girls, who were otherwise forbidden to wear a breast cloth, to learn sewing in Sri Lanka. According to Mark Balmforth (2018), the use of  distinctive stitches, colors, and motifs, including devotional verses in Tamil, found in the needlepoint samples of the Oodooville group, demonstrates that the trainees were forging a new subjecthood and identity for themselves. Beyond missionary upliftment, Jennifer Way’s research on the deployment of craft therapy for convalescing American soldiers during World War I by women ‘reconstruction aides’ reveals the use of craft within an aesthetics of collective care and rehabilitation.  In a pamphlet published in 1939, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, founder of the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) in 1927, was very aware of the pervasive gender-biased injustice in conceptions of work, labour, and wages that women were contending within colonial economies of the Global South: ‘everywhere women are paid less - in some places about half of men’s wages. This unjust system is part of the tradition handed down under masculine dominance. Masculine standard is the accepted one and according to that measure wages are fixed. That a woman worker spends proportionately as much energy and labour and is entitled to the same wage is lost sight of.’ The model of co-operative organization introduced by Kamaladevi for crafts in India during the pre-independence years was to rectify this bias.  Perceptions of local realities and gendered work were actively examined by many nations in the mid twentieth century and incorporated craft diversely within state policy. They also came to be inserted into transnational agencies like the International Alliance of Women (IAW), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and UNESCO. International development theorists like Amartya Sen too returned to the analysis of asymmetrically organized division of labour and persistent inequalities in productive households in Asia and Africa, to spotlight women’s well-being and survival, and sought new ways to theorize the everyday conflicts of interest between men and women within family-based gendered work, towards a global vision for women and crafts.  In a study of pastoralist copper bell makers, from the Kachchh region of Gujarat in Western India, Meera Velayudhan notes that after the partition, when the cattle population and their movement was hampered by the India and Pakistan border the formation of women’s self help groups (SHG) became an opportunity for revitalizing the economic viability of the craft. “The women in this community appear to have a more pronounced role within the family compared to Muslim women in other craft communities and are gradually moving towards recognizing the benefits of interest based loans, despite religious beliefs, if the contribution of women are added to the rates of copper bell size. The SHGs, in turn are linked with Khamir [a local ngo] which in turn builds linkages with government schemes and support programs (health, business). Despite nationalist goals of empowerment through craft, in Ghana for example, the contributions of African women to the development of the economy in the field of village-based crafts are often less visible than those engaged in urban fine arts. One study found that in the glass bead making industry, the culture of silence obstructs the full empowerment of many elderly women glass bead makers and prevents them from speaking out about the challenges they face in their work. A recent collection of stories from the regency of South Central Timor in East Nusa Tenggara province of Indonesia, titled Weaving, Guardian of Identity: Weaving (2017) documents the struggles of women who prevented an environmental disaster in the region by driving out a marble mining company from their land using their looms and weaving skills.   Their actions are testimony to the significance of weaving for the Timorese, which is deeply rooted in the their natural habitat as much as it is a source of livelihood, cultural identity and archive of knowledge for future generations. In her foreword to the volume, Catharina Dwihastarini National Secretariat Coordinator of GEF SGP writes, “our appreciation of textiles should no longer be based on the beauty of the textiles themselves, but a deeper understanding of weaving as an archive of womanhood.” In a recent volume on De-/Anti-/Post-colonial Feminisms in Contemporary Art and Textile Crafts, the essay by Neelam Raina emphasizes how women use their tacit, uncoded knowledge of craft in re-asserting and valuing their daily life spaces in times of extended conflict, regardless of where they may be settled or displaced. In the same volume, Fatima Hussain focuses on the wider cultural and ecological context of learning which is so essential for women’s craft work to remain a tool of resilience knowledge and sustainability.