This essay shows the rhetorical and material process of regendering and forgetting that accompanied the downsizing and tearing down of U.S. progressive-era settlement homes founded by female maternalists who lost their ethos by mid-century in the U.S. The regendering of place by mid-century urban renewalist’s rhetoric, policy and culture enabled the elimination of neighborhoods. It made vulnerable the concept and material space of the neighborhood as a headquarters for community engagement, and denied the emotional attachment to homes that Progressive-Era maternalists embraced. The legacy of maternalist placemaking layered into Detroit’s contemporary social service agencies embodies the impact of this regendering.

Research Article| January 01 2006 A Material Pedagogy: Lessons from Early-Twentieth-Century Domestic Arts Curricula Liz Rohan Liz Rohan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (1): 79–102. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-79 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Liz Rohan; A Material Pedagogy: Lessons from Early-Twentieth-Century Domestic Arts Curricula. Pedagogy 1 January 2006; 6 (1): 79–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-79 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2006 Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay examines the annotated description of a quilt produced by one woman to memorialize her mother who died in 1902. The quilt's function is analyzed in relationship to nineteenth-century mourning rituals and to other mnemonic aides produced and used in the nineteenth-century domestic sphere to remember-like scrapbooks and, later, photography. This study promotes memory-making as a rhetorical end and suggests a study of technologies employed in the nineteenth-century domestic sphere might reshape our conception of mnemonic activity and also a perceived separation between the rhetorical canons.

This article compares the historical and contemporary clothing industry with the current microelectronics industry. It argues that the development of paper patterns, along with the perfection of the sewing machine as a technology in the 1870s, “democratized fashion” for lower and middle class women just as the development of the World Wide Web and Web-making software has democratized publishing for authors before unable to gain access to an audience for their writing. Comparing the businesses of three groups of women using the World Wide Web, this article finally problematizes these historical and contemporary democratizing technologies—the sewing machine and the computer—by pointing out both obvious and more subtle socioeconomic realities which undercut some utopian promises of publishing in Cyberspace. Women are … without class because the cut and fall of the skirt and good leather shoes can take you across the river and to the other side: the fairytales tell you that goose-girls may marry kings [1, pp. 15–16].