Abstract

Drawing on sources such as home furnishing manuals, hygiene and household guidebooks, as well as literary texts, this article examines how the nineteenth-century domestic interior can be regarded as a functional environment regulated by textiles. In the debate about the correct usage of furnishing textiles in line with contemporary aesthetic and sanitary standards, women were held responsible for regulating these textile environments. While on the one hand this led to a supposedly natural and mechanical conflation of women and domestic space which has often been interpreted as restrictive and encapsulating, my aim is to identify a specific feminine agency that has its origin in the home but is not limited to it. By tracing the negotiations of this gendered textile expertise in different fields of knowledge and forms of representation, this article reevaluates the relationship between textiles, domesticity and femininity in the nineteenth century.