Rhetorical Agency in the Quilts of Nineteenth Century Women

It’s clear from the articles that quilting was not just a necessity that kept families warm in cold weather and harsh winds—it was moreover, a “creative outlet” that helped nineteenth century women escape the “drudgery” of their domestic work by engaging in quilting as a form of artistic expression (Hedges 294). Quilts were made with love, creativity, and they served as sites for memory-making, self-definition, and cultural identity. As we learned from Janette’s story, each fabric piece that made up her quilts became signifiers that expressed places Janette had visited and the connections she had shared with family and friends, particularly her mother (Rohan 373).

Quilting further provided the artist with rhetorical agency to invent, memorialize, and creatively arrange the fabric pieces of each quilt—making connections that became part of a shared culture of female identity. In the Rohan article, we saw that Janette constructed a quilt to memorialized her deceased mother, arranging the fabric pieces chronologically, at first, and then switching to a more sporadic arrangement that reflected her actual recall of her memories of mamma. The process of making the quilt gave Janette an expressive medium to make vocal the prematurely silenced memories of her mother—by her father—after her mother’s death, and simultaneously provided Janette with an outlet to creatively enliven their shared cultural identity as women. Thus, quilting provided a place to document important relationships and shared female identities.

Quilting, scrapbook making, and diary writing were, moreover, safe mediums for nineteenth century women to employ rhetorical agency.  By employing “a range of material objects” including, clothing scraps, diaries, letters, and photographs—Janette made-meaning and memorialized her mother’s life using multimodalities (Rohan 371). Janette chose personal pieces of fabric that represented memories of mamma and used letter scraps “to create narrative patterns” that captured the intimate bond she had with her mother, and the contextual values they had shared as nineteenth century women. The quilt itself became the agency of Janette’s rhetorical activity, giving her a medium to make rhetorical choices and to vocally express herself, her memories of her mother, and their shared identities as nineteenth century women. Janette’s other quilts, scrapbooks, and diaries also became the agency of Janette’s rhetorical activity. I chose to spotlight the quilt Janette made to commemorate her mamma because it provided a particularly strong example.