'This absorbing study skilfully illuminates the rich cultures of the women of the arts and crafts movement, authoritatively excavating their significance. It is a major contribution to British feminist and cultural history.'
Kathryn Gleadle, Mansfield College, University of Oxford
'Zo« Thomas provides a thoughtful new take on the role and place of women within the English Arts and Crafts movement, offering an alternative narrative encompassing consumer pleasures and feminist concerns that leads to refreshingly unique perspectives.'
Juliette MacDonald, Edinburgh College of Art
'Thomas's important book offers a revisionist, politicised, and staunchly female-centred history of the Arts & Crafts movement, firmly re-establishing women's aesthetic, professional and intellectual contributions through suffrage and the political economies of Victorian England.'
Jenni Sorkin, University of California, Santa Barbara
'As art history increasingly finds a place for methods that account for embodiment and duration, social histories like Thomas's Women Art Workers are invaluable. Beyond histories of the Arts and Crafts, Thomas's book is also a model text for other researchers trying to understand ideologies of identity through printed texts and public
pronouncements.'
Woman's Art Journal
'This is a wonderful contribution to women's studies generally as well as to scholarship about the Arts and Crafts movement.'
The Victorian Web
'Meticulously researched and referenced, it draws upon a previously unknown archive related to the WGA, and Thomas also factors in members of London's Lyceum Club, founded in 1903 for professional women by Constance Smedley, artist, writer, suffragist, and stage designer. [...] This thought-provoking woman-centred study has wider implications for how we think about these cultural producers'.
DAS Newsletter
'This important book offers the first detailed study of the women who worked in the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. [...] We find in this fascinating account the names of long-forgotten painters, book-binders, sculptors and jewellery makers'.
Times Higher Education
' [...] will be a vital addition to the literature for anyone teaching modern history, whether focused on art and design, social and economic history, or gender studies. In addition to extensive research in public and private archives in Britain, South Africa, and the United States, it is clearly based on a thorough knowledge of the relevant theory and literature and includes excellent notes and bibliography. [...] it will be essential reading and a stimulating resource for anyone working on the period and should be in the library of every institution studying and promoting history.'
Annette Carruthers, Journal of British Studies
'Encompassing intellectual, entrepreneurial, cultural and political history, it shifts the focus from the finished artworks to the network structures, the business strategies, and the spaces of women art workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making a tremendous contribution to both women's history and to scholarship on the Arts and Crafts period.'
Dublin Review of Books
'Though confined largely to Great Britain, this examination of the women art workers of the Arts and Crafts Movement is a welcome corrective to the astonishing absence of women from the literature of the movement generally (including how it is represented in the extensive Wikipedia entry). Thomas (Univ. of Birmingham, UK) moves away from the male-run Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society established in 1887 to focus, for the first time, on "the extensive network of women working at the highest echelons of the English Arts and Crafts Movement" (p. 5). Following an introductory overview of the politics of gender in the movement, Thomas's study
