that is embroidered with mushroom spores and assists with purifying the body during decomposition. The suit is currently in development and has been the subject of a popular TED Talk.

The president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, penned This Republic of Suffering in 2008, which detailed how American culture was deeply shaped by the mass deaths of the Civil War. There are many more that I do not have room to mention, but needless to say, women are making sense of death in new and innovative ways.

As a woman participating in this culture, I notice this pattern in the numerous conversations, lectures, and studio visits that compromise my post day-job life. Nearly every time I meet someone new, they insist on introducing me to someone they know, nearlyend. Social expectations of modesty in this era forbade many men from interacting with the bodies of women, thus relegating this kind of body management to women.

Death in America changed drastically with the onset of the American Civil War. Grievous loss of life was everywhere: the decay on battlefields, the missing spouses and children, and the nameless graves filled in after armies passed through. Women led the front as nurses and aided in developing the first ambulances, encountering death on a daily basis, as men fought to their demise on the battlefields. The United States lost 7% of its total population in this bloody pursuit, leaving plenty of opportunity for anyone, including women, to manage its gruesome aftermath.

The origins of embalming started with herbs and dismemberment in fourteenth-century