ISBN:  Unavailable

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Page count: 394

Women writers of the nineteenth century, when dismissed as having no appropriate education or life experience for writing, were able to use their own specialized body of expertise--needlework--as a way to legitimize their writing, thereby appropriating the era's emerging concept of the "professional." Addressing works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by both British and American women, I demonstrate how these authors, at first using needlework as the basis for authority in conventional creative forms, moved through the century toward writing professionalized nonfiction about the needlework itself--thus mirroring efforts in other professions to establish both specialized bodies of expertise and sets of professional publications for these fields. Women wishing to justify entry into the publishing market could call upon the rhetorical and social gestures developed by men to explain their privileged status as professionals in a variety of fields. Women who incorporated needlework into their texts or wrote about needlework itself did not simply reject old practices for new professional goals, but built upon their previous experiences to construct a new way of living and working in their culture