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A Stitch in Time

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A Stitch in Time A ST I TC H I N T I M E T H E N EEDLEWORK OF AGING WOM EN IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA A I M EE E. N EWELL O IVERH IO U N SITY PR ESS Athens CT O N E NTS G H Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Physical Challenges of Needlework 19 Chapter 2: Growing Old Gracefully 37 Chapter 3: The Technological Reshaping of Antebellum Needlework 57 Chapter 4: I Give and Bequeath This Quilt: Needlework as Property 85 Chapter 5: Family Currency: The Gift Needlework of Aging Women 101 Chapter 6: Biographical Needlework: Telling a Life Story 139 Chapter 7: Threads of Life: Needlework as Memorial 159 Conclusion 181 G H Appendix: Decorative Needlework Made by Women Forty or Over between 1820 and 1860 187 Notes 195 Bibliography 237 Index 261 Facing page: Sampler by Esther Johnson (1778–1859), 1787, England. Courtesy of the Slater Mill Historic Site, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. ITRN O D U CT IO N n October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785–1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler (figure I.1). But Amy was not a young schoolgirl making a sampler to I learn her letters or to reinforce household sewing skills. Instead, as she explained on her sampler, “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth it tattered to Pieces My age at this time is 66 years.”1 Indeed, when she stitched the sampler, Amy Fiