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The gender and class associations of handicrafts altered by the middle of the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth century, crafts such as embroidery, drizzling [unraveling and rewinding of metallic threads from brocades], and collage had been prized for their aristocratic associations and practiced by men as well as women. But in the early nineteenth century, handicraft became coded as a woman's hobby specifically, and it was increasingly identified with a middle-class sensibility, as a thrifty, skillful mode of domestic management. This does not mean handicraft was limited to the middle class, on the contrary, needlework continued to be popular with upper-class women, while domestic ornamentation was prized even by the very poor. But it means that handicraft now signified the moral, managerial virtues of the bourgeoisie, not just aristocratic leisure, and that members of other classes were emulating these middle-class ideals when they did craftwork. In the nineteenth century, when high-art venues were largely closed off to women, they channeled their creative urges into the world around them, using the elements most readily available. This kind of domestic decoration was also sanctioned because it added to the comforts of the home, whereas more ambitious high art was condemned as a selfish use of time taken away from the family.

Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, the handicraft's most visible and urgent function was to signify womanhood. Craft items were made by the home's female inhabitant and thus appeared to be an extension of her body, as well as carrying the signs of her taste and skill. The woman's hands had held it, her mind had planned it, her eyes had gauged it, and she had communicated something of her intangible subjectivity to the completed object. For the Victorians, then, women were ensconced in a cocoon of items of their own manufacture, representing otherwise invisible aspects of their identity. This is the image behind Ruskin's famous claim that “wherever a true wife comes, this home is always around her." The craft was frequently described as “pretty" or "elegant," qualities that elided the object with its maker's own body. The craft was the woman's home skills made concrete, a tangible trace of her household labor that was all the more valuable for having been produced in leisure hours, for it showed that labor was leisure, that she never stopped working to improve the domestic abode.