Dorcas legacies, Dorcas futures: Textile legacies and the formation of identities in ‘habitus’ spaces

Feminist legacies of the handmade are visible through the rhetoric of the material archive. For a textile practitioner this might traditionally have been through the creation of the sampler, a physical display created to demonstrate the technical skill or creative prowess of the maker. The voices of hidden textile practices might also be revealed by oral stories and narratives, which lie dormant in newspaper listings and archives. Other textile legacies are embedded within the modes of transmission of knowledge contained within spaces or other ‘habitus’ that traditionally sit outside the boundaries of more traditional institutional spaces of textile learning. Textiles as objects hold meaning, are related to different aspects of memory and knowledge, and generate significance by and for different social, gendered and cultural groups globally. This article explores how Dorcas Clubs – a charitable organization of philanthropic women formed at the beginning of the nineteenth century – did this through the migratory experience of women, whether through notions of class boundary, physical space or travel. It is argued that Dorcas Societies, through their transformation,