Quilts

History of Quilts

American quilt making arrived with the first colonial settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ³ This method of producing utilitarian textiles had been used throughout Europe. Soldiers returning from the Crusades had actually introduced the technique of quilting to Europe. These soldiers bought back padded garments from the Middle East, which included two layers of cloth with a warmer fabric sandwiched between the outer layers and stitched to hold all of the layers in place. The garments were durable, practical, and warm. They became popular throughout Western Europe. In the northern, cooler countries, such as in England and Holland, this technique of making clothing was very popular. Layers were held together with simple diagonal or square stitching. By the fourteenth century, women began to make intricately designed petticoats and vests with the sandwiching technique, and stitched blankets using the same technique were common. ⁴ Custom dictated patterns of stitching, styles of piecing, and designs of the clothing and bedding. A particular type of garment or bedding may be traced to specific areas by the design of the piece. Often names, dates, places, or significant events were embroidered into the piece or into the design of the quilted garment or bedding. Historians can often place a piece by these regional designations.

When the first settlers arrived in America they brought quilted articles of clothing and bedding with them. They also began to construct items as old pieces wore out and were replaced. Imported European fabrics were expensive and difficult to obtain. The oldest colonial pieces were homespun, rough, dark, and usually made from wool or linen, which marks both the agricultural trends and the limited availability of alternatives in colonial America. ⁵ As garments wore out, pieces of the fabric that were still useable were cut into shapes and sewn together to make the top of quilted bedding. The earliest pieced colonial quilts were simple square, triangle, or hexagon patterns, or appliquéd pieces of fabric stitched to a white background. Crazy quilts, with oddly shaped remnants or cutout pieces fitted together into a whole large quilt top, were also popular. The crazy quilt illustrated in Figure 1 was made by Mary Chappell Hunt in Elkland, PA, in 1920. The quilt includes materials from her sister Minnie’s dresses as well as scraps from her sister-in-law, Elmira Bennett’s, and her granddaughter Verna Hunt’s dresses. The decorative stitching on the connecting lines between each piece is hand embroidered.

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Figure 1.

Crazy Quilt made by Mary Chappell Hunt.

As the techniques and available fabrics expanded, quilting became more elaborate. Beautiful intricate and often abstract designs replaced the old designs. ⁶ Geometric patterns dominated American quilt making for several hundred years, however. American quilts were often called string quilts, because the small strings of fabric left over from the making of an article of clothing were strung together in a patched-together design. The designs were often intricate and complicated, so specific names were applied to patterns used over and over. Often a single quilt design has several regionally derived names, or one name will describe several different designs. ⁷

Quilting was an important activity for women in the American colonies because the outcome provided necessary garments and blankets. Utility spawned the techniques and strategies for creating quilts. These important items moved from strictly utilitarian uses to form artistic expression and ultimately to a social function as women joined their skills into group production. The regional, ethnic, and technical construction of quilts also reflected women’s artistic expression within the confines of their own opportunities. The quilts frequently made social or political statements that reflected regional circumstances. Nineteenth-century women considered their quilts records of their lives and referred to their quilts as “bound volumes of hieroglyphics” or as “albums” and “diaries.” ⁸

During the civil war, women’s quilt-making funded much of the confederate war effort. ⁹ Southern women made and sold quilts to raise money to buy gunboats. The gunboat quilts pictured an elaborate medallion of a floral arrangement cut from printed fabric and appliquéd to a solid fabric. The method is called broderie perse and is very detailed. Southern women sold enough of these quilts through fairs, raffles, and markets to buy three ironclad gunboats. Similarly, northern women made quilts for soldiers to use on their cots. The government provided exact dimensions and the sewing groups made the quilts for soldiers. The Sanitary Commission, which was an organization that provided comfort to soldiers by supplying soap, razors, and other needed items, also made quilts. They collected and distributed about 250,000 quilts made for the war effort. ¹⁰

Women made and sold quilts to fund political movements and to gain attention for causes such as the women’s temperance movement and the abolitionist movement. Quilts revealed the more public roles women were beginning to claim in US society throughout the nineteenth century. ¹¹ Women’s quilting bees, for example, were venues at which Susan B. Anthony addressed groups of women. ¹²

Northern women in the antislavery movement also used quilts and quilt designs to make political statements. ¹³ Around 1825, the pattern known as Job’s Tears took on the name “Slave Chain,” as an expression of abolitionists’ strong feelings using a biblical metaphor. The quilt pattern known as Jacob’s Ladder shifted to “Underground Railroad” for many women ¹⁴ (see Figure 2). The contrasting light and dark squares leading to a central area visually suggested the “safe houses” that were havens for escaping slaves along the route to Canada. ¹⁵ Sarah Grimke, a noted American abolitionist, famously remarked, “May the point of our needles prick the slave owner’s conscience.” ¹⁶ Quilts were also used to help slaves escape and to point them on the road to the Underground Railroad. Slaves memorized codes and ordering of particular quilt patterns that were aired on a fence or clothes line to inform the timing and route for escape. The secrets of the codes were carefully guarded, taught to those who needed them, and trace to ancient African symbols and stitching. Spiritual messages, maps, and signals were embedded into the quilting patterns. ¹⁷ Tobin and Dobard describe these quilts as highly evolved systems of writing in which color combinations and juxtapositions of patterns contain data. Geometric designs, “the syntax of quilt tops” according to Tobin and Dobard ¹⁸ encode symbolic or secret knowledge. Tobin and Dobard ¹⁹ were introduced to such coded messages relating to the use of the Underground Railroad design for people escaping from slavery by a South Carolina quilter who explained the patterns used in Figures 3 and 4 ²⁰ :

And follow the North Star to Canada. Stay on the Drunkard’s Path (a warning to take a crooked path to evade slave catchers).

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Figure 2.

Jacob’s Ladder/Underground Railroad.

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Figure 3.

Flying Geese made by Patricia Flannery.

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Figure 4.

North Star made by Patricia Flannery.

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Figure 5.

Drunkard’s path.

According to Ozella Williams, quilts were used to direct slaves to take action. ²² Quilts would be hung out a window one at a time as if they were being aired out. The code signaled slaves to prepare to escape and then gave clues and directions on the journey action ²³ (go to page: http://www.hillsdalebarnantiques.com/textiles.htm; http://www.hillsdalebarnantiques.com/textiles.htm http://www.hillsdalebarnantiques.com/textiles.htm). The codes and meanings of the stitching were passed intergenerationally and have only recently been uncovered. ²⁴ Women’s work, in this case, was profoundly political, abolitionist, and radically challenged the prevailing social institutions. Production of the patterns and symbols was a radical act, which would have been treason in the confederacy.

As the industrial revolution gave rise to more advanced manufacturing technologies, much of the work done by women was replaced by machinery. Candle and soap making, production of herbal remedies, brooms, and the hand production of other household articles were replaced by commodities that could be mass produced cheaply, which freed women to pursue other activities. Much of the writing about women’s roles in the nineteenth century illustrates the disenfranchisement of women from productive work. Women lost utilitarian activities as industrialization shifted production by the mid part of the nineteenth century. Sewing machines in the home also increased the efficient production of clothing, and many articles that had previously been made by women were produced in factories. The loss of productivity among middle-class women, in particular, who had servants or slaves to cook, clean, and care for children, spawned other traditional women’s work to replace old tasks. Hand sewing required skill, intricacy, artistic vision, and was often accomplished in groups. Sewing bees, quilting bees, church-sponsored sewing meetings, or weekly sewing circles facilitated women’s congregate work and allowed for a utilitarian social outlet for women. Such activities crossed social class, regional, and ethnic distinctions. The nineteenth-century medical, social, and political doctrine dictated against middle- and upper-class women’s involvement in the paid labor force, but productive women’s work was acceptable. Women relished the social aspects of group sewing and used the time to socialize as well as to produce quilts and other articles. ²⁵

For slave women as well as free white and black women, quilting “sprees” functioned as agents of cultural solidarity and group identity. On holidays such as the 4th of July, plantation workers often organized “big time quiltings,” all-day events that included dinner and dancing. ²⁶ Women shared family stories, received and gave advice, socialized younger women, and created group art through the congregate production of quilts. Group-produced quilts were often donated to a needy cause, church-sponsored projects, or to each member of the group in turn. The monetary value of the quilts was less significant than the social roles, values, and institutionalized barriers to remuneration for productive work that parceled with the quilt making. The economic value, in other words, traced to a moral economy.

