UC Davis

This project traces a long genealogy of feminist craft-making that extends from pioneering nineteenth-century women writers to women crafters today. It explores the embodied craft practices and collaborative communities so central to the lives and work of modern makers as a legacy of this earlier creative tradition. It connects this history to the ways in which collaborative handicraft communities, economies, and practices have moved online, onto platforms like Etsy and Pinterest. This new digital context highlights both the innovative possibilities inherent in this legacy and the ways in which these online platforms reproduce the limiting gendered values and attitudes inherited from nineteenth-century British and American culture. This dissertation argues that, because of the long-standing association between women’s writing and craft culture, these online craft spaces can also help us recognize, re-interpret, and even experience the ways that handicraft has informed and shaped the work of nineteenth-century women writers, who were themselves working during a period of rapid technological advancement. Addressing the role of craft and craftwork in the writer's oeuvre alongside the craft afterlife of the author in contemporary online craft networks, this study pairs British Regency novelist Jane Austen with Etsy.com and nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson with Pinterest.com. Exploring an eclectic mix of primary sources, including letters, scrapbooks, collages, conduct books, holograph manuscripts, and printed texts alongside digital interfaces, online profiles, online craft descriptions, virtual pinboards, and contemporary crafts, this project traces the interactions between text and craft, making and re-making, past and present.