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This panel contributes to our current textile moment in art history by continuing the feminist emphasis on woman makers but shifting the focus from individual handmade craft and its purported femininity to a different model of industrial-scale textile production under authoritarian regimes. This shift puts pressure on the category of craft and on the politics of textile production. The celebration of textile art as a means of expressing a liberated female identity—and often indigenous or otherwise marginalized identities—gives way to a different form of mass production and mass politics often directly hostile to, or appropriative of, such marginalized identities. Within such mass systems, woman makers could find support for their creativity within the socialist or even fascist collective, while struggling with the repressive underside of such undertakings.

Max Boersma’s paper troubles the feminist optimism associated with the abstract textile practice of modernist artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp by examining the potential coloniality of her use of ethnographic motifs and her outsourcing of the execution of her designs to others, setting the stage for papers considering women laboring within three different authoritarian systems of mass production: Anna Dumont’s account of the synthetic textile company SNIA Viscosa and women’s experience of its company town in fascist Italy; Smaranda Ciubotaro’s analysis of “the female imaginarium” in the Dacia Textile Enterprise in communist Bucharest, Romania; and Christina Kiaer’s examination of anonymity and collectivity amongst female colleagues at the Red Rose silk factory in later Soviet Moscow.