Decoration and desire: Women of the home arts movement, 1884--1915

This dissertation furthers a discussion of the home arts movement in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland by presenting case studies of two craft guilds established at the turn of the century as part of the home arts movement: the Dun Emer Guild (Ireland) founded by Evelyn Gleeson, Lily Yeats and Elizabeth Yeats, and the Compton Potters' Arts Guild (England) established by Mary Seton Watts.;Both the Dun Emer Guild and Potters' Arts Guild focussed on the home arts movement's 'social mission' of national cultural improvement---where art production and display were meant to bring the social classes together. This shared culture was imagined and performed in the handcrafting and design of art objects in these guilds. As such, it was inflected by imperialism and cultural nationalism, and shaped by a middle-class perspective. Still, the energy, ingenuity, organisational abilities and creative expression of Evelyn Gleeson, Lily Yeats, Elizabeth Yeats, and Mary Seton Watts made the Dun Emer Guild and Potters' Arts Guild internationally known and commercially successful home art industries. The international acclaim of the two guilds allowed these women to advance an unwritten agenda of social and political activism focussed on fostering the economic self-sufficiency of women through active creative labour.;This discussion also expands knowledge of women working in the nineteenth century while exploring the imprint of the historical moment on their cultural production. Using craft revival as a means of economic development in rural areas, the women of both guilds balanced remunerative creative labour with a public profile of middle-class femininity. Indeed, participation in this movement was a tool developed by these Victorian middle-class women to expand their fields of action and transgress the ideological boundaries of the private and public spheres, and to blur the hierarchical distinctions between the fine arts and the feminised decorative arts.;The history of the home arts movement in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland presented in this dissertation illustrates the variety of ways middle-class Victorian women deployed art to effect social and political change.