African American women in slavery produced quilts for utilitarian purposes but also held quilting bees called frolics, that served the same purposes as those of Anglo American women during the same time period. ²⁷ They socialized, exchanged advice and counsel, and coalesced cultural identity. Their materials and the design of their quilts differed markedly from Anglo-American women’s quilts, with many slave designs traceable to African roots. Anglo-American women commonly used predictable, symmetrical, coordinated designs with distinctly named patterns. African American women typically used asymmetrical designs, with variations in color, or shifting designs altering the color elements, as illustrated in the quilt made by Sallie Jones in Figure 6. ²⁸

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Figure 6.

Asymmetrical African American design made by Sallie Jones.

Anglo-American quilts repeat one single pattern, while African American quilts emphasize asymmetry, as shown in this illustration in Figure 6. Wahlman ²⁹ describes the characteristics of African American quilts as including dominance of strips, bright, highly contrasting colors, large design elements, offset designs; and multiple patterning. She describes offset designs as asymmetry, improvisation, and symbolic forms. In contrast, Anglo-American style quilts “tend to draw their designs into a tight and ordered symmetry” and have a “strict formality.” “Rigid, uniform repetition and predictability” define Western folk art, including quilts. ³⁰ The design features cited by Wahlman are apparent in the quilt that Mollie Walker in Figure 7. By contrast, the quilt made by Anglo-American quilt maker, Patricia Flannery, in Figure 8 includes symmetrical, color and design coordinated repetition throughout the quilt.

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Figure 7.

Mollie Walker’s Log cabin variation.

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Figure 8.

Log cabin by Patricia Flannery.

Figure 6 shows a typical African American “log cabin” quilt pattern designed by Sallie Jones of Florida. Her style contrasts with that shown in Figure 8 of a typical Anglo-American Log Cabin quilt pattern. Leon ³¹ has suggested that the log cabin quilt design predates the mid-nineteenth century and was African in origin. African American Log Cabin quilts vary from the light and dark arrangement of fabric logs around a center square and appear to be squares within squares.

Gladys-Marie Fry in her book, Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South, lists the log cabin pattern as one favored by slave quilters. ³² She suggested that a log cabin quilt with a black center was a signal on the Underground Railroad. See Figure 9 for another example of a log cabin design. Usually the center square was red to represent the fireplace.

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Figure 9.

Log cabin by Mary Hunt.

Initial interpretation of African American designs suggested a lack of skill or insufficient understanding of aesthetic principles as explanation for the marked differences in design between the two groups of women in the same time period. Such observations highlight the predominant Euro-centric evaluation of the art form. Research by Cash ³³ documents that slave women skillfully executed the traditional American designs for their owners by day but reproduced African designs by night. Such adherence to ancestral African aesthetics verifies the importance of cultural transmissions combed into the combinations of cloth for the quilters.

Klassen ³⁴ has indicated that since the 1980s, scholars have begun to recognize what Melville Herskovits had proposed, that an African heritage has influenced African American music, dance, religious beliefs, oral traditions, and material art. ³⁵ The new values represented in the style of these quilts included an improvisational aesthetic, incorporating old clothes, household linens, feed sacks or flour sacks, inverting quilt world values that deemed labor-intensive fancy quilts as appropriate for display. ³⁶

Intergenerational transmission of quilts carried the stories of the quilt makers as well as the importance of design elements. The value of the article was in the original ownership and subsequent transmission, not in the article itself. Historically, the quilts produced by women became testimonies to familial wealth that were not part of a market economy. Bequests and other transfers of heirloom quilts preserved knowledge, family histories, and networks of familial obligation that have sustained extended families for hundreds of years. The moral economy of quilt making discerns the meanings of the quilt and the methods for transfer to succeeding owners. Women’s labor in producing quilts, as well as the means of distribution, exists within social networks of women that form this moral economy.

The Moral Economies of Women’s Work

As scholars in many fields, including literary studies, history and cultural studies, have begun to study material artifacts as evidence of history, culture, race, gender, politics, and economics, they have begun to focus on the cultural meanings of these artifacts. ³⁷ Material culture can now be read like a text in anthropology and archaeology. Multidisciplinary approaches, such as the one in this article, integrate feminist, sociological, and anthropological theories of production and exchange to examine material objects. The social roles that objects such as quilts play in the lives of the individuals who create, receive, or circulate them impose meaning and obligation among those who possess the objects.

