Eva Zeisel, the great ceramic designer, died last week at the age of 105 after a very long, very great career. She was designing new pieces at her studio in Rockland County as recently as 2009.  Zeisel first gained wide acclaim in the 1950’s, and lived long enough to see her work “rediscovered” by more than one new generation.  She was trained, in Europe, at that moment when ceramics was shifting from craft to industrial design, and from hand-making to mass production. Her designs were elegant and expressive, with shapes that brought the sensibility of hand, that is, of line drawing, into mass-produced tableware.

Zeisel’s renewed popularity in past decades owes something to our craze for mid-century modern, and something to our desire to celebrate the work of accomplished women designers who might not have gotten their due. Working in design and manufacturing from the 1920’s onwards, she almost certainly faced prejudice. And she said things herself that seem prejudiced, like this statement quoted in her obituary in the Times: “Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.” (Since women use cars, smartphones, and buildings, should we be designing all of those as well?)  It’s obvious that the kind of gender-based assumptions Zeisel encountered, and may have believed herself, are still in play. The obituary includes this howler, describing how Zeisel’s designs evolved after she had children: "Motherhood opened her eyes once more… Town & Country, designed in the 1940s, has salt and pepper shakers that nestle, one into the other, like a mother and child.” Do people look at the work of accomplished designers like Hella Jongerius and Karim Rashid with the same ludicrous, gender-based assumptions? When will it go away?