Women, Consumption, and the Circulation of Ideas in South-Eastern Europe, 17th - 19th Centuries (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Curls and forelocks”: Romanian Women’s Emancipation in Consumption and Fashion, 1780-1850
Women, Consumption, and the Circulation of Ideas in South-Eastern Europe, 17th - 19th Centuries, 2018
Once a culture is undertaken, women are a significant and an active agent when we speak about consumption and dissemination of ideas. For this paper, I will analyze the Romanian case in quite a challenging time for the Christian elite and for the manner in which the social status was (re)defined. The shopping lists, family registers, dowries and wills are the main sources for such a research theme. Many of these sources are still unedited and they offer many important information about consumption and the circulation of ideas. Through such archival documents we can recompose the distribution network of these assets, the connexion between clients, their tastes, ideas and how they chose to integrate them, the social status and the women involvement in consumption.
ABSTRACT Through the prism of objects and material culture, the workshop intends to highlight broad patterns of transregional circulation of people and goods crossing the borders of the Ottoman, Venetian, Russian and Habsburg Empires. The papers will present and discuss a wide variety of unpublished textual and visual sources related to luxury consumption, fashion and dress codes; diplomatic and political exchanges; dowry contracts and travel journals. New light is shed on networks of agents, merchants and diplomats negotiating the self-fashioning of local elites whose identities are shaped by linguistic, cultural and religious practices. The workshop aims at rethinking broader interpretive categories and challenges issues of Ottomanization and Westernization, as well as linear processes of modernization and change.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture, 2020
In the patriarchal culture of imperial Russia, the collecting, preserving, and exhibiting of art works was an activity reserved predominantly for men; in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a new type of female collector emerged. In both the capitals and provinces, women began collecting, exhibiting, and promoting folk arts and crafts and needlework. This article examines the focus on the part of specific female collectors and patrons on objects associated with women, their pastimes, domesticity, and femininity, all understood as an expression of both self and group identity. It examines this unfolding feminist project through five stages: (1) collecting artifacts associated with women; (2) displaying them at home or at private museums; (3) organizing and supporting the handicraft workshops and practical schools for peasant women; (4) popularizing those artifacts via printed editions; and (5) publishing ethnographic commentaries which reflected female pastimes, material culture, and crafts in the context of traditional culture and the arts and crafts revival.
Luxury, Fashion and Other Political Bagatelles in Southeastern Europe, 16th-19th centuries
2022
Acest e-book este protejat de legea drepturilor de autor. Reproducerea sa integrală sau parţială, multiplicarea sa prin orice mijloace şi sub orice formă, punerea sa la dispoziţie publică pe internet sau în reţele de calculatoare, stocarea temporară sau permanentă pe diverse dispozitive sau în sisteme care permit recuperarea informaţiei, gratuit sau în scop comercial, precum şi alte fapte similare, fără permisiunea scrisă a editurii reprezintă o încălcare a legislaţiei privind protecţia dreptului de autor şi se pedepsesc conform legilor în vigoare.
Museum History Journal, 2020
Between the two world wars, affluent and intellectual men and women in Greece assembled and displayed in their private homes in Athens collections of Byzantine and pseudo-Byzantine objects in order to recreate personal renderings of the 'Byzantine world'. Some of these collections, like the one by Dionysios Loverdos, ultimately transformed into house museums; others, like the collection owned by Eleni Stathatos, were donated to institutions where they are exhibited to this day; finally, a few, like the one by Eleni Kanellopoulou-Zouzoula, were dispersed and disappeared once their owners passed away. In this paper, I discuss these collections and their development against the backdrop of the Byzantine revival in Greece and the support and promotion of Byzantium and its art by the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. I focus on these collections as interior decoration; the appreciation and understanding these collections enjoyed, which varied according to the gender of the collector; and the changes in meaning as these collections went from the domestic to the institutional.
From the Coffee Grinder to Sputnik: The Culture of Objects and Women in the Service of Ideology
Abstract: The essay examines the popular Hungarian weekly women’s magazine Nők Lapja through the Sixties socialist consumption and the culture of objects and the discourse concerning the image of the socialist woman, not from the perspective of economics or the history of consumption, but from the point of view of cultural history. It focuses on the change of strategy during the Cold War, which from the side of the West signified the use of soft power, while in the East it implied the modification of socialist modernization, in so far as emphasis was shifted from aggressive armament and the conquest of space to everyday prosperity and consumption. The narrower segment under examination is the project in the Sixties that addressed the modernization of the kitchen and the woman of the house, a project which extended to the manufacturing of household appliances aimed at facilitating domestic chores faced by women who also had full time jobs, the introduction of a network of self-service businesses, the expansion of the use of canned food, as well as hygiene, environmental culture and the cultivation of taste. According to the imagery and the texts found in publications of the time, posters and women’s magazines, it was not socialist modernism and the official policy of emancipation that confronted the inherited mentality of the masses as a hindering factor, although this is what contemporary official discourse attempted to imply. This mode of discourse, the style in which the modernization of the household and the housewife and the expansion of consumption was communicated through pictures, advertisements and objects conserved old patriarchal topoi in opposition to the official political discourse of emancipation. Keywords: Cold War, culture of objects, design, gender roles, Kádár-era, Khrushchev Thaw, kitsch, material culture, modernization, socialist consumption, women’s role, housekeeping, kitchen, kitchen-debate, Stalinism
Selling Glamour: Marketing Western Women's Fashion in Interwar Bucharest
Transylvanian Review, 2023
This paper explores the dynamics of women’s fashion marketing in advertisements and promotional materials related to Western ideas, materials or products. It will analyse published promotional visual and written texts in the interwar Bucharest press, with local or national distribution. The aim is to ascertain the degree and nature of Western women’s fashion influence on interwar Romania’s bourgeoisie. This will be interpreted as a reflection of larger social, political, cultural, artistic and economic phenomena at a local, regional, national, European and global level. This paper will also offer an overview of the various individuals and entities involved in the interwar Bucharest textile and fashion industry. These companies, creators and merchants represented various budgets and means of propagation and possible ethical and accuracy concerns regarding their messaging. It will follow the major streams in interwar Romanian advertising in relation to the West, namely on the circulation and promotion of ideas, raw materials and finished goods relevant to women’s fashion. It will employ semiotics and discourse analysis for a wider understanding of interwar Romania through the lens of fashion as marketed to interwar Bucharesters, covering all aspects relevant to the fashion industry, from conception, production and dissemination to consumption, interpretation and reinvention. Keywords: women’s fashion; marketing; advertising; Bucharest; interwar