Delineating Women’s Historical Lives through Textiles: A Latvian Knitter’s Narrative of Memory

In presenting and analyzing the narrative of a woman who knitted for survival, I engage two continuing marginalizations in mainstream history; that the lives of ‘everyday’ women are poorly delineated and that the realm of textiles is undervalued as a source of knowledge. Outside the visual art domain the status and potential of textile study, with its associations of domesticity and craft, is little valued. Yet textiles have a history of being associated with many other aspects of women’s lives, a relationship that is slowly being probed for the knowledge it may hold (Parker, 1984; Tickner, 1988; Ulrich, 2001). Through oral history and the study of objects imbued with memory, we gain access to additional topics, issues and aspects of identities; we hear the stories that clothe, illumine and enhance what we know of women’s historical lives. Such is the case, presented here, of one woman’s attachment to the tools of her trade. They provided the means to preserve family and culture, to enact her agency, when confronted with the inexorable force of historical circumstance. When Anna Vipulis Samens was faced with fleeing her home once again, she was a determined woman. “The knitting machine is my life; I will not take a step without it” (Glenbow Archives, 1979). In her Latvian homeland Samens operated her factory in the capital of Riga through the First World War, Russian Revolution, German occupation and Soviet expropriation. As the Soviets approached to reoccupy Riga in 1944, the Samens family buried family valuables; china, silver and a stamp collection. Anna’s husband had sold a race horse for three gold czar’s coins which secured an open truck for a hurried escape for the family of five with a few of their possessions. On October 4th the knitting machine chosen for the journey, a lighter commercial model was placed in a coffin-like box with extra parts. In preparation for another temporary displacement, Anna took the key to her factory, some business papers, a small sewing machine, patterns, yarns and the box. It took four of the five family members to carry the box

Delineating Women’s Historical Lives through Textiles: A Latvian Knitter’s Narrative of Memory

In presenting and analyzing the narrative of a woman who knitted for survival, I engage two continuing marginalizations in mainstream history; that the lives of ‘everyday’ women are poorly delineated and that the realm of textiles is undervalued as a source of knowledge. Outside the visual art domain the status and potential of textile study, with its associations of domesticity and craft, is little valued. Yet textiles have a history of being associated with many other aspects of women’s lives, a relationship that is slowly being probed for the knowledge it may hold (Parker, 1984; Tickner, 1988; Ulrich, 2001). Through oral history and the study of objects imbued with memory, we gain access to additional topics, issues and aspects of identities; we hear the stories that clothe, illumine and enhance what we know of women’s historical lives. Such is the case, presented here, of one woman’s attachment to the tools of her trade. They provided the means to preserve family and culture, to enact her agency, when confronted with the inexorable force of historical circumstance. When Anna Vipulis Samens was faced with fleeing her home once again, she was a determined woman. “The knitting machine is my life; I will not take a step without it” (Glenbow Archives, 1979). In her Latvian homeland Samens operated her factory in the capital of Riga through the First World War, Russian Revolution, German occupation and Soviet expropriation. As the Soviets approached to reoccupy Riga in 1944, the Samens family buried family valuables; china, silver and a stamp collection. Anna’s husband had sold a race horse for three gold czar’s coins which secured an open truck for a hurried escape for the family of five with a few of their possessions. On October 4th the knitting machine chosen for the journey, a lighter commercial model was placed in a coffin-like box with extra parts. In preparation for another temporary displacement, Anna took the key to her factory, some business papers, a small sewing machine, patterns, yarns and the box. It took four of the five family members to carry the box

