Thankfully, quilting could be justified to husbands and fathers as a practical and frugal activity. Quilts not only provided warmth, but the piecing and re-piecing of garments into new quilts was a type of recycling or "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" as my grandmother used to say. In this way quilting and other womanly practices gave women some control over household expenses as well.
Quilting shaped girlhood by placing girls in close proximity with positive role models who were exhibiting quiet, frugal, productive femininity. Quilting further enhanced the feminine role of piety and domesticity through the fear that "idle hands are the devil's workshop." And the quilting kept their hands busy for hours, days, and years.
Cora and Janette Miller, would've been horrified to realize they were creating rhetoric for hours on end. It simply wasn't an approved occupation for 19th-century women, and as a future missionary I assume Janette followed the propriety guidelines very carefully. So unbeknownst to her, Janette's scrapbook, diary and quilt give us a multitextual example of identity construction. I was struck by Rohan's compilation of descriptions about the translation process where pieces form a new link that is non-linear and non-hierarchal (376). In other words, the pieces of fabric and pieces of letters, or entries in the diary, become a new text with a different meaning together then they had singularly.
As Rohan says, I think quilting, and other womanly practices, served a double purpose: it "—the scrapbook and the diary—can represent the women’s subjugation and concession to hegemony, they also provide a portraitof the women’s active engagement and expertise with these particular materials for communication, memory-making, and identity construction" (376). Women who made Temperance or Freedom quilts were acting out within defined roles.
Girlhood today seems to have largely discarded "traditional feminine handicrafts" as they have discarded traditional feminine roles. Perhaps it is solely a time constraint, and not a backlash against their grandmothers learning to create and communicate in the few ways they had available.
An example of a Temperance quilt from http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/womenshistory/quilt.html
Great post. I especially like women communicating in the ways they had available. That speaks volumes, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteI like your post and the images you provide. I think quilting is more counter-hegemonic in that it provided a safe, socially acceptable medium for women to be vocal and artistically expressive about their cultural and social identities. In the case of Janette, her quilting provided a safe place to un-silence the treasured memory and connection Janette had shared with her mother. I think we see quilting as hegemonic sometimes because it is so closely linked to normative female roles. But the way the women employed quilting in the articles we read displayed a counter-hegemonic use of quilting, as it provided a creative release from the drudgery of their domestic chores. Thus, quilting became a site where nineteenth century women could enjoy the opportunity to explore identity creatively.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I didn't mean to imply that quilting was hegemonic.
ReplyDeleteI like the title-'piecing together girlhood. I think it is a way to make sense of the 'order of things' as Foucault would say. At a time when women's voices were not important enough to be spoken in the public arena, the experience and commonplace for women became powerful in the sharing of time and memories.
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