Quilting

Quilting is almost exclusively associated with women and women’s work, and it makes sense, since it is a domestic activity and requires sitting inside and being quiet. Additionally, the reading really especially when thinking about the cultural expectations determining the acts surrounding remembering and mourning. In my family, the women are mainly responsible for remembering birthdays, anniversaries, births, dates and other important events. The women are also responsible for passing down memories associated with artifacts. My great-grandmother made a quilt she gave my mother when she got married and my mom has told me it will be mine someday. The Rohan article states “memories might be regarded as “things” in their own right, yet housed inside the mind” (Rohan, 370) and it seems like these quilts are a conflation of memory and ‘thing’, something to be remembered by. And since women (at least the ones I have in my life) are almost solely responsible for the act of remembering, it would follow that these quilts are a way to pass down the responsibility of remembrance through a form of artifact. Identity is a composite of past experiences, memories and influences, therefore it makes sense that quilting, seen as women’s work, would be a way to materialize and memorialize those past influences and memories. I agree with the article that as our society moves farther and farther into digitalization and away from the oral histories of our past, our memories are in jeopardy. As the Rohan article states, “much as we feel our memory is hampered by information overload today, nineteenth century people felt they had too much to remember” (Rohan, 369). We are all trying to use artifacts to remember, pictures, diaries, videos, Facebook posts and Twitter updates. Even as our technology advances, we still feel the need to capture moments and memories in whatever means available. For these women, quilting was that medium.