ABSTRACT
In her well-known and influential treatise on ‘Female Industry’ that appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1859, Harriet Martineau called for an end to what she saw as the ‘artificial depreciation’ that was levelled at women’s work. Although generally thought of as secondary in the factories, women’s work, she argued, was crucial to the continuing success of England as an industrial nation:
The manufacture of artistically designed merchandise, such as silks, ribbons, and paper hangings, was termed in the second half of the nineteenth century the ‘artindustries’. This term related not only to the design of such items, but also to the production of a wide variety of related crafts from etching and engraving to pottery painting and photograph tinting. Often grouped with art-needlework, these crafts were demarcated as one of the branches of ‘low art’ that were mainly inhabited by women.2
