Some news coverage

Today people across America wore white to support women's rights, particularly women's healthcare and the current legislative issues concerning the government's control or coverage of that care. In Staunton, many of us joined the cause, myself and Linden included, and even our little Staunton made a bit of a splash. Although I, like many women on campus, was not able to make the "walk about town" this evening, you can see pictures here on the website for this movement.

Although work with white paper and costuming gender in All's Well is an entirely separately conceived set of ideas, the political movement and the production we are working to produce have a lot in common.  Both projects are seeking to question standard ideas of who holds power. Both are concerned with the roles of women in taking action and having freedom over their stories and their choices. Both are using the color white as a signifier for women and women's bodies.

When a news reporter came to lunch to interview people wearing white he latched onto our project, and focused the news report of the Wear White project on All's Well instead. You can see the report here. While grateful for the airtime for our ideas, we hadn't meant to usurp the press coverage, and our project isn't about fighting for women's rights exactly, but the Wear White project certainly is. I hope the men and women who wore white today have raised awareness for the legislative issues at stake in our country today, and I hope that a little over a month, our production can raise some questions for our audiences to ponder and mull over for years to come.

If you're new to this blog you can check out this opening essay to find out what the All's Well production and the paper design is all about.

For more information about Wear White, visit their tumblr.

Writing and Sewing - Women's work then and now

In her beautiful work, Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early Modern England, Susan Frye writes about the instabilities of gender constructions and how women in early modern England created much of their own identity as they worked with textiles and with text. Some of her book re-evaluates some of the misconceptions held by many today. She writes,

“The first misconception is that only women were associated with the needle and only men with the pen—a misconception held despite repeated attempts to complicate this binary by scholars as well as by early modern people themselves. The second misconception is that the needle was only associated with drudgery, while the pen was only associated with intellectual work. To a certain extent the needle represented women’s obedience to a rigid insistence on sexual difference, but it is an unstable signifier and, as an object, it is small but phallic, penetrating as well as penetrable, conveying activity, even violence as well as creativity. The needle conveys the potential for active, thinking feminine, without precluding women’s use of the pen in paintings like Alice Barnham and her Sons Martin and Steven” (16).

She then discusses this remarkable painting and the stories it can tell about women's agency with a pen as well as with the more traditionally accepted needle, and it strikes me that this semester Linden and I are sewing and creating work with our hands, but also writing. We get to use these two expressions of feminized power together, to put on a play. And tonight as I'm typing up quotations for a social history paper, all this seems beautiful and serendipitous, and much like a gift.   

For more on the painting: http://www.bergercollection.org/index.php?id=5&artwork_id=75