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Between 1876 and 1920, American women fought against established Victorian values for the opportunity to work outside the home. Yet the contributions of female Arts and Crafts workers to this fight have been repeatedly overlooked, even by their contemporaries. Arts and Crafts women encountered opportunities comparable to those available via club work and volunteerism, which allowed women to move past gender barriers and enter the working world through meaningful non-profit careers. Similarly, female Arts and Crafts workers used socially acceptable artistic opportunities to sharpen skills that were not learned at home. Under the Arts and Crafts umbrella, women converted traditional ideals into non-traditional opportunities, creating a balance between the values they had been taught and the opportunities they wanted to pursue. This balance represented a middle ground between work and home, where female artisans gained important, relevant work experience without threatening established social norms.
For women seeking work outside the home, the Arts and Crafts Movement created timely opportunity for a wide array of employment. The movement's dual focus on social reform and the design of the home allowed women to bridge the gap between working for a better society and working for pay. Because traditional “women's work” was so closely tied to Arts and Crafts ideology, women were able to enter non-traditional occupations within the movement without being questioned by society, even if those positions had no connection to art production or social reform. In the end, women who made careers out of artistic production were also businesswomen, executives, inventors, architects, writers and laborers.
The complexity of women's participation in the Arts and Crafts Movement raises two questions, first, how does the Arts and Crafts Movement create new opportunities for women and second, how do these opportunities allow women to influence the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. This study attempts to examine the issues both generally, through comparisons between women working inside and outside the movement, and specifically, through case studies of notable figures. The comparisons discuss the various ways that the Arts and Crafts Movement allowed women to enter the working world without threatening established social values. This emphasis on the obstacles women faced in procuring employment outside the home demonstrates how the Arts and Crafts Movement removed or mitigated obstacles preventing women from achieving their full potential. In supplement, the case studies provide concrete examples of how the Arts and Crafts Movement facilitated the professional careers of women in the decorative arts. This two pronged approach, both microcosmic and macrocosmic in focus, parallels the diversity of women's participation in the Arts and Crafts Movement and yields the most complex understanding of women's roles in the decorative arts to date.