The Political Stitch: Voicing Resistance in a Suffrage Textile

While on a hunger strike within the walls of Halloway Prison in 1912, a woman recorded her experience in an embroidered handkerchief. Her deliberate stitching presents us with an intimate artifact that embodies an individual experience and a pivotal collective moment in Western women\u27s history. The textile engages us with her act of resistance in a struggle for a political voice for herself and womankind. This singular textile communicates a powerful sense of self and, with its provocative content, a prescient anticipation of a future audience. Through personal examination of a number of suffrage textiles housed in the Museum of London and an analysis of new historical viewpoints, this study promotes the efficacy of textiles as historical sources. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the construct of voice in textiles is used to challenge \u27received\u27 history that has marginalized some experience. Textiles imbued with women\u27s negotiation of historical circumstance during the suffrage movement can be viewed now, on its centenary, as a response to converging social, economic and political factors. The Halloway embroideries juxtapose the \u27delicate\u27 domestic skill of embroidery with the grim reality of oppressive prison sentences. Embedded within the textiles of the embroiderers, once dismissed as irrational bourgeois women, was a new political force. Cognizant of the power of symbolism, women employed their amateur craft skills crossing class boundaries to enact resistance and propel enfranchisement onto the public stage. It is timely to examine these acts of commemoration and performance, infused with agency, identity and desire for social change, through the language of textiles

Manipulating the Threads of Culture: Contemporary \u3ci\u3eShibori\u3c/i\u3e Artist Yvonne Wakabayashi

Deeply anchored in her practice of shaping and manipulating fibre are both the aesthetic integral to Yvonne Wakabayashi’s Japanese heritage and the inspiration of the natural environment she finds along the shores of her own birth place, Canada’s west coast. Wakabayashi’s journey to find her authentic voice in her varied textile works, engaged both historical craft practices of Japan and printmaking processes of the West. Most importantly, it led to the discovery of shibori with its ancestral links and innovative contemporary possibilities. This paper explores how an individual artist embraces her artistic cultural identity that also negotiates the upheaval wrought on her parents’ generation as she creates art that honours her ancestry. The creative origins of Wakabayashi’s textiles spring from a childhood imbued with her mother’s traditional skills including fine dressmaking acquired in her native Japan, skills that took on a new significance during years of dislocation. The Japanese family of a young Yvonne was interned by the state away from the coast of British Columbia during the Second World War. During the upheaval that saw professional jobs lost, it was the skills of her mother that secured them financially, modelled adaptability, and shaped her daughter’s interests. A second profound influence on the developing artist was Hiroyuki Shindo. On a sojourn to Japan as a young teacher, Yvonne Wakabayashi took a workshop with the Indigo Master and contemporary shibori artist and found a key medium in which to express herself in cloth. As a foremost textile artist in Canada, the sculptures, narrative wall hangings and fashion pieces of Yvonne Wakabayashi meld methods and materials from two diverse cultures and reach a global audience. In their interplay of ancestry and local inspiration, the artist manipulates the unique threads of her culture

Coast Salish Textiles: From ‘Stilled Fingers’ to Spinning an Identity

When aboriginal women of south western British Columbia, Canada undertook to revisit their once prolific and esteemed ancient textile practices, the strand of cultural knowledge and expertise linking this heritage to contemporary life had become extremely tenuous. Through an engagement with cultural memory, painstakingly reclaimed, Coast Salish women began a revival in the 1980s that includes historically resonant weaving and basketry, as well as the more recent adaptive and expedient practice of knitting. This revitalization faces continuing cultural challenges as a new generation is presented with the opportunity to engage its heritage. Through interviews with principals in this movement plus an analysis of historical sources and artifacts, the revival and its current resonance and future prospects in Coast Salish communities are considered. In this interdisciplinary and interpretive study, textiles as historical sources, oral history and material culture are the tools employed to tease out details of a more nuanced history that can ameliorate marginalizations, especially those of aboriginal women. The “coercive and exclusive” acculturation (Goldberger, N. R.) of the past is shown to account for the loss of textile skill inseparable from culture. Agency, imbedded in ancestral knowledge, is identified as a means for textiles to communicate wisdom, history and identity in new contexts that value ‘ways of knowing’ in a decolonized (Smith, L. T. ) approach. The visual concept of contemporary women ‘spinning back in time’ serves a literal and figurative function that encompasses the mesmerizing ability of spindle whorls, the act of spinning and the sensing of an ancestral presence while standing at the loom, to reconnect with the past. The determination of a dominant culture to force indigenous peoples to discard tradition may have “stilled the fingers of the native women” (Oliver Wells cited in Gustafson, P.) but in a gravely challenged culture a revitalized textile language has extended a thread of empowering cultural memory to a subsequent generation of Coast Salish who may or may not grasp it

