Crafting Womanhood: Needlework, Gender, and Politics in the United States, 1810-1920

Decorative needlework was a key medium through which American women constructed femininity and its relationship to public and political concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through samplers, needlecases, lace coats, silk sofas, cotton scraps, banners, and other textile things, scholars can see the ways in which women and girls related to education, property-holding, slavery and freedom, labor, and women’s right to vote. Needlework’s durable association with “traditional” notions about womanhood made it a potent resource through which to make gender in expansive and meaningful ways that had profound public, political implications as educational opportunities for girls and women were expanding, and the antislavery and women’s suffrage movements were growing. Indeed, needlework’s very conventionality and relationship to the past made it a useful tool for crafting womanhood anew.