Widow Makers
Written for an art history class on women as producers and consumers in Europe between 1700 and 1900.
Fibre and material arts have long been closely aligned with femininity—ask any Westerner and they will know somebody with fond memories of their mother’s knitted sweaters or their grandmother’s piecework quilts—but for several centuries before and during the Victorian era, hairwork was another popular and highly feminized craft that allowed women to perform appropriate gender expectations while memorializing their dead loved ones. Though it is still admired for its skill, hairwork is now largely considered a mere historical oddity because of its use of human hair as a creative material. In reality, hairwork mourning pieces express a hidden archive of feminine historical production and expose gaps in contemporary historical knowledge.
This piece examines hairwork in Victorian women’s mourning and remembrance customs, considering the practice as a site of negotiation between craft, commodity, class, and gender performance. Though hairwork shares similarities with other feminized domestic arts including needlework and quilting, it is distinct in its close association with a specific period and its unique use of human bodily material as a physical memorial.
Aside from a general contextualization of hairwork production, I limit discussion of the craft to pieces used for mourning purposes and focus on hairwork as a trend in Victorian England from a gendered perspective informed by class hierarchies and emerging modes of consumerism. Although preserving a loved one’s hair was a low-cost means of remembrance, hair jewellery itself was a luxury good; lower-class funerary and mourning practices necessarily revolved around different priorities, and working-class families were generally unable to afford hairwork items (either in terms of money or the time it took to make them at home).[1] Therefore, this paper largely focuses on the middle and upper classes.
Before the Victorian era, several societal shifts occurred that facilitated the development of hairwork not only as a powerful tool for mourning but a practice closely aligned with what was then considered to be the “feminine ideal.” During the Renaissance era, humanist philosophers fundamentally reconceptualized gender roles, viewing women through an essentialist lens as the natural counterpart to men, possessing intelligence yet physically and emotionally weaker. Domestic activities like needlework came to be viewed as “virtuous” and thus aligned with “ideal femininity” as they kept women at home and out of the masculine public eye. Feminist art historian Rozsika Parker writes of this change, noting that although public roles differentiated men’s social classes, the same household duties were expected of women regardless of class; these overarching perspectives on gender generally continued to inform social relations up to the Industrial Revolution and beyond.[2]
The Industrial Revolution further changed how people expressed bereavement. The sanitization of death began for the middle and upper classes as professionalized male undertakers replaced the familial death rituals that female relatives traditionally conducted.[3] While people still wore black clothing to indicate mourning, working-class families performed simple burials—nobility, in contrast, continued to follow older traditions, and the growing middle class followed their lead. Businesses made mourning attire available to rent to capitalize on the burgeoning desire to consciously perform one’s wealth; cultural theorist Michelle Iwen writes that this display “disturbed the visual display of the social hierarchy” as one’s appearance no longer definitively determined one’s social class.[4]
Mourning jewellery largely remained an aristocratic tradition during the eighteenth century due to the high cost of materials and production. Though subdued in style, the jewellery was luxurious, using materials including diamond, onyx, and pearl, and often expressing French sensibilities.[5] The symbolism of the jewellery reflected popular neoclassical motifs including willow trees, tombs, and urns. Retaining a lock of the deceased’s hair was an old tradition even by the eighteenth century, and jewellery made of hair was not uncommon. As Iwen notes, the rise of sentimentalism during the Romantic period spurred interest in hair collection, and hairwork “became more elaborate and yet another status marker.”[6]
Major social changes occurred during the Victorian era as older traditions surrounding life events were reinstated and the royal court set official customs. The popularity of mourning in particular was reinvigorated with the death of Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert in 1861, and Victoria remained in mourning until her death forty years later. Mourning was mainly seen as a female burden, with different attire and lengths of mourning required depending on one’s relationship to the deceased. In the most acute stage of mourning, “full mourning,” women were expected to isolate themselves from social situations and dress entirely in black with a long veil covering their faces. After some time, the “second mourning” phase would begin, wherein women could wear more jewellery and remove their veils; the final stage, “half mourning,” allowed more jewellery and a wider range of colourful clothing. Until 1850, in contrast to women, men were advised to wear a black mourning cloak for one year after their loved one’s death; after 1850, male mourning attire was very similar to regular clothing, though men might wear darker clothing or armbands depending on their relationship to the deceased.[7] While men generally maintained a similar public appearance regardless of bereavement status, women behaved as mourning proxies for their husbands, becoming public manifestations of familial grief.
