A woman tugs urgently at Paola Gianturco's sleeve, coaxing her down to the dusty South African ground. When meeting the king, one must kneel, she wordlessly instructs. Gianturco, '61, who's spent her career fighting gender politics in American business, is not used to bowing. But for the Ndebele tribal leader, she readily makes an exception.
It's a week before Christmas in Rosenekal, three hours northeast of Johannesburg, and time for the annual celebratory reunion of the Ndebele people now scattered across the country. But this year, King Mayisha III is also honoring Gianturco and her co-author, Toby Tuttle, for bringing the creative beadwork of the Ndebele women to international attention. Their book, In Her Hands: Craftswomen Changing the World (Monacelli Press, 2000), is a photojournalistic exploration of how women's crafts can alleviate poverty.
Gianturco and Tuttle spent two years interviewing and photographing artisans in 12 countries on four continents. They discovered desperately poor women finding new power to change their lives and the lives of their children through microenterprises built around craft sales. The book isn't heavy on advocacy, though some of the proceeds go to six global nonprofit organizations that assist these women. Instead, Gianturco wanted readers who are far removed from her subjects to feel as if they could sit down, talk to them and find out about their lives. "These invisible women are doing something that needs to be made visible. They just seemed like heroines to me," she says in an interview at home in Marin County, Calif.
Entrepreneurship among craftswomen is a growing, global phenomenon, well-known to organizations like the United Nations Development Programme that help foster it. But it had yet to be documented in detail for the general public when Gianturco and Tuttle started their project six years ago. (An exhibition featuring photographs and crafts from the book runs through January 13, 2002, at the Field Museum in Chicago.)
Gianturco was inspired both by a desire to do something socially important and by two facts reported at the 1995 U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing: first, that one-quarter of the world's families are supported exclusively by women; second, that these women reliably devote their earnings to food and their children's education. "I thought, 'My God, if they are successful in educating the next generation, over time these indigent women could be the agents of change, not just for their families but for all of us,'" Gianturco recalls. She spent months mulling the idea of producing a book, while walking the trails of Mount Tamalpais near where she lives with her husband, David Hill, '60.
Chronicling women entrepreneurs was a fitting extension of Gianturco's own career. As part of what she calls the "flood of American women out of the home and into working lives," she's spent her professional life expanding and examining the role of women in business. For 14 years, she was a principal at Hall & Levine in Los Angeles, the first major U.S. advertising agency owned by women. Later she became a consultant, teaching executive courses on "glass-ceiling" issues at corporations and universities, including Stanford's Graduate School of Business. At the time, her photography excursions and folk art collections were just hobbies.
To prepare for the book project, Gianturco did extensive research, primarily at Santa Fe's Museum of International Folk Art. Then began what she calls a labyrinthine process of networking to find the craftswomen she wanted to interview. "You can't just call and say, 'I'm coming,'" she jokes. Mainly she worked through universities, nongovernmental organizations and museums. Mapping out itineraries revolved around finding interpreters and guides, too, since many of the villages are in remote, virtually inaccessible areas.
Gianturco worked full time for four years without an agent or a book contract, making six overseas trips between September 1996 and August 1998. "Toby called me a bulldozer on this project," she says, referring to Tuttle, a former business colleague and avid photographer whom Gianturco enlisted to share the workload and heighten her sense of security while traveling. It was especially helpful to have company in Bhuj, India, near the Pakistani border, where they had to sneak past a security checkpoint when they were refused official permits.
Together, Gianturco and Tuttle took more than 18,000 photographs and interviewed 90 women, asking each the same 115 questions. "Sometimes that meant we were on the floor of somebody's hut for six straight hours," Gianturco recalls.
Although the craftswomen come from diverse cultural backgrounds, Gianturco discovered they often follow parallel courses turning traditional crafts into commercial goods. Because most of these products are made for tourist traffic or export, artisans often try to cater to their new customers by modifying ancestral crafts. For example, Chimaltenango weavers in Guatemala have turned from vibrant rainbow colors to more subtle neutral tones. They've also added tablecloths and napkins to their inventory. In Panama, Kuna Indians have freed the mola, or appliquéd picture panels, from their native blouses to sell as stand-alone art. Ndebele have resurrected the distinctive beadwork of their foremothers into marketable dolls and jewelry. And Rabari women in India, once forbidden to be seen outside their homes, are now in the marketplace selling their elaborate mirror-embroidered bodices and skirts.
Sometimes, though, old ways are best. Turkish rug weavers in Suleymankoy plunged into poverty when they switched from natural to synthetic dyes that ran and faded. Now they have returned to their great-grandmothers' recipes of madder root, onionskin, goat galls and chamomile to create colorfast rugs that carry a 200-year guarantee and fetch three times the price of synthetically dyed rugs. Gianturco says the weavers are proud to have saved the regional economy.
The strongest common thread Gianturco discovered in her travels was the generosity of time and welcoming sense of kinship the craftswomen extended to her. She says she expected them to be "more conscious" of their poverty and that their material deprivation would affect all aspects of their lives. "Of course, that was a projection," Gianturco observes. "They have very rich spiritual, communal and family lives. In those ways, they are very rich. It provoked in me a real question about what poverty is--our assumptions about it are so rooted in materialism."
Author Alice Walker echoes that sentiment in the foreword to In Her Hands. As you witness these women, she writes--"the ones at the very bottom, the ones that are so low in status, as much of the world defines it, that they seem to be part of the earth itself"--you will recognize their dauntless spirit. "They are in relation to and in a flow of creation that is as old as the planet. I think of them as goddesses."
Deborah Claymon, '92, is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.
