Craft and Hardship: Gendered Expectations and Artistic Innovations

Although existing studies highlight that an innovation is based on pre-existing norms and beliefs in society, few studies have examined how a society’s expectations of men and women can shape their innovations. To address this gap, I focus on artistic innovations, new materials and/or techniques that an artist never used previously, in the context of the arts and crafts movement in Britain from 1888 to 1938. Considering living up to gendered expectations — the way others expect him or her to behave as a man or woman according to society’s idealised masculinity or femininity — on-going hardship that craftsmen/women face, I investigate a mechanism, deviance neutralization, through which such expectations shape their artistic innovations. Deviance neutralization is an individual strategy to counteract perceived deviance from gendered expectations by making one's innovation look gender-appropriate. When craftswomen try out masculine innovations (e.g., metalwork or leatherwork), they are likely to neutralize deviance by accounting for their innovations in alignment with generally expected feminine qualities. Similarly, craftsmen are likely to justify feminine innovations, such as embroidery, by evoking masculine qualities of their work. I test this mechanism using quantitative analyses: content analysis and event count analysis of artwork presented at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society’s triennial exhibitions. Preliminary analyses show that craftswomen tend to show their dependency on men, especially their husbands, and God when their innovations are masculine. By contrast, craftsmen try to meet gendered expectations by stressing historical relevance when their innovations are feminine. The findings of this study complement current understanding of the way in which individuals make sense of their innovations and the mechanism of variation in innovation adoption using the lens of gender. They also have practical implications for addressing deviance neutralization in the arts.