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Selling Education by the Yard: Handlooms for Technical Education at the Philadelphia Textile School, 1880 — 1900
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The Philadelphia Textile School, founded in 1884, was the first major institution to systematize the instruction of textile design and manufacturing in the United States. The school provided practical experience on hand and power looms to teach the predominantly white male student body to be designers, managers, and salesmen for textile mills. This thesis explores the educational handlooms used at the school to consider how this tool facilitated an embodied understanding of technical processes to a growing class of white middle managers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Ultimately, this inquiry situates the Philadelphia Textile School’s educational handloom within a broader trajectory of handweaving education in the United States to expand our understanding of how making and learning practices in contemporary craft have been developed.