Annette Weiner ³⁸ in her book, Women of Value, Men of Renown, pointed out that “in order to begin to restructure the questions we ask of our data, we must begin to objectify the processes in our own historical tradition that have effectively denied both the biological and cultural powers of women.” Weiner was particularly interested in Trobriand Island women’s exchange in mortuary rituals that played a central role in the total system of social organization. According to Weiner, mortuary gifts should not to be understood simply as gifts of love or part of reciprocity. Rather, certain gifts represent exchange or distribution that produces power and hierarchy in the social system. In the case of quilts, the bequest of an heirloom holds not only the material meaning of a beautiful or useful object but also the choice of who inherits or how the quilt is to be given and regiven in intergenerational exchanges. The cultural value of the exchange outweighs the economic value of the quilt. It is an honor to be both a giver and a receiver in the exchange, and all parties to the exchange are, traditionally, women.

Schneider and Weiner, ³⁹ in their edited book, Cloth and Human Experience, articulate the role of cloth in producing women’s wealth. While cloth has been used as a form of commercial wealth in many economies, there is also an additional moral economy, or social currency, to which cloth belongs. Commercial wealth falls within the domain of men, historically and cross-culturally, and their role as cloth merchants has been one means of establishing commercial wealth. Cloth holds other social and political power in many societies, however, because it is tied to ritual, exchange, and kinship. ⁴⁰ Because this form of wealth has been typically overlooked in social and economic studies, the role of central actors in the moral economy of cloth, especially women, have often been overlooked. As Schneider and Weiner point out, ⁴¹ women do not hold exclusive domain over production of cloth, but their domain is normative. The common pattern of women’s control over the moral economy of cloth, including ritual, exchange, and kinship roles, pervades in most societies.

As Weiner points out: ⁴²

In many societies throughout the world …. women are the producers and, in part or wholly, the controllers of highly valued possession—a currency of sorts made from cloth. Intricate symbolic meanings semantically encode sexuality, biological reproduction, and nurturance so that such possession, as they are exchanged between people, act as the material agents in the reproduction of social relations … . Historically, women’s control over these arenas has accorded them powers … .

Quilts are treated as a kind of matrilineal property. The manner in which they are distributed as well as the way they are stored away for perpetuity, suggests that the value attached to them is not merely economic. Schneider and Weiner ⁴⁴ note that cloth absorbs value with time, so it is hoarded and stored not as capital or for display but as “treasure to be saved.”

In Marcel Mauss’s book, The Gift, ⁴⁵ he pointed out that in giving, “the spirit of the gift will not rest” (paraphrased). He argued that one gives away a part of one’s nature with a gift and the recipient accepts that gift as a part of someone’s essence. Quilts carry the essence of social connections sewn into the cloth. Mauss’s work described reciprocity in “traditional” (preindustrial) societies, but the concept applies to the reciprocity between kinswomen in the tradition of passing on family quilts. The ethics of general reciprocity are reiterated in the oral histories that narrate the giving of the quilts. Ties between sisters, mothers, daughters, and granddaughters are reinforced and represented in the quilts.

The stories of quilts compel family members to hold onto them for generations. They are family heirlooms, made by grandmothers from generations long past and treasured for the hundreds of hours of women’s work that went into their making. This cloth “record” is one that offers challenges to received knowledge. As Marx pointed out, consumers, not producers, make commodities into fetishes in ways that have nothing to do with their manufacture. ⁴⁶ Women saving their grandmothers’ quilts recognize something unique about the production of these artifacts. Home production controlled by a family matriarch has given the cloth its social meaning. Quilts evoke female power within families. They have been a form of women’s wealth or gifts exchanged for favors between female kin or neighbors. Furthermore, older quilts made by members of one’s own family are not bought or sold. They resist commodification. The ways in which quilts are used and passed on suggest that they have some capacity to bless and protect the recipients.

