Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Carla Bittel (editor), Elaine Leong (editor), Christine von Oertzen (editor)

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 337
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations covering Europe and North America and spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century, this volume breaks new ground by examining material histories of paper and the gendered worlds that made them. Contributors explore diverse uses of paper—from healing to phrenological analysis to model making to data processing—which often occurred in highly gendered, yet seemingly divergent spaces, such as laboratories and kitchens, court rooms and boutiques, ladies’ chambers and artisanal workshops, foundling houses and colonial hospitals, and college gymnasiums and state office buildings. Together, they reveal how notions of masculinity and femininity became embedded in and expressed through the materials of daily life. Working with Paper uncovers the intricate negotiations of power and difference underlying epistemic practices, forging a material history of knowledge in which quotidian and scholarly practices are intimately linked.
 

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Paper, Gender, and the History of Knowledge - Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong, and Christine von Oertzen
Part I. Beyond the Page: The Sociomaterial History of Paper
One. Letter Writing and Paper Connoisseurship in Elite Households in Early Modern England - Heather Wolfe
Two. Papering the Household: Paper, Recipes, and Everyday Technologies in Early Modern England - Elaine Leong
Three. The Sociomateriality of Waste and Scrap Paper in Eighteenth-Century England - Simon Werrett
Four. Paper Trials, Multiple Masculinities, and the Oeconomy of Honor - Gabriella Szalay
Part II. Transcending Boundaries: Tools and Technologies
Five. Bookkeeping for Caring: Notebooks, Parchment Slips, and Enlightened Medical Arithmetic in Madrid’s Foundling House - Elena Serrano
Six. Unpacking the Phrenological Toolkit: Knowledge and Identity in Antebellum America - Carla Bittel
Seven. Keeping Prussia’s House in Order: Census Cards, Housewifery, and the State’s Data Compilation - Christine von Oertzen
Eight. Tracing Paper, the Posture Sciences, and the Mapping of the Female Body - Beth Linker
Part III. Knowledge, Power, and the Everyday
Nine. A Letter Is a Paper House: Home, Family, and Natural Knowledge - Elizabeth Yale
Ten. Family Notebooks, Mnemotechnics, and the Rational Education of Margaret Monro - Matthew Daniel Eddy
Eleven. Papier-Mâché Anatomical Models: The Making of Reform and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France and Beyond - Anna Maerker
Twelve. Women Who Worked with Documents to Rationalize Reproduction - Dan Bouk
Afterword: Making and Using Paper in Late Imperial China: Comparative Reflections on Working and Knowing beyond the Page - Jacob Eyferth
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index