Feminine specialization: beautifying arts. Initiatives supporting women’s activity in the field of applied arts and crafts in the second half of the 19th century in the Kingdom of Poland

Abstract

In the second half of the 19th century, in the Kingdom of Poland, practicing art professionally by women was not only a manifestation of their emancipation. In public opinion it was viewed as one of the options to solve the problem of making a living for women from the higher classes of society – landed gentry or intelligentsia – who faced the necessity of work for money. For this reason, it enjoyed significant social support, which resulted among others in the organization of artistic education and exhibitions of “female art”. However, doubts raised especially by conservatives concerning the lack of predisposition of the female sex to intellectual activity and at the same time attributing to women the innate manual skills, caused that not so much the so-called pure art but decorative art was considered as an appropriate occupation. In the 1860s and 1870s when the need for work for women became for the first time a largescale social problem in the Kingdom of Poland the handicraft was also promoted. The latter appeared to be an optimal way out of a difficult situation, not only because of the manual not intellectual nature of work and low social prestige, but also because it was possible to refer to the tradition of women’s knitting. Due to the resistance of the guilds (which accepted the fact that the craftsmen’s widows ran workshops, still they did not accept female artisans entering the profession without proper background and family connections) and the large number of women interested in working in crafts, a real flood of private schools and courses took place in the Kingdom of Poland, especially in the 1870s. This phenomenon, which can be described even as an educational “fashion”, has found its resonance in the press. Unfortunately it turned out soon that craftsmanship would not meet the hopes placed in it. There was a surplus of “new craftswomen”, as they were called, often poorly qualified, competing with each other and with guild craftsmen. Moreover, labour – and time-consuming products lost in competition with cheap factory products. As a result, earnings were very low. Craft schools lost their popularity, and instead schools educating in the field of applied arts and decoration became popular, like Maria Łubieńska’s, Bronisława Poświkowa’s, Bronisława Wiesiołowska’s, Halina Tokarzewska’s schools, for example. It is worth noting that the majority of such institutions were founded and run by women, who have been treating the work of the art school headmistress as another option for earning money. The promotion of both craft and applied art was of a great importance for extending the range of occupations available to women from higher classes of society. That range, although not as drastically narrow as in the 1860s, at the end of this century was still insufficient in comparison to needs.