Abstract
Cherchez la femme studies the boom in the sale and consumption of antique objects in Belgium between c.1880-c.1940. The growing craze for antiques around the turn of the century saw the involvement of both men and women active in the antique sector, either as buyers, sellers and/or as expert advisors. Curiously enough, until now scholars have paid scant attention to women's important role in the expanding antiques trade. Previous explanations addressed the boom in the antique market in only the most schematic and biased terms, failing to address why antiques would become so characteristic to bourgeois homes at the end of the nineteenth century, and what role women played in this evolution, both relating to demand, supply, and the marketing and dissemination of antiques in Belgian society at the turn of the century. This project hypothesises that women have played a crucial, yet underestimated role in the perceived changes in the antique market. In a society structured around dominant patriarchal notions of 'separate spheres' and women's 'different role' in society, it can be expected that they not only began to actively assume their supposedly 'traditional' role as homemakers, but that they also became increasingly involved in businesses geared at interior decoration and the applied arts. Within the context of a complex set of societal shifts around 1900, Cherchez la femme questions an evolution where antiques became gradually revalued and re-conceptualised, from exclusive 'male-gendered' curiosities to essential 'female-gendered' interior props of the late nineteenth-century home. As such, this project proposes an integrated exploration of women's active engagement and strategies in the antiques sector where their diverse roles as advisor, taste maker, seller, marketer, evaluator, manager, educator, and consumer came together. It does so by mobilising the exceptionally well-preserved business archives of the Antwerp based Eugène Van Herck & Fils – one of the most important antique trading businesses in Belgium during the belle époque and interbellum period. The current project strengthens existing research collaborations between history and heritage studies at the UAntwerpen, by way of focusing on important changes in the material culture and consumption in Belgium at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century.
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