Mourning jewellery styles in Victorian England continued in the same tradition as the preceding Georgian period.[8] Popular imagery within the jewellery included neoclassical female forms, birds, snakes, belts, hands, and flowers; many of these were symbolic of eternal life, good luck, or friendship. Hair jewellery enjoyed peak popularity between 1830 and 1880 as weaving and braiding styles expanded; this interest was partially due to Queen Victoria’s influence, as she had a locket made containing Albert’s likeness and a lock of his hair, along with other memorial hairwork objects including a pin and a bracelet. Other popular items produced with hair included rings, earrings, necklaces, and watch chains.
Figure 1: Royal Collection Trust, Queen Victoria’s Locket, c. 1861.
Historian Deborah Lutz connects the Victorian era’s fascination with mourning relics to earlier “relic culture,” which emerged at the end of the Elizabethan era as people fought to acquire holy relics and proof of famous events and people including monarchs, war heroes, and artists. The influence of this culture continued through the Romantic period and into the Victorian era, though interest in the secular, personal relic from “any ordinary body” superseded demand for the “celebrity” memento around the mid-eighteenth century.[9] Because they represented (and, in the case of hair jewellery, were part of) “normal” people, these relics possessed superficial beauty to outsiders but were only truly meaningful to those who knew the people they memorialized. Like celebrity mementos, personal relics were a way to prove someone’s existence, though instead of their power lying in the ability to “prove” the existence of a famous person or event, it instead was located in their ability to publicly represent ordinary individuals and continue to assert their presence even in death.
Lutz writes that “this radical individualism led to a worship of the body—one’s own and that of the other—carried to the extreme that even its decay, its ruins could be adored.”[10] This is in line with notions of the “beautiful death” that were popular during the Victorian era, where death was seen as impermanent, and people clung to a romantic desire for the person to continue after death through their remains. Because hair is one of the only bodily materials that does not decay if properly kept, it was one of the most convenient ways to express these beliefs. Art historian Rachel Harmeyer notes that “hair recalls the living state of the body: it remains the same after death, unlike the rest of the body, which is subject to decay.”[11] Death turns people into things, yet it can also animate the inanimate, allowing hair jewellery worn close to the skin to embody the deceased.
Hair jewellery became more popular outside of mourning practices in the 1860s and 1870s, especially among middle-class consumers for whom the trend was a signifier of good taste and high class—this occurred at the same time that black clothing grew in popularity among women, as mourning attire was so prevalent in the culture that it was recognized as a way to court respectable public male attention. As literary historian Rebecca N. Mitchell writes, widow’s fashion “could be read as a symbol of bereavement, but it could also signal a woman’s new availability or sexual experience.”[12]
Victorian women’s mourning attire signifies the wider gender expectations and social customs of the time, yet despite these rigid mourning expectations, women were less present in the actual death process due to the aforementioned professionalization of death work.[13] The interest in physical, personal sites of memorial could be explained by the lack of closure that existed between the dead and their loved ones. Indeed, as Harmeyer writes, Victorians were not obsessed with death in the way present-day characterizations suggest but were still “consumed with the need to materialize the lives of their loved ones, to objectify and treasure them through talismans of memory.”[14]
During the Victorian era, hairwork was as popular a craft as knitting and crocheting, and it was closely associated with femininity both through women’s previous association with death work, and their association with handiwork, which coalesced in the domestic sphere.[15] Literature from the time reflects earlier views on women’s suitability for activities like needlework, emphasizing the importance of “dainty and very tasteful handling” in hairwork and women’s “natural” aptness for the “elegant arts”—this closely aligns with Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s assertion that, “The historical process by which women came to specialize in certain kinds of art […] [has] been obscured by the tendency to identify women with nature.”[16][17] Although domestic activities had public, commercial, and masculine analogues, they were devalued due to the location in which they took place.
Hairwork jewellery was already commercialized by the mid-1850s; the availability of the product grew along with the commodification of other mourning goods, and shopping for mourning attire even came to be seen as an activity of comfort and pleasure for some.[18][19] It was through the mass availability of mourning objects and the development of low-cost production methods and materials that the further erasure of visible class markers occurred—middle-class women could now afford to broadcast their bereavement to the world, and this led to a “kind of democratization of fashion through the uniform of black dress.”[20] Even the lower classes participated in the death economy in a bid to appear “respectable,” renting clothing and other items for the funeral even if the dead would rest in a pauper’s grave.[21]
Jewellers in England took advantage of the commodification of mourning rituals and hair jewellery’s popularity, offering their services to produce “expert-made” mementos. Lutz writes that London-based jeweller Antoni Forrer was the most famous “professional” hairworker and employed fifty people at his shop during the mid-nineteenth century.[22] Referring to an 1897 article that covers hairwork as a “bygone occupation,” literary historian Shu-chuan Yan writes that jewellers copied styles created by designers; this reflects the factory production system in which workers were given individual tasks with no control over the final product of their labour.[23]
Figure 2: Victoria and Albert Museum, A. Forrer Hairwork Brooch, c. 1842.
