INTRODUCTION. Labour of Love: New Approaches to Palestinian Embroidery at The Palestinian Museum features 80 dresses and accessories. Archival photographs, posters, paintings, music, and a video place these objects in their historical context.
Below follows a generous and thoughtful conversation with Rachel Dedman, the exhibition’s Curator. In it, she discusses the show's origins; expands on its themes; offers insights into the economic and social conditions of the otherwise anonymous embroiderers; and expands on the aptness of material history to frame Palestine’s mosaic tale.
The exhibition will run until January 31, 2019. For more information, please contact media@palmuseum.org.
------------------------------------------------------
JS: This is the second show you curated for the Museum. How does Labour of Love expand upon At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery, the 2016 satellite exhibition you staged in Beirut at Dar el-Nimer for Arts and Culture?
RD: At the Seams was the Palestinian Museum’s first ‘satellite’ exhibition, an attempt to render the museum transnational, and to reach the huge Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon. I took this second iteration of the exhibition – at the Museum’s ‘home’ site in Birzeit, Palestine – as an opportunity to reflect critically on the previous show, deepen my research, and engage with local objects and experts in Palestine. This iteration, Labour of Love, features over 300 objects, drawn predominantly from local Palestinian collections (the vast majority of which were not in the first show).
While At the Seams aimed to unfold and establish an alternative timeline of Palestinian dress, following a linear chronology, for Labour of Love I took a more dynamic, thematic curatorial approach to its structure. A dramatic ‘forest’ of historic dresses from all over Palestine occupies the spine of the exhibition, and key themes of gender, symbol, labour, commodity and class are used as lenses for rich, critical, and complex explorations of Palestinian history and politics. The show brings together posters, paintings, textiles, video, documents and archival images, alongside clothing, in order to argue for an expanded understanding of embroidery's role in Palestinian culture, and as catalysts for a critical look at how that culture is constructed.
JS: How does it “address vital issues in Palestinian consciousness”?, to use the words of Zina Jardaneh, Chair of the Board of the Palestinian Museum. What are these issues?
RD: I cannot speak for Zina, but for me the exhibition directly tackles critical issues of the day in Palestine – particularly around gender, labour and class. While embroidery, dress and textiles constitute the content of the exhibition and project, for me the real subject at stake is Palestinian history and society. My approach and aim as a curator has been to use clothing as an intimate, universally-accessible vehicle for the unearthing of historical narratives around gender, labour and class, and critical discussion of how they operate today.
Despite appearances, embroidery in Palestine is about so much more than ‘heritage’. My work argues that, since 1948, embroidery in Palestine has acted as a vehicle for forms of romantic and active nationalism, militant resistance, nascent economic power and opposition to the infrastructural and cultural violence of the Israeli state. The exhibition uses material culture as a mode of connecting seemingly disparate histories, exploring the tensions at stake in the shift from embroidery’s origins as rural, personal practice, to its circulation as product in a neo-liberal, global marketplace.
The exhibition deconstructs the loaded associations that exist around embroidery today, placing dresses in conversation with archival photographs, literature, posters, paintings, and newly-commissioned video amplifying the voices of those women and men who continue to embroider today. In unfurling the complex web of political, social and economic dynamics woven into textile, we hope to ask: how is identity – national, personal, political – constructed in Palestine? To what extent are certain narratives hinged on ideas of the female body? What is at stake in the reproduction of traditional material? What kind of labour does embroidery require and address? And where is the Palestinian-ness of such practice located, if anywhere?
JS: How do you define material history in the context of this exhibition? To ask the above question from another angle, why is this an effective way to examine the history and address the vital issues of Palestine?
RD: I define material culture in anthropological terms; I take all clothing and embroidery to be enmeshed in a nexus of gender norms, socio-economic forces and dynamics related to labour and class. For example, the garments we wear today are indicative of patterns of contemporary industry (the industrial American history of denim; or the mass-production of cheap clothing in China), of exploitative labour (chains of production leading back to ill-made factories and precarious workforces in India or Bangladesh), of the politics of trade and the aspirational nature of the homogenised global fashion industry (contingent upon gendered and racialised notions of beauty), etc etc.
By virtue of having been made by people, and worn on the body, embroidery and dress are inherently political, and can speak to the conditions of their making, and to the broader context of their wear. The public nature of clothing means it is connected to the performance of identity, and in Palestine the construction and perpetuation of national identity became deeply urgent after the Nakba of 1948. The exhibition charts the ways in which embroidery and its historical connection to rural female life became politicised after 1948. The image of the fellahi woman in embroidered dress, circulated in poster and painting, became part of a visual vocabulary of nationalism, and these women flattened into anonymised signifier of an idealised Palestinian past. At the same time, economic exigencies in the 1960s and 1970s shifted embroidery from wear on the body to display in the home, as something produced predominantly as a commodity. This production was predicated on the labour of the same rural, working class (now refugee, or displaced) women who were vaunted symbolically, but who could no longer afford to own the embroidery they made, as wealthy women became the ones to perform Palestinian identity or solidarity in public. These are just a couple of threads running through the exhibition, and such histories of class, of the use and visualisation of the female body, and so on, are articulated powerfully through dress.
JS: What’s the genesis of the exhibition?
RD: I was invited in 2014 by then-director of the Palestinian Museum, Jack Persekian, to make an exhibition about Palestinian embroidery. In part the intention of the Museum board was to honour women like Malak Al-Husseini Abdulrahim, who was (and remains) deeply involved in embroidery organisation INAASH since the late 1960s, and has a collection of embroidered dresses, which appear in both exhibitions.
Apart from that starting point – to meet Malak and hear her story (she, along with so many women I met, is an inspiring character) – I was given freedom to research, curate and develop the exhibition as I wished, in conversation with others within and outside the Museum. The result was four years of fieldwork, research, film-making, writing and collaboration with a huge community of collectors, experts, artists and embroiderers.
JS: What was your criteria for each dress and accessory chosen?
RD: This varied significantly, and rarely did I have set criteria around what to include. Rather, the experience of going to a private collection or institution was inspiring in itself – especially the interaction with the collector or curator. The keepers of such collections always know their objects intimately, and are extremely generous in sharing their knowledge, insight and stories about the origins or significances of their objects with me. With hand-made clothing, a great deal is down to guesswork – we cannot know exactly where or when things were made. This actually helps to collapse the museological pressures of defining an object to a singular time or place.
Rather, I sought items that can tell stories: this humble dress might not have the most perfect embroidery, but the patches at the chest speak to how mothers handled breastfeeding in agricultural life. This dress is patched up oddly – close inspection reveals it was enlarged with a stretch of fabric from a UN-issued bag of flour, suggesting it was donated from one (slightly smaller) woman to another (slightly taller) after the Nakba of 1948. This strangely-shaped embroidered pouch or holder seems familiar – made for a small transistor radio, it tells us how farmers passed their long days in the field in the 1930s and 1940s.
My attempt is always to reorient typical approaches to embroidery exhibitions in Palestine and elsewhere: the tendency is usually to represent Palestinian heritage along the lines of ‘this dress is from here, this dress is from there’, using only the most spectacular examples from each town. While that is certainly important, and the exhibition is founded upon decades of research and reconstruction of such histories by many people, I am much more interested in building a complex and rich picture of what dress can tell us about people’s lives and relationships to the broader forces governing twentieth century Palestine.
JS: How did Palestinian embroidery become a symbol of national heritage as well as a focus for protest and commodification?
RD: In the years following the Nakba, embroidery became a key signifer of Palestinian rurality, antiquity and endurance in the face of Israeli erasure and violence. Women’s bodies—as carriers of embroidery and the associated (if conflicting) virtues of chastity and maternity—were key vessels for such symbolism. Alongside images of the city, the olive tree, the harvest and the sickle, the Palestinian village woman was a figure taken up widely by artists in the 1970s and 1980s, whose committed ‘Liberation Art’ contributed to the PLO’s broader revival of Palestinian heritage and folk craft. These images often became the basis of graphic posters that circulated widely among the public. Though the Nakba eroded many women’s connection to agriculture, and changed their relationship to embroidery, post-Nakba paintings and posters amplified their connection to both: rendering women sometimes literally flattened emblems of history or resistance. At the same time, embroidery continued to be made by women in villages and camps – producing the more homogenised shapes, and innovative designs of the ‘New Dress’ or ‘Camp Dress’ from the 1950s onwards. The simultaneous continuation and politicisation of embroidery as practice paved the way for its use in protest. The economic poverty and displacement induced by the Nakba prompted embroidery’s shift into waged labour and commercial sale (rather than something made by a woman for her own wear, mostly outside of market concerns). Embroidery as work was increasingly organised by NGOs, which were founded to provide employment for women who needed it.
JS: The Love portion of the exhibition’s title bears several meanings, right? What might they be? How do you connect embroidery to love and both of them to politics?
RD: The love of the title nods to the emotion and passion so many in Palestine feel for embroidery and its practice. I have been moved and awestruck by women who devote their lives to embroidery’s preservation and renewal in the face of Israeli appropriation and the changing priorities of a contemporary world. In such urgent scenarios, love feels like a radical political act.
At the same time, the love in the exhibition’s title is inextricable from labour, and my adoption of this phrase was intended to acknowledge and exhibit respect for the sheer work that embroidery constitutes. A labour of love is something done for more than mere remunerative reward, and which in spite of, or because of that, involves particular dedication and commitment. A labour of love suggests something greater at stake than its production; I felt it applied beautifully to the conflicting dynamics that govern Palestinian embroidery’s making.
JS: What are several stories that the exhibition tells?
RD: There are so many it is hard to choose! Below are some of my personal favourites…
Dolfus, Mieg and Cie, a French thread company, first appeared in the Palestinian market in the 1930s. DMC’s cotton thread was made mechanically, offering embroiderers a range and consistency of colour. This slowly eroded the practice of hand-dying silk thread, ending the gradations of shade historically present on women’s dresses (you might traditionally have found 12+ shades of red on a single dress, as each dye session produced a different tone). However, despite the loss of a historic mode of making, DMC’s cataloguing of colour led to firmer classification of local embroidery by the women making it. They began to define their local shades by number – this village was known by this shade of DMC red, a neighbouring town by another. Shopkeepers came to know intimately which village used which numbers, to the extent of being able to give a woman the correct shade of red thread upon hearing only the name of her natal village. This practice continued late into the twentieth century, and in diaspora, allowing women who were exiled from their homes by the Nakba to maintain a historic connection to their village, through the thread they used in their work. For me this speaks to the complexity of external, colonial influence on embroidery – on the one hand ending a historic practice, on the other contributing to embroidery’s locality and particularity in the face of homogenisation.
Having studio photographs taken in embroidered dress became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. For the descendents of Palestinian villagers—those who would have once worn embroidery every day—studio portraiture became a mode of embodying their heritage. In the 1910s and 1920s, however, it was Palestinians of a very different class who wore embroidered costume for the camera. Middle-class urbanites, or tourists to the Holy Land, would visit studios and dress up in embroidered costume for amusement, posing with the assorted trappings of Middle-Eastern antiquity. While the female fellahi became an idealised Palestinian figure after the Nakba, for the urban elite before 1948 she was an exotic character to perform in auto-Orientalising play. Such archival images speak to the class distinctions between city- and rural-dwelling Palestinians in the early twentieth century: what was for one Palestinian woman her most treasured possession, was for another an exotic novelty worn for the camera.
Despite embroidery's status as a domestic handicraft, local industry and international trade in textiles played a significant role in its production. From the mid-nineteenth century, cotton, linen and wool were made in Palestine and locally woven in the main towns, with other textiles coming from Syria, Egypt and Europe. Village and bedouin women would dye their linen or calico base fabrics with indigo. Cloth was soaked several times to get the strongest shades, light blue cloth was therefore cheaper, and dark blue cloth more prestigious. The British Mandate and increased import from Europe and Asia brought new fabrics into Palestine. Foreign cottons were enjoyed for their novelty. Some nineteenth century village dresses included panels or scraps of European cotton or precious velvet in eye-catching positions. Taqsireh jackets of Bethlehem and Jerusalem were frequently lined in British cottons as a sign of wealth and status.
As part of the PLO’s revival of Palestinian heritage, travelling exhibitions were organised abroad throughout the 1970s and 1980s, managed by artists Tamam al-Akhal and Ismail Shammout under the auspices of the arts and heritage section of the PLO. Such exhibitions—of which embroidered dresses were a central component—visited Moscow, Leipzig, East Germany, Madrid and Japan, among many others, and were often the backdrop to high-profile political meetings (Yasser Arafat meeting the King of Spain, for instance). Dresses were worn by models in presentations or dabke performances, and presented to local dignitaries as gifts. Used as backdrops to international political meetings, the exhibitions used Palestinian heritage as a form of advancing soft diplomacy abroad, simultaneously educating a foreign public about Palestinian history. In these contexts, embroidered dresses hovered between museum objects, preserved behind glass for audience scrutiny, and active costumes—worn for dances, sweated in, moved and jostled and affected by the body. In both cases, they were divorced from their original contexts and instrumentalised in the service of public articulations of nationalism.
JS: How did women use clothing as protest and solidarity in the First Intifada?
RD: In 1987, when the First Intifada erupted, embroidery took on fresh power as a tool of resistance. When Palestinian flags were confiscated in protests, and Palestinian colours banned in public, 'Intifada Dresses' were made by the women of the West Bank, who embroidered motifs of explicit nationalism on thobes of gunmetal greys, blues and blacks. On one spectacular piece from Widad Kawar's collection, a white dove takes flight across the chest panel, a rifle held between its claws. Others feature the Dome of the Rock, the Ship of Return or the letters P-L-O, mingled among traditional motifs. As garments, worn against the skin, they rendered women’s very bodies sites of political resistance, and accompanied increased political visibility for village and refugee women. Embroidery, however, is an unlikely tool of protest. Unlike street graffiti or painted banners, the hand-stitched is the antithesis of immediacy or spontaneity. By its nature laboured, private and slow, the embroidery of the Intifada would have been months and years in the making, under extremely difficult conditions. These extraordinary Intifada Dresses thus reflected the enduring nature of Palestinian resistance, and the extended temporality of all embroidery.
JS: Did Palestinian men use embroidery as a similar form of protest?
RD: Embroidery in Palestine is fundamentally associated with the feminine, and men generally do not admit to embroidering for either work or leisure. Nor would men have worn embroidery in public political protest, though they did embroider under different conditions. As political prisoners in Israeli prisons, particularly in the years around the First Intifada and into the 1990s, Palestinian men embroidered with creativity and pride. In the indisputably masculine space of the prison, embroidery became a licit practice, done to counter boredom, to resist their incarceration, and to make gifts for loved-ones. During periods when craft materials are banned from entering prisons, the very making of these pieces requires clever improvisation of tools and materials, as prisoners would unravel threads from their clothing, use medicine as chemical dye, and cardboard as bases for their designs. The attendant objects are wonderful in their mingling of expressions of national pride with romantic love – made for mothers, wives, and daughters, for International Women’s Day, or Mother’s Day. They challenge simplistic notions of embroidery as ‘women’s work’ or a practice incompatible with the masculine; they reveal embroidery’s gendering as conditional upon social norms, rather than intrinsic to the practice. Although both ‘resistance’ and embroidery tend to be gendered, such objects trouble the distinctions and the definitions of both, and suggest that while embroidery has, as we have seen, contributed to the construction of gendered roles for women, it has also mediated in their refusal.
JS: What have been women’s responses to the exhibition? Can you detect a generational consensus?
RD: I live in Beirut, and left Palestine a few weeks after we opened. So I haven’t been there to gauge long-term responses first-hand over the last few months, and I wouldn’t want to speak on behalf of visitors. However, a common response among older women is an emotional reaction to the beauty of the dresses, and the sight of many thobes together. People often respond with personal stories and memories, stirred by their interactions. Many others comment that there is so much they never knew about embroidery, and objects they had never seen. Despite being something ubiquitous in Palestine, embroidery’s lesser-known histories are rarely explored in public, and my job has been to uncover these.
I have personally been blown away by the positive critical reception my curation and approach have received. This has been deeply satisfying because there were particular gaps in At the Seams that I wanted to address here, particularly around the ethics of embroidery’s production today, so I am glad I managed to include that research in this exhibition.
JS: How does the exhibition participate in and contribute to discussions about a woman’s control of and rights over her own body?
RD: I think it does so predominantly about labour – and the precarious conditions in which women who produce embroidery work today. (Author's note: See below the images for specific details about these conditions as well as general information about embroidery organisations.) The exhibition also critically traces and reveals the ways in which the female body – particularly that of the rural, fellahi woman – have been flattened and politicised in the service of nationalist narratives, mediated by the image of embroidery as a surface/signifier.
JS: What was the biggest challenge you faced as you brought the exhibition to fruition? Your biggest surprise, delightful or otherwise?
RD: The greatest challenge was convincing the board of the importance of being critical about the contemporary embroidery industry today, and the class dimensions of that labour. They were reticent about us being so honest about the problematic conditions in which NGOs operate and participate.
Wonderful surprises abounded when I found exciting material or amazing objects.
JS: How did you locate and collect the dresses and accessories? Did any restoration have to be done?
RD: The dresses and objects of the exhibition are drawn from over 40 collections and archives, local and international, and were tracked down over years of research by me and my team. We owe our lenders enormous gratitude, they have been extremely generous with items of great personal significance.
We did some minor restoration of one or two garments, through the fantastic team at Dar Al-Tifel Al-Arabi, led by Baha Jubeh, who was also the project registrar at the Museum, but the vast majority were shown in the condition they arrived in. I only selected objects that could safely withstand public exhibition for 6 months or more.
JS: What was your biggest hope as you conceived and then mounted the exhibition? Did you have an ideal viewer in mind?
RD: I did not work with a particular viewer in mind; I tend to hope that the exhibition can be accessible, fascinating and meaningful to anyone, and I write and curate with that in mind. Someone who reads or speaks English or Arabic will take more from the show through its text, but I hope some of the connections I am making – for example, the circulation of embroidery as an image, shifting from the historical dress, into graphic poster, via painting – are articulated physically or visually, and thus implied without reading a word.
I had many hopes for the project. Not least to do justice to the weight of the subject, and the meaningful nature of the content – as I have said, embroidery is close to the hearts of many in Palestine. I also wanted to respect and amplify the voices of those who taught me a great deal along the way, particularly the embroiderers themselves. Through my fieldwork I met many women in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan who continue to embroider today, and who shared much about what this active, living craft continues to mean to those who make it. Their voices appear throughout the exhibition in the form of video, filmed by artist Maeve Brennan, and giving space to their opinions – of those who rarely play a public role in the celebration of heritage – was important to me. I hope they feel we did them proud.
JS: What would be the one takeaway that you would want the serious, focused, time-is-no-object visitor to take from the show?
RD: I hope people will emerge with the idea that embroidery is not fixed. We long to think of cultural heritage as static and rooted, as passing unaffected from one generation to another. In my experience, this view is closely cherished in Palestine, where it takes on an understandable political urgency.
In reality, however, historic practices rarely work like this. If a traditional practice has persisted through time it is usually because it has been adaptable, mutable, flexible – that it has remained relevant to and articulate of, people’s ongoing lived experience. The exhibition argues that Palestinian embroidery, like almost all cultural practices, has shifted and transformed with the realities of the times, and the lives of those making it. It is that ability to transform and be transformative that makes dress and clothing so fascinating, and such a powerful catalyst for storytelling and the critical work of historiography. Embracing this approach allows, I venture, for a critical, open look at history and contemporary society. I have been enormously grateful for the opportunity to make this exhibition.
Embroidered 'everyday' dress from the collection of Widad Kawar, photograph by Kayane Antreassian for the Palestinian Museum
Embroidered dress from Ramallah, from the collection of Maha Abu Shosheh, photograph by Kayane Antreassian for the Palestinian Museum
Ikat jellayeh coat from Galilee, from the collection of Birzeit University Museum, photograph by Kayane Antreassian for the Palestinian Museum
Detail of an embroidered dress, photograph by Kayane Antreassian for the Palestinian Museum
Detail of an embroidered dress, photograph by Kayane Antreassian for the Palestinian Museum
Hatim al-Araj, two decorative pieces, 2005, cardboard, felt, embroidery, beads, sequins, made in Ofer prison, courtesy of Nawal al-Araj
Photograph, 1973, from the archive of Inaash al-Mukhayyam, courtesy of INAASH
Photograph, 1973, from the archive of Inaash al-Mukhayyam, courtesy of INAASH
Burhan Karkoutly, 'Mother and Fighter', c.1978, published by the General Union for Palestinian Women, courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archive (PPPA)
Najiyah El Helou from Bethlehem, taken in a studio in Beirut, Lebanon, from the Family Album of Haya Rizik, the Palestinian Museum
WHAT IS AN EMBROIDERY ORGANISATION?
An organisation that produces Palestinian embroidery!
As part of Labour of Love, curator Rachel Dedman studied over 100 embroidery-producing organisations, recording each organisation’s profile, history and funding model, to whom they sell, the services they offer their embroiderers, their prices, and institutional partners.
The research suggests that, irrespective of age, location and organising principles, most embroidery organisations function with similar aims and similar structures, and sell to shared markets.
Usually not-for-profit, organisations pay women to stitch products that are then sold to consumers. Profits are funneled into other services for embroiderers and used to cover running costs. As a generator of income, embroidery offers degrees of independence to women who might otherwise have little, but organisations’ labour structures are also embedded within a nexus of social and economic inequalities.
This research has involved fieldwork and interviews with more than 40 embroiderers across Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as academic research and secondary reading. Much of the information on the 100 organisations studied here is publicly available through institutions’ websites, publications and annual reports. Please see At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery for a version of this database, and elaboration of these arguments.
WHERE ARE MOST EMBROIDERY ORGANISATIONS BASED?
Two-thirds of Palestinian embroidery organisations are based in Palestine, and the majority of the rest in countries with large Palestinian refugee populations, such as Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. However, Palestinian embroidered products are sold all over the world through hundreds of NGOs, shops, and partnerships.
Countries where Palestinian Embroidery is Sold.
Palestine
Jordan
Lebanon
UAE
Egypt
Syria
Kuwait
Tunisia
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
UK
USA
Canada
Germany
France
Italy
Belgium
Luxembourg
Switzerland
Norway
Australia
New Zealand
Japan
Brazil
Chile
HOW OLD ARE EMBROIDERY ORGANISATIONS?
Established NGOs have been working for decades. However, less than 16% of embroidery organisations—whether or not they are still operating today—were founded before 1970. 64% of embroidery organisations were founded after 1989.
Why were so many embroidery organisations established from the 1990s onwards?
The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 facilitated an increase in foreign funding reaching Palestine and made it easier for NGOs to work in Palestine. The First Intifada also left many local families in need of employment.
The increase of embroidery projects continued into the new millennium. Nearly half of all embroidery organisations were founded between 2000 and 2016. This is likely connected to the availability of the Internet, allowing for online sales to customers all over the world.
HOW MUCH DOES EMBROIDERY COST?
As a handmade product that requires a great amount of time and labour, Palestinian embroidery is an expensive commodity.
Based on prices advertised by the organisations we surveyed, despite the ubiquity of small embroidered products (key rings, purses, bookmarks, bags), only 30% of all embroidery sold by organisations costs less than $50 (US) per item.
More than one-third of embroidery, 37%, sells for more than $150 per piece. 16% sells for more than $300, with 5% selling for over $500.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE EMBROIDERERS WORKING FOR ORGANISATIONS?
Are the women who make embroidery being appropriately compensated for their time and labour?
Some organisations are registered as Fair Trade, and others pay local living wages. However, our research shows that on average, women receive only 10-25% of the total price the embroidery is sold for. That means an item sold for $50 will earn its embroiderer between $5 and $12.50, on average, for what may have been days of work.
The result is that women who make embroidery cannot afford to own or wear what they produce and remain dependent on other forms of income and support.
Many organisations operate a ‘pay-per-piece’ policy. This means that the more a woman embroiders, the more money she earns. But this precarious system leaves her vulnerable. When she most needs money—to look after a sick child or support an ageing parent—she is least able to work and may not get paid at all.
21% of all embroidery organisations in Palestine are based in Occupied Gaza, yet embroiderers there earn least of everyone. This is due to multiple dynamics, but in general, embroidery NGOs are dependent on a healthy market: when demand is low, less work is available. As poverty levels rise in an area, more organisations are established to offer women employment. However, if embroidery businesses are competing in the same market, prices deflate, women are paid less, and poverty is not necessarily alleviated.
Embroiderers in Lebanon earn between $33 and $100 per month.
Embroiderers in the Occupied West Bank, Occupied Jerusalem and 1948 Occupied Palestine earn between $50 and $150 per month.
Embroiderers in Occupied Gaza earn between $40 and $50 per month.
These figures reflect increased numbers of embroiderers in the market since 1989. As supply has risen, but demand has remained stable, less embroidery work is available to women, so prices have fallen and wages with them.
WHERE DOES THE REST OF THE MONEY GO?
There is a gulf between the prices organisations charge and the salaries paid to women. If an organisation is for-profit, the company absorbs this money as profit. If the organisation is not-for-profit, the difference is funneled back into the NGO, covering their running costs and funding other kinds of support for beneficiaries.
In connecting 'beneficiaries' to resources and services, embroidery organisations provide women and their families access to vital services. However, such services rarely offer women new ways of positioning their social and political selves in relation to family and society.
As a decentralised, cottage industry, embroidery is flexible work. Allowing women to earn money without leaving their children, embroidery is credited with easing Palestinian women into new contexts of labour after the Nakba. Some large organisations provide shared spaces for women to embroider together. However, most embroiderers work from home, and have to juggle embroidery, domestic work, and the emotional labour of household and family. For these women, embroidery concentrates their lives in a single space. While this works well for some women, others may benefit from the opportunity to leave the house, or to engage in work that is less explicitly feminised.