Review: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics and Jessica Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power

In 1974, women in a consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed an informal organization called the Ladies’ Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Its humorous name teased out a tension within textiles: they are key to traditionalist histories, while also frequently invested with a subversive potential. Evoking the traditionally feminized and supposedly harmless act of sewing alongside the menacing threat of a terrorist society, the women in the Ladies’ Sewing and Terrorist Society envisioned collective textile making as an insurrectionary process that might disrupt social conventions. Their logo, composed of an unassuming flower motif and typeface, was quickly reproduced on T-shirts, mugs, buttons and other merchandise. Almost half a century later, the logo remains popular among younger feminists, who have revived some of the iconography of secondwave feminisms in the US.