A Brief History of Hairwork and Hairwork Jewelry
A Brief History of Hairwork and Hairwork Jewelry
Join us after the craft for this special lecture!
Join us after the craft for this special lecture!
From a commodity… to an oddity! What is hairwork jewelry?
Join us after the jewelry making craft for this special guest lecture, by Dr. Woloson!
Where: 235 N. 4th Street
When: September 12th, 3-4 PM (after the 1-3 Crafting History session)
Who: All ages
FREE!
Sign up for the craft, the lecture or both here!
Questions? Please email marketing@historicstgeorges.org.
From a commodity… to an oddity! What is hairwork jewelry?
Join us after the jewelry making craft for this special guest lecture, by Dr. Woloson!
Where: 235 N. 4th Street
When: September 12th, 3-4 PM (after the 1-3 Crafting History session)
Who: All ages
FREE!
Sign up for the craft, the lecture or both here!
Questions? Please email marketing@historicstgeorges.org.
What to expect:
"A Brief History of Hairwork and Hairwork Jewelry" will begin by describing the emergence of hairwork in 18th-century America and its use in portrait lockets and mourning jewelry.
The talk will then shift to discussing the rise of sentimental culture in the 19th century, which made hairwork jewelry even more popular. Hairwork was no longer exclusively created by artisans for the elite, becoming instead a commercial product made in manufactories for the masses. Essential to this shift was the emergence of a global trade in human hair.
The talk will close in the first decades of the 20th century, when changes in fashions and forms of self-expression made hairwork jewelry obsolete. This once extremely ubiquitous material form is now a relic, and a seemingly odd one, of the past.
Meet Dr. Wendy Woloson (Professor at Rutgers University-Camden, Department of History):
"My teaching and research interests include the history of consumer culture, material culture, visual culture, secondary economies, and capitalism, particularly in 19th-century America, and I am especially interested in better understanding the lives of ordinary people and ordinary things. I have written on subjects as wide-ranging as the history of child criminals, free give-aways, representations of time in visual imagery, and men’s toupees.
My most recent monograph is Under the Rug: The (Not So) Hidden History of Men’s Hairpieces, which will be out in the spring of 2027. It explores the subjects of masculinity, aging, pretense, and the problem of baldness by looking at the surprisingly deep history of men’s wigs, toupees, and false mustaches. My third book, Crap. A History of Cheap Stuff in America (Chicago, 2020), was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Criticism, and a finalist for the Hagley Prize for best book in business history. It has been translated into Korean and Chinese. I also wrote In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago, 2009), and Refined Tastes: Sugar, Consumers, and Confectionery in 19th-Century America (Johns Hopkins, 2002). I am co-editor of Commercial Intimacy: Affinity and the Marketplace (Penn Press, 2025); and Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of 19th-Century America (2015).
My current project is on the history of novelty and consumer culture.
I am also an artist, with an MFA in printmaking, who has taught studio art courses in silkscreen, etching, and non-traditional printmaking techniques.
Sign up for the craft, the lecture or both here!