The stories, then, that come with the quilts reinforce the power of women within extended family networks, a power that has fostered family resilience for many generations, sometimes in socially and economically hostile environments. Certain heirlooms may, like insignia, define their owners’ rank and status as the head of a matrilineage. These items are protected as irreplaceable identity-defining objects and their owners resist pressure to exchange or sell them. Keeping these goods out of the market exchange system is in fact an important demonstration of power. African American quilt owners appear to have placed even greater emphasis on this aspect of quilt ownership because there is a comparatively more active commercial market for buying and selling quilts made by women from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Oral Tradition and Transfer of Quilts

The social aspects of quilting were, historically, among the most important components of the production of quilts. As previously discussed, women, who throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century were often excluded from wage-earning production, made quilts. Individually made quilts could be a source of income, especially for rural women. Group-produced quilts were donated or sold for charitable or political purposes. Through the production of quilts women expressed personal stories, as well as their technical skills in design and production. Many stories are woven into the design of the quilt. In other cases, an arbitrary, traditional design is crafted with special fabrics, stitches, or other unique insignia. Such traditions persist as a uniquely feminine cultural activity and maintain the moral economy of ownership and exchange. A wedding quilt, for example, may be made with scraps of fabric from the bride’s baby clothes. In this way, the quilter sews mementos of the adult child’s early life into her transition to married life. The recipient of the quilt is honored by the careful saving of scraps of material over the childhood of the bride and the love and care with which the mother lets the adult woman’s childhood reach into her married life. Such quilts commemorate important events and bridge the transition between childhood and adult life. As such quilts are passed in intergenerational exchanges, the familial links in the quilts are also passed, primarily in oral transmissions. The following stories of women’s exchange and transfer of quilts illustrate time-honored family traditions that cross regional and cultural distinctions

Mollie Walker

The quilt given to Monica Brown as a gift from her grandmother illustrates the familial meanings included in the gift of quilts. Monica received the quilt from her grandmother, Mollie Walker (see Figure 11), who was born in Washington County, Texas, near the Brazos River in 1912. Mollie had received the quilt from her sister-in-law, Bertie Barnes, who was born in the 1890s near Freeport, Texas. Bertie had made the quilt. The genealogy, illustrated in Figure 10, transmitted with the quilts given to Monica from her grandmother is a matrilineage.

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Figure 10.

Mollie Walker's matrilineage.

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Figure 11.

Mollie Walker (at age 90) with granddaughter, Monica Brown, who received the quilt.

According to Mollie, Bertie gave the quilt to her a week before she died. These two women had a close family relationship, although they were related only through marriage. Mollie’s grandmother, Mellie, was born in slavery, as was Bertie’s grandmother, and the quilt style was learned from enslaved African American women.

Mollie remembered Bertie working on quilts. She said Bertie worked with four long poles laid out parallel to one another. The fabric was wrapped around each pole. She and other women sewed the big squares into individual strips and then sewed the strips together. The strips were not uniform and they were deliberately not lined up. This type of quilting was typical of African American quilts with asymmetry in individual blocks but a balanced whole quilt that shifted color and design through the whole cloth combination.

Note in Figure 12 that the strips are not uniform and are deliberately offset. While the beauty and virtue of Anglo-made quilts lie in their perfect symmetry and exact repetition of small elements, the beauty of African American quilts lies in the variations on a color theme and in the shifting patterns. There is asymmetry yet balance in the quilt as a whole. The strips pieced together in the quilts are lined up so that patterns are not parallel. Instead one sees what might be called a syncopated rhythm among the designs.

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Figure 12.

“Shading the Count” in Mollie Walker’s strip quilt.

Leon ⁴⁷ has described the way that strips are staggered to create a visual rhythm that does not allow straight lines. This is the aesthetic principle employed both in West African textiles such as kente cloth and in African American strip quilts. One of the main organizing principles of music, dance, and textile making from Central and West Africa has been called metronome sense or inner design sense. ⁴⁸ Inner design sense in music is the ability to hear two different kinds of beat at once. The rhythm of one song can be carried over to a second song. For example, a woman can hear in her mind a standard four beat time while dancing or clapping a three-step rhythm. This creates a hidden cross rhythm. Using this ability, American jazz dancers frequently emphasize offbeats in their stepping and call it “shading the count.” ⁴⁹ This kind of syncopated clapping is a regular part of African American church music.

