In this fascinating study, Rozsika Parker traces a hidden history--the shifting notions of femininity and female social roles--by unraveling the history of embroidery from medieval times until today.

The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine

History

Parker, Rozsika

Americas

Routledge

Many a loving mother has had fleeting feelings of hatred toward her children - the desire to hurl a howling baby out the window or to lock a teenager out of the house. In this provocative book, Rozsika Parker argues that these ambivalent feelings not only are common but can actually have a creative impact on mothering. Mother Love/Mother Hate boldly illustrates how a mother's desire for devotion coexists with the impulse to hurt and desert. Parents will find Parker's insight into the conflicts that beset them illuminating and deeply reassuring. Reversing the conventional psychoanalytic approach, in which maternal ambivalence has been understood chiefly from the point of view of the child, this book gives precedence to the mother's perspective. Drawing on interviews with mothers, clinical material from her practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and a wide range of psychoanalytic and literary sources (including Virginia Woolf, Anne Tyler, Simone de Beauvoir, D. W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, and John Bowlby), Parker explores experiences of maternal ambivalence in a culture painfully and profoundly uneasy about its very existence.

Mother Love/mother Hate: The Power Of Maternal Ambivalence

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Women's Health

Basic Books

The subversive stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts & Hobbies

Women's Press

Old Mistresses ; Women Art and Ideology

POLLOCK, GRISELDA

Pantheon

Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-85

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Pandora Pr

Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology [paperback] Parker, Rozsika,Pollock, Griselda [Jan 01, 1991]

Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology

Arts & Photography

Rozsika Parker's re-evaluation of the reciprocal relationship between women and embroidery has brought stitchery out from the private world of female domesticity into the fine arts, created a major breakthrough in art history and criticism, and fostered the emergence of today's dynamic and expanding crafts movements.The Subversive Stitch is now available again with a new Introduction that brings the book up to date with exploration of the stitched art of Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, as well as the work of new young female and male embroiderers. Rozsika Parker uses household accounts, women's magazines, letters, novels and the works of art themselves to trace through history how the separation of the craft of embroidery from the fine arts came to be a major force in the marginalisation of women's work. Beautifully illustrated, her book also discusses the contradictory nature of women's experience of embroidery: how it has inculcated female subservience while providing an immensely pleasurable source of creativity, forging links between women.

History & Criticism

Bloomsbury Visual Arts

About the Author\nRozsika Parker (1945-2010) published widely in Art History and Psychoanalysis. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine first appeared in 1984. Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence was published in 1995. She and Griselda Pollock together wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981) and edited Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985 (1987).\nGriselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and, since 2001, Director, Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory & History) at the University of Leeds, UK. Known for her critical interventions in feminist, social, Jewish and postcolonial studies in art's histories, her work ranges from nineteenth and twentieth century fields to that of contemporary art and cinema, museum studies and cultural theory. Her publications include Old Mistresses, Vision and Difference, Avant-Garde Gambits, Generations and Geographies, and Differencing the Canon.\nWhy is everything that compromises greatness in art coded as 'feminine'? Has the feminist critique of Art History history yet effected real change? With a new preface by Griselda Pollock, this edition of a truly groundbreaking book offers a radical challenge to a women-free Art History.\nParker and Pollock's critique of Art History's sexism leads to expanded, inclusive readings of the art of the past. They demonstrate how the changing historical social realities of gender relations and women artists' translation of gendered conditions into their works provide keys to novel understandings of why we might study the art of the past. They go further to show how such knowledge enables us to understand art by contemporary artists who are women and can contribute to the changing self-perception and creative work of artists today.\nIn March 2020 Griselda Pollock was awarded the Holberg Prize in recognition of her outstanding contribution to research and her influence on thinking on gender, ideology, art and visual culture worldwide for over 40 years. Old Mistresses was her first major scholarly publication which has become a classic work of feminist art history.

Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Bloomsbury Revelations)

Bloomsbury Academic

Why is everything that compromises greatness in art coded as 'feminine'? Has the feminist critique of Art History history yet effected real change? With a new Preface by Griselda Pollock, this new edition of a truly groundbreaking book offers a radical challenge to a women-free Art History. Parker and Pollock's critique of Art History's sexism leads to expanded, inclusive readings of the art of the past. They demonstrate how the changing historical social realities of gender relations and women artists' translation of gendered conditions into their works provide keys to novel understandings of why we might study the art of the past. They go further to show how such knowledge enables us to understand art by contemporary artists who are women and can contribute to the changing self-perception and creative work of artists today.

I.B.Tauris

New, revised edition of this bold and exciting book. More and more women confess uneasily to finding motherhood as much a source of pain as pleasure. Rozsika Parker presents a new understanding of maternal ambivalence, suggesting that the coexistence of love and hate can stimulate and sharpen a mother's awareness of what is going on between her and her child. Drawing on interviews, clinical material from her practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a range of literary sources, Torn in Two is original and accessible. With new readings of the work of Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby and others, this book offers invaluable - and often reassuring - insight into the conflicts confronting women at every stage of motherhood.

Torn in Two: Maternal Ambivalence

Virago

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