Page - 114 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

114 | Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 95–122 cates a probable date around 1830, Goggin proposes that it was made around 1839.43 This description of the main aspects of the embroidering of samplers as a cultural material practice has sought to emphasise the significance of needle- work in the education of girls and the role of religious references in this prac- tice. In the nineteenth century, embroidering became a means of inculcating ideals of femininity and of what it meant to be a woman. As Rozsika Parker demonstrated in her study The Subversive Stitch (1984), the teaching of needle- work in schools and families naturalised values linked to women. She explains: In this book I examine the historical processes by which embroidery became identified with a particular set of characteristics, and consigned to women’s hand. By mapping the relationship between the history of embroidery and changing notions of what constituted feminine behaviour from the Middle Age to the twentieth century, we can see how the art became implicated in the creation of femininity across classes, and that the development of ideals and feminine behaviour determined the style and iconography of needle- work. To know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women.44 Another sampler from the V&A collection expresses very well the ideals linked to women and embroidery at the time Elizabeth Parker stitched her autobiog- raphy (fig. 6). The sampler text reads: Seek to be good but aim not to be great, A womans noblest station is retreat, Her fairest virtues fly from public sight, Domestic worth still shuns too strong a light.45 The text praising modesty and reservation as female virtues is associated with the Tree of Life, Adam, Eve, and the tempting snake, who offered Eve the fa- mous fruit. Elizabeth Parker’s sampler reproduces the virtues of modesty and reserva- tion, while it simultaneously subverts them by clearly expressing her fights 43 See http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O70506/sampler-parker-elizabeth/ [accessed 20 April 2020] and Browne/Wearden 1999, 108; Goggin 2002. 44 Parker 2019, ix. 45 https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O355537/sampler-bailey-jane/ [accessed 20 April 2020]; Parker 2019, 165.