The personal element of hairwork mourning jewellery complicates its commodification more deeply than the commodification of other products previously defined as handicrafts. Because of the requirement that a piece incorporate hair from a deceased loved one, many women were fearful that locks they sent away to a jeweller would be replaced with a stranger’s hair, and thus the hairwork would not attest to the “thingness” of the human whom the piece memorialized.[24] Historian Melissa Zielke posits that the act of working with the hair was an essential step in the process of mourning and gaining closure, and thus aside from the view of hairwork as a feminine domestic task, there was a personal element to the practice that provided women with a benefit outside of expected gender performance.[25]
Alongside professional jewellers, women continued to produce hairwork pieces in their homes, often learning from instruction manuals like Mark Campbell’s 1867 Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work, which took further advantage of the craft’s popularity by advertising the sale of the metal findings that were required to finish woven hair jewellery. Men were public “professionals” of the craft who sold training and books to domestic female practitioners and consumers, but women were still able to practice hairwork as a form of historical memory separate from public, formal, masculine histories.[26]
Figure 3: The British Museum, pair of plaited hairwork bracelets displaying method described in Campbell’s Self Instructor, c. 1830-1850.
Interest in hairwork was already beginning to decline by the 1880s, and the turn of the century brought an end to the cultural fixation on death. The hairwork trend came to a definitive end with the onset of the First World War, when the mere number of dead and the material excess required by earlier mourning customs rendered the practice impossible. Changing gender roles as women entered the workforce in even greater numbers and shorter women’s hairstyles ensured the end of the craft’s popularity.[27] From the beginning of the twentieth century onward, mourning objects were less important in active mourning practices but were still passed down in families as heirlooms and tools to remember the individuals they signified.
Although hairwork jewellery was generally only available to the higher social classes, engaging with the craft as a valued piece of material culture rather than an historical oddity provides a fuller understanding of women’s roles during the Victorian era. Because hair does not decay, we are left with an enormous archive of deeply personal hairwork pieces created by Victorian women that simultaneously act as individual memorial objects and as a network that documents an otherwise ignored history; in the words of Melissa Zielke, this network allowed women to “realize a myth-making space outside of formal, public commemorative rituals.”[28] Aligning hairwork with domestic activities such as needlework and knitting rehabilitates the craft’s eccentric image, but mourning hairwork must ultimately be understood as a distinct art form that existed at the locus of interaction between craft, commodity, class, gender, and death.
Notes
(Detailed citations bolded)
Julie-Marie Strange, “‘She Cried a Very Little’: Death, Grief and Mourning in Working-Class Culture, c. 1880-1914,” Social History 27, no. 2 (May 2002): 147.
Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 63.
Michelle Iwen, “Reading Material Culture: British Women’s Position and the Death Trade in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Women and the Material Culture of Death, ed. Maureen Daily Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (New York: Routledge, 2020), 1.
Iwen, “Reading Material Culture,” 4.
Johannis Tsoumas, “Mourning Jewelry in Late Georgian and Victorian Britain: A World of Fantasy and Tears,” Convergences—Journal of Research and Arts Education 15, no. 30 (November 2022): 123-24.
Iwen, “Reading Material Culture,” 15.
Tsoumas, “Mourning Jewelry,” 128.
Tsoumas, “Mourning Jewelry,” 129.
Deborah Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry, and Death Culture,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (2011): 129.
Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us,” 129.
Rachel Harmeyer, “Objects of Immortality: Hairwork and Mourning in Victorian Visual Culture,” Proceedings of the Art of Death and Dying Symposium (2012): 41.
Rebecca N. Mitchell, “Death Becomes Her: On the Progressive Potential of Victorian Mourning,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 11 (December 2013): 598.
Mitchell, “Death Becomes Her,” 596.
Harmeyer, “Objects of Immortality,” 35.
Shu-chuan Yan, “The Art of Working in Hair: Hair Jewellery and Ornamental Handiwork in Victorian Britain,” The Journal of Modern Craft 12, no. 2 (July 2019): 128.
Yan, “The Art of Working in Hair,” 128.
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 58.
Yan, “The Art of Working in Hair,” 130.
Mitchell, “Death Becomes Her,” 598.
Mitchell, “Death Becomes Her,” 611.
Strange, “‘She Cried a Very Little’,” 157.
Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us,” 129.
Yan, “The Art of Working in Hair,” 137.
Harmeyer, “Objects of Immortality,” 42.
Melissa Zielke, “Forget-Me-Nots: Victorian Women, Mourning, and the Construction of a Feminine Historical Memory,” Material Culture Review 58, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 58.
Zielke, “Forget-Me-Nots,” 54.
Mitchell, “Death Becomes Her,” 613.
Zielke, “Forget-Me-Nots,” 52.
