Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000: Diversity and Difference

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Pat Kirkham Editor

Yale University Press and Bard Graduate Center, New Haven, CT, 2002, 2000, English

Nonfiction, Graphic Design; Nonfiction, Product/Industrial Design; Nonfiction, Fashion Design; Nonfiction, Interior Design

ISBN: 9780300087345

From the Publisher. Winner of the 2000 Susan Koppelman Award sponsored by Popular Culture/American Culture Association Women’s Caucus in Feminist Studies of Popular Culture and American Culture (out of print).

This book celebrates the many contributions women designers have made to American culture over the past century in such fields as textiles, ceramics, graphics, furniture, interiors, metalwork, fashion, and jewelry. It includes designers from the arts and crafts and modernist movements, Native American and African American cultures, the post-World War II era, craft and “ethnic” revivals in the 1970s and 1980s, and the world of today. Many famous designers are discussed, including Eva Zeisel, Maria Martinez, Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Edith Head, Clare McCardell, Bonnie Cashin, Elsa Peretti, and April Greiman, as well as less well-known designers.

The book features 17 essays by such eminent scholars as Valerie Steele, Ellen Lupton, Cheryl Buckley, and Edward S. Cooke, Jr. A timeline offers readers a broader context within which to understand the developments discussed in the text, as does Eileen Boris’s chapter “Women in the United States, 1900–2000: Social Change and Changing Experience.” In addition, an essay by Pat Kirkham and Lynne Walker explores such fascinating issues as the differing gendered nature of the various areas of design, training, and education, support networks, “race,” class, cultural traditions, and the diverse ways in which women came to be, practiced as, and experienced being designers.

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Published by the Bard Graduate Center (BGC) in conjunction with its landmark exhibition in 2000–2001. Edited by Pat Kirkham, a member of the BGC faculty, this truly groundbreaking study examines a broad range of women designers, from the most famous (Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Donna Karan) to those anonymous women who worked in many different fields, including textiles, graphics, ceramics, furniture, fashion, and jewelry and contributed to 20th-century American culture.

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