Ammonia Emissions from Twelve U.S. Broiler Chicken Houses

Twelve commercial broiler houses in the U.S. were each monitored for at least thirteen 48 h periods over the course of one year to obtain ammonia emission data. Paired repetition of houses on four farms represents current construction with variety in litter management (built-up or new litter each flock) and climate conditions (cold or mixed-humid). Ammonia concentration was determined using portable electrochemical sensors incorporating a fresh air purge cycle. Ventilation rate was determined via in-situ measurement of fan capacity, fan on-off times, and house static pressure difference. There were seasonal trends in exhaust ammonia concentration (highest in cold weather) and ventilation rates (highest in warm weather) but not for emission rate. Flocks with at least three monitoring periods (13 of 22 flocks) demonstrated similar emission rates at a given bird age among the four study farms and across the seasons. An analysis of emissions from all houses on the three farms using built-up litter resulted in predicted regression slopes of 0.028, 0.034, and 0.038 g NH3 bird-1 d-1 per day of age; the fourth farm, managed with new litter, had the lowest emission rate at 0.024 g NH3 bird-1 d-1. The intercept of these composite relationships was influenced by litter conditions, with flocks on new litter having essentially no emissions for about six days while built-up litter flocks had emissions starting at flock placement. Data from all four farms and all flocks provided a regression slope of 0.031(±0.001 std error) g NH3 bird-1 d-1 per day of age. Emission rate per animal unit for built-up litter flocks indicated very high emissions for the youngest birds (under 14 days of age), after which time the emissions decreased exponentially and were then relatively steady for the balance of the flock cycle

Ammonia Emissions from Layer Houses

Ammonia (NH3 ) emission rates from six high-rise (HR) and four manure-belt (MB) laying hen houses were measured for one year. Manure was stored in the lower level of the HR houses for a year, but removed daily or semiweekly from the MB houses. The results revealed an annual average NH3 emission rate of 0.87 (±0.29) g d-1 hen-1 for the HR houses, 0.094 (±0.062) for the MB houses with semiweekly manure removal, and 0.054 (±0.026) g d-1 hen-1 for the MB houses with daily manure removal. Information of this study contributes to the U.S. national inventory on ammonia emissions from animal feeding operations with different housing and manure handling schemes and geographical locations

Comparison of Direct vs. Indirect Ventilation Rate Determination for Manure Belt Laying Hen Houses

Direct measurement of ventilation rate in livestock housing can be a formidable task due to uncontrollable variations in fan and system performance as caused by factors such as operation static pressure, fan belt condition, and dust accumulation on shutters and blades. Indirect, CO2-balance method offers a potentially viable, more flexible alternative to estimating ventilation rate. The reliability of CO2 balance method depends on the validity of relationship between CO2 production and metabolic rate of the animals and the knowledge of CO2 generation by the housing environment. Metabolic rates of modern laying hens have recently been quantified in intensive large-scale laboratory measurements. However, performance of the indirect method remains to be evaluated under field production conditions. This paper compares ventilation rates of a commercial laying hen house with manure belt (manure removed daily) obtained from direct measurement based on in-situ fan performance and runtime vs. indirect determination based on CO2 balance. The results indicate that indirect determination based on CO2 balance was well in agreement with that of direct measurement. Application of the CO2-balance method to evaluate building ventilation rate can improve the affordability and versatility of poultry emission studies