ReMTW · Re-making the World: Women, Humanitarian Agencies and Handicrafts Programmes

Re-making the World: Women, Humanitarian Agencies and Handicrafts Programmes

Lacemaking is an important part of Belgium’s cultural heritage. The First World War threatened to extinguish the renowned Belgian lace industry, cut off from both markets and raw materials. Thousands of lacemakers would be left without an income. Humanitarian organisations stepped in, saved the country’s cultural heritage, and supported its workers by supplying materials and selling the finished fabrics. Their actions gave unprecedented publicity to the industry and American philanthropy, and employing more than 50.000 women in German-occupied Belgium and among Belgian refugees in Holland, France and the UK. The produced lace became known as ‘war lace’, as its unique iconography sometimes referred directly to the conflict. Historians have tended to study food and medical aid programmes. My project fills this gap. Through the example of war lace, I uncover the overlooked origins for the preservation of cultural heritage by humanitarian organisations. In particular, I will test the relationships between humanitarian labour, female agency, and artistic expression. Through a combination of archival, collection and practice-led inquiry, the project will lead to an innovative, transnational, social and material history of war lace. Today the preservation of cultural heritage by humanitarian organisations forms a significant part of relief activities across the globe. That is why the results of this historical research will be useful to humanitarian organisations understanding the long history of craft-based programmes, its best practices and its possible pitfalls. The project had three main objectives: first, to undertake new and transnational research in archives and museums to establish a documentary and material basis for the political, economic, social and cultural currents informing war lace programmes. Second, to re-examine historiographies of war lace in light of current research on the history of humanitarianism, American philanthropy, cultural nationalism and gender history. And third, to conduct a programme of practice-based investigation involving textile theory and practice, particularly lacemaking as a humanitarian textile. Through the combination of archival, collection and practice-led inquiry, I uncovered how the origins for the preservation of cultural heritage by humanitarian organisations were steeped in historical practices and nostalgia for the pre-industrial, artisan ‘way of life’ in contemporary humanitarian reform. The programmes often contained traditional characteristics, as the fate of working-class women was put into the hands of the female philanthropists of the upper- and middle-classes. The latter developed lace-aid programmes that were reminiscent of the long tradition of craft-based philanthropy. As such, they nuance the assumption made by recent histories of humanitarianism that the First World War was a turning point in the development of modern humanitarianism.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз