Women Art Workers provides a new social and cultural history of the Arts and Crafts movement which offers unprecedented insight into how women constructed alternative, creative lifestyles and disseminated the ethos of the social importance of the Arts and Crafts across new local, national, and international spheres of influence.

Women art workers constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that Arts and Crafts solely revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, this book instead offers a new social and cultural account, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. From their precarious gendered positions, they opened up the movement to a wider range of social backgrounds and interests, and redirected its radical potential into contemporary women-centred causes.

This book constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, it instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. Thomas provides unprecedented insight into how women navigated authoritative roles as 'art workers' by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial and domestic. Through examination of newly discovered institutional archives and private papers, Thomas elucidates the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles.