Threads of Friendship:Quaker women, “Peasant Handicrafts” and educational reconstruction in Russia and Poland, 1916-1939

The use of handicrafts played a part in humanitarian activity by women members of the Religious Society of Friends from at least the early nineteenth century. This chapter considers later manifestations of Quaker women’s relief practice during the First World War and its aftermath, in which they deployed handicraft as a pedagogical and humanitarian tool. Intended as a practical application of their faith-inspired witness for peace and international understanding, Quaker women worked in relief schemes in France, Holland, Russia, Germany, Poland and elsewhere from 1914 into the interwar period and beyond. The chapter focuses specifically on the development of the Polish Peasant Handicrafts scheme which had its origins in Friends’ relief work with Polish women displaced to Russia in 1916. It was later developed as part of relief and reconstruction work in Poland itself from 1919, when it employed some of the same refugee women on their return home. Surviving until 1939, the scheme combined practical aid in the form of paid employment with education and vocational training, and also reflected a desire to preserve Polish Folk crafts. Drawing on the personal papers of relief worker Florence Barrow, the chapter traces the evolution of this particular educational humanitarian practice, and explores how it was adapted and deployed in Russia and Poland. It analyses how women relief workers conceived of the educational role of handicrafts in the context of post-war reconstruction, and explores the importance of handcrafted objects as carriers of humanitarian emotion and memory. The chapter also discusses how textile schemes offered a vision of a 'reconstructed' Polish nation and the domestic feminine identity of the Polish peasantry.