African American quilters such as Bertie appear to be visually shading the count. Instead of absolutely repeating a pattern, African American quilters alter the color elements or the orientation of a piece within each block. They create shifting patterns and alternating “visual rhythms” among the various strips making up the quilt, as illustrated by Figure 12.

Along with the quilt, Mollie Walker passed to her granddaughter the memories of her own grandmother, Mellie, who had deep scars on her legs from daily beatings on the plantation where she was a slave. Mellie had three children by the white master who was the one who beat her regularly. She and the three children achieved their freedom by running away. They lived among American Indians in the Brazos River area, where she had more children of mixed American Indian and African American ancestry. Bertie’s grandmother had five children by force by the white master. The links in slavery, as well as in life events, undoubtedly strengthened the tie between Mellie and Bertie.

When she passed the quilt on to her granddaughter, Mollie Walker told her, “You can sell everything else in this house, but these quilts are family. They’re yours” (paraphrased). The stories of the quilts were to be included in the transmission of the quilts across generations.

While memories of slavery or other familial knowledge may be transmitted by other means, the tangible transmission of the quilts helps to verify the meaning and memory of the giver and solidifies the importance of passing on women’s knowledge.

Dorothy Upp

Dorothy Upp of Galesburg, Illinois, when describing a quilt made between 1871 and 1930, carefully pointed out which scraps were drawn from her grandmother’s dresses, those from her mother’s, which bits of cloth were from her own dresses and her brother’s shirts. Upp’s quilt was embroidered with a matrilineal genealogy (see Figure 13). Jemima Manley Capps began piecing the quilt in 1871 and her daughter finished the quilting in 1930. At age 85, Upp maintained her kapok-filled baby quilt in a cedar chest at the foot of her bed. She had slept under it, as did other members of her family. Although the quilt is drab and worn, it was cherished like a blessing from her grandmother.

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Figure 13.

Upp genealogy.

Patricia O’Reilly Flannery and Mary Chappell Hunt

Patricia O’Reilly began quilting when she was in high school in the 1940s. She married Jim Flannery in 1950, and they lived on “Irish hill” in Corning, NY, where they raised six children together. Throughout her life, she made her own clothes and most of her children’s clothes when they were small. She made quilts for each of her children and grandchildren when they married that included scraps of material from play clothes, pajamas, dresses, and shirts that she had made for them when they were children. One of her quilts that appears in Figure 8 as an example of an Anglo-American log cabin design was pieced in 1994 for her son, Jim, who was killed in 1995. She tried to finish it after his death but was overcome with emotion each time she took it out. In 2005, she hired an elderly woman to quilt it for her, but when the woman learned of the story behind the quilt, she finished it but refused payment.

The quilts in Figures 1, 9, and 14 also belonged to Mrs. Flannery. Her great grandmother, Mary Chappell Hunt, made these quilts. Mrs. Hunt lived in Elkland, PA and quilted for over 50 years. The log cabin quilt in Figure 14 was made in 1915. Mrs. Hunt was confined to a wheel chair for the last 15 years of her life but continued to quilt from the wheel chair. One of the last entries in her diary before she died in 1926 said, “Give the quilts to Verna.” She was aware of her failing health and knew that death was near. There was no mention in the diary of any other items to be given to others upon her death. Mrs. Flannery’s mother was Verna Hunt O’Reilly, who passed these quilts and those made by other members of her family to Mrs. Flannery before she died.

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Figure 14.

Log Cabin by Mary Chappell Hunt, 1915.

Sallie Jones

African American quilt maker, Sallie Jones, was born in 1915. Like her parents and grandparents, she farmed 60 acres in Swift Creek, near White Springs in northern Florida. As a young woman, she hitched mules to plow, stripped and hauled sugarcane, helped with domestic tasks, split rails for fences, rolled corn shucks for drying and rived boards for shingles. She proudly tells of helping her father set out the first tobacco in Hamilton County, Florida. She helped pick, string and put tobacco up to cure, and sometimes picked cotton and peas for pay. With her fifteen younger brothers and sisters, she cared for livestock, milked cows, and butchered hogs and chickens. Jones raised fifteen children and maintained three gardens to feed them. She grew peas, peanuts, butter beans, okra, corn, snap beans, potatoes, rice, and sugarcane. The family’s self-sufficiency did not end there. Her eight daughters gave birth to their first children at home, with Jones and her sister serving as midwives. Her two sisters were traditional midwives and all three sisters knew some herbal medicine. It is significant here to note that Mrs. Jones and her sisters were much respected for their general knowledge of the environment in the county in which they lived. For example, they organized groups to go into the Florida woodlands, or hammock, to pick wild vanilla, known locally as “deer tongue.” The plant leaves were a local cash crop sold to cosmetics companies for use in products such as face powder compacts. Mrs. Jones’s did heavy manual outdoor labor as well as indoor work to maintain the economic well-being of her family. Both she and her husband did farm labor for hire, although her husband worked more often for wages. She did unpaid as well as paid farm labor to support them. Quilting was just one part of providing for her family.

Jones began helping her aunts and her mother to quilt when she was thirteen and completed her first quilt when she was nineteen. After the age of sixty, she used her mother’s seventy-five-year-old Singer treadle sewing machine to carry out all the stages of quilt making. She used large safety pins to hold the multiple layers and rolls of the quilt together, so that she could sew the layers together one section at a time. Figure 15 shows Sallie Jones with her mother’s sewing machine and one of her quilts. ⁵⁰

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Figure 15.

Sallie Jones with her strip quilts and the treadle sewing machine she used to make them.

Jones’s quilts express a cultural aesthetic that is traceable to West Africa. Six major characteristics are identifiable in her work: vertical strip organization, bold color, large design elements, asymmetry, multiple patterning, and improvised positioning of the patterns. The strip is a basic structural unit in many West African textiles; handlooms with narrow warps are used to make long strips of cloth, which are cut and edge sewn to form a larger textile. Traditional African American strip quilt designs date back hundreds of years to pre-Colonial Africa, and similarities can be seen today with modern woven strip textiles from Nigeria and other regions in West Africa. ⁵¹

The cultural influence, according to Leon ⁵² and Wahlman, ⁵³ is mainly Central African and West African. Patchwork has been used for centuries in clothing and funerary cloths by Fante, Efik, Fulani, and Akan peoples. ⁵⁴ The organization of twentieth century African American strip quilts reflects the patterning found in Nigerian textiles such as Ashoke cloth. Yoruba Ashoké from Nigeria is a prestigious handwoven cloth used for clothing for weddings, funerals, naming ceremonies, and religious festivals.

African American strip quilts, like West African textiles, are made from narrow strips, each strip about the width of a hand. Some blankets made in Ghana, for example, are remarkably similar to the quilts patterned by Jones. Her quilts feature thin solid strips of color next to wide strips or blocks of triangles. The strips are not uniform and are deliberately not lined up in a standard fashion. Jones said, “I make it the way I get the scrap to fit.” Figure 16 illustrates the technique used by Jones.

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Figure 16.

Jones Block Red Hearth.

Strip quilting is faster than typical Anglo-American quilting, which requires tiny hand stitches. Jones often spent only two or three weeks making a quilt. African American strip quilts are also generally heavier than those made by women from other cultural backgrounds; instead of light batting, multiple pieces of cloth are typically sewn between the two pieced layers. Jones’s quilts, which have now been distributed among five generations, testify to the self-sufficiency of the twentieth-century African American farm families in Florida.

Bessie Demuth

Bessie Ellen Taylor Demuth was born in Vernon County, Missouri, in 1893. She was the fifth of seven children born to her parents who were tenant farmers. Her childhood was happy, focused on family, and full of music. She married Gottlieb Demuth in 1916, after he had courted her for seven years, and they moved to New Berlin, Illinois. Although Bessie’s parents had been poor, they insisted that all of the children get as much education as possible. Bessie completed high school and then passed her certification to teach in a country school. She was teaching first grade when she became pregnant with her first child. As was the custom of the times, she was fired from teaching before the end of the year because pregnant women were not allowed to teach. She eventually went back to teaching and taught all grades in the country school and later in the Springfield, Illinois school system. After her husband’s death when she was 60, she returned to teach in the same building where she had been fired for being pregnant thirty-six years previously. She continued to teach until she was seventy.

During the years that she maintained her household, raised her two children, and cared for nieces and nephews who moved in to her home while they were in school, she made 34 quilts. She listed the years of her quilt making as between 1930 and 1979, with the designs listed in her diary. ⁵⁵ She gave most away to family. One of her quilts won first prize in the Illinois State Fair in the 1930s, with one of the judges remarking that her quilting stitches were smaller than her friends’ in the Missionary Society Quilting Club to which she belonged. She used quilting frames designed and made for her by her husband and had a quilt in progress always.

Two of her last quilts were made in 1976, when she was 83, in commemoration of the bicentennial. These quilts used a combination of appliqué, embroidery, and designs she developed. The center square of the bicentennial quilt was made with the appliqué where Demuth recorded a nostalgic scene. “Old Pink, “ her childhood horse was appliquéd next to the old home farmhouse in which she raised her children. The scene also included two small children and her husband walking away in the distance. He had died seventeen years previous to the construction of the quilt. The borders included embroidered birds and flowers representing states’ insignia. Demuth’s last quilt, sewn when she was eighty-seven years old, was made from women’s handkerchiefs (see Figure 17). Of the thirty-one people whose names were embroidered onto the handkerchiefs, only one male was represented. Her son’s name was sewn onto a handkerchief that he gave to her as a gift when he was seven years old. He had died very unexpectedly at the age of 60. The other women named on the quilt include both consanguineal and affinal female kin. Only one woman whose name appears was not a kinswoman; she was a neighbor and long-time friend. One of Demuth’s quilts was a crazy quilt that her mother, Susan Ellen Taylor pieced in 1926. Bessie Taylor Demuth quilted it in 1956 and her daughter, Connie Demuth Berg, added decoration in 1992 and 2000. The dates of the work and the signatures of the quilters are embroidered into the quilt. Bessie Demuth told her daughter in her later years, “Sell everything, but my quilts.” The Demuth quilts were bequeathed to family members upon her death. ⁵⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 17.

A network of female relatives embroidered on the handkerchief quilt.

Conclusion: Quilts and Matrifocal Experience

Each quilt is individualized by the quilter and draws significance from the materials, design, and arrangement of the fabrics and patterns. Women know these connections and often relay them as family stories that accompany the quilts. As quilts are passed to succeeding generations, the stories are re-told in oral tradition, generation to generation. Inheritance of Grandma’s wedding quilt, as discussed previously, is of special significance because it includes not only the physical article, but also the stories of the wedding, the making of the quilt, and significance of the pattern and materials used in the quilt. Women’s oral tradition of storytelling and transference of family knowledge to successive generations is accomplished through exchange of quilts as one means of connection between mothers and daughters. The quilt holds the significance of the story as well as the relationship between the giver and the recipient of the quilt. This knowledge is held communally among women. They transmit the stories, as well as the quilts, to succeeding generations of women who hold both the stories and the quilts in reserve to be passed again. As such, the quilts are blankets, handmade textiles, and folk art, as well as ethnographic artifacts that prompt women to focus on their experiences, past and present. The remnants of personal clothing sewn into quilts evoke details about those who wore the clothing, including their interconnections with the lives of people in the present.

While transfer of quilts is discussed here as an American tradition that includes a myriad of ethnic, racial, regional, and economic experiences of women in giving or receiving quilts, transmission of cloth artifacts in such transfers crosses many cultures. As Weiner ⁵⁷ has pointed out:

Weiner and Schneider ⁵⁸ compiled numerous ethnographic illustrations of women’s use, manufacture, and distribution of cloth as well as many rituals, customs, and practices associated with the handling of cloth. They, for example, describe ritual dyeing and weaving of cloth among the Kodi in Indonesia, the transfer of woven mats for hundreds of years among Samoan women, and mortuary ceremonies using cloth among the Trobriand societies. The manufacture of cloth was central to economic expansion during the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe and the United States, and the importance of cloth manufacture to expansion of industry, wealth, commerce, and industrial innovation is, of course, well known. ⁵⁹ The matrifocal aspects of cloth and transmission of quilts fits into the larger context of women’s use and exchange of cloth artifacts around the globe. The quilts are commodities of exchange, but their value is in the human connections that they symbolize. Handmade, heirloom quilts occasionally make it into the market economy, but this appears to happen infrequently, especially for quilts made by African American women. ⁶⁰ Most stay in families and their use connects women’s experience over time through threads of remembrance woven into the exchange.