Quilts and Feminism

There is this lovely blog post from the National Museum of American History on their quilt collection. The posted video has some wonderful examples and talks about quilts. At one point, they even call quilts a kind of "sandwich," which is hilarious and cute. I also love the detail of how women rejected men, called "giving him the mitten."
Even though I am myself not a quilter, I am a feminist. In Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, talks about how creative expression for women has been historically limited. Despite this obvious problem of this, Walker asks her readers to see things, including quilts, which she explicitly mentions, as a way for women to creatively expressed themselves, especially women of color. The blog post does not mention Walker, unfortunately, but it does note the use of quotes as a source of history, specifically a source of history of women.

Turban Experiments

Multicultural Steampunk has this great post that talks about the use and history of the turban.  Turbans are stereotypically associated with Muslims, though in fact they have been used by other groups, like Sikhs. 
I tried making one of these turbans myself, and I can't decide if I like mine or not.  I used brightly colored scarves and decorated it with mardi gras beads just as an experiment (they went with the bright colors).  I'm not sure I liked how it looked on me, but it was a fun experiment.  

Detroit's Hub

Even though I'm not living in Detroit right now, I love my home city. It's hard some time to keep up sometimes with what is going on, but thankfully, there are lots of great bloggers over at The Hub. There's been some great posts lately.

Power Reading

Bibliotonic posted this great book shelf where the books actually come imbedded in the shelf. All of the books in this collection are political books on power. As both a book nerd and political junkie, I would love one of these in my home, though I suspect I would inevitably decorate the shelf with more books (in keeping with the theme, probably political books too.) I hate to admit that I haven't read all of these books, but I have read both The Republic and The Communist Manifesto. I'm a fan of the latter (obviously), but I have more complicated feelings about the former. On one hand, Plato makes some fascinating observations, but he also proscribes some terrible things. (Among other things, he basically calls for genocide based on what is at the very least an abiliest point of view. It would be easy to read these comments as a defense of things like the Holocaust.) Usually I read The Republic similar to how I read the works of Freud: truths used to make lies. Some of the things are true, but lot of the idealization is not.
Who says home decor can't make you think?

Riding Side Saddle

Edwardian Promenade has another interesting post, this time about riding side saddle.  One of the things the post mentions is that it took a long time before riding skirts were designed with safety in mind.  Before that, it was common for women to get dragged by their horses.  The history of clothing is littered with stories of clothes that privileged a certain aesthetic for women over their own health and safety, and the fact that horse draggings went on for centuries before a solution was found is really sad.  Women were literally dying just to wear socially acceptable clothes. 
It's hard not to wonder about some of our own choices today and think about how they are privileging an aesthetic over health and safety.  For example, women (more so then men) get surgery to change their appearance, and although many of these procedures happen without complications, problems can arise.  Is this really what we want for women and men?  To feel compelled to change their bodies or put their bodies at risk just for other people?  Do we really want them to feel like they're getting dragged by a  horse?