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  • Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats ed by Hinda Mandell
  • Ashley Hopkins-Benton (bio)
Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats Edited by Hinda Mandell . New York: Rowman & Littlefield, American Association for State and Local History Book Series , 2019. 339 pages, 6″ x 9″. $55.00 cloth, $52.10 e-book.

Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats is a collection of essays highlighting and examining women's use of textile craft to express their views and protest injustice. The essays also explore the implications of their actions, both for their intended political, social, and economic outcomes and their place in history. The collection was edited by Hinda Mandell, an associate professor in the School of Communications at the University of Rochester and a crafter who uses yarn to "explore and commemorate the suffragist and abolitionist legacies in Rochester, New York." 1 Essayists include activists personally engaged in using craft for protest, as well as scholars in a variety of fields who place these actions in the context of the past, examine their real social and political impacts, and explore ways of interpreting them.

The essays are divided into three parts. Part 1, "Crafting Histories," provides snapshots of the use of handiwork through history for activism and modern use of craft to commemorate history, as well as examinations of the interpretation of textiles as resistance. In part 2, "Politics of Craft," authors examine the actual impact of craft activism. Part 3, "Crafting Culture Conversations," focuses on recent craft activism activities that engage communities in conversation.

The essays in Crafting Dissent are primarily focused on the United States, although several have international focus (Great Britain, Australia, and India). For readers in New [End Page 387] York State, there are three essays of particular interest. In "Finding Frederick and Anna Douglass's Parking Lot: Public Art's Role in Combating Historical Erasure and Urban Renewal," Hinda Mandell recounts her personal journey using public installations of crocheted work to spark interest in the former site of Frederick and Anna Douglass's home. Struck by the lack of a memorial at a parking lot for which the home was razed, Mandell began a process of historical research and interaction with the site through yarn installations. These actions led to formal recognition of the site and erection of a historical marker. This essay highlights craft as both a means for commemorating a place-based African American history, and as a way for enacting change to ensure that history is remembered long term.

Shannon Dehoff and Jill Swiencicki discuss a project with national focus, which was staged in New York, in "'Consent Trumps Everything': The Clothesline Art Project and the Election Politics of Sexual Assault." In traditional applications of the Clothesline Project (created in 1990), participants decorate shirts to address domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault, and the shirts are then mounted on clotheslines in public spaces. In this 2016 installation at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, planners sought to "publicly condemn Donald Trump's sexual assault discourse" immediately before the 2016 presidential election. 2 In doing so, they tweaked a usual rule of the Clothesline Project, to not name an attacker or rapist not formally charged with a crime. The intended result of the clothesline, to spark thought and conversation about this form of misogyny, remained the same as more traditional iterations of the Clothesline Project.

Finally, "Stitching Dissent: From the Suffragists to Pussyhat Politics," by Anne Bruder, discusses both the embrace and rejection of textile arts by early women's rights reformers (many based in New York) and by contemporary women at the Women's March, and the many associations textiles carry within both movements.

While the content of the rest of the essays is not focused on New York specifically, our state's rich history of textile production and activism lends itself to many connections. For example, one can find a continuation in the timeline of struggle for fair labor practices and wages in the garment industry in both "The Entanglement of Consumption, Commerce, and Craft Activism," by Hannah Bush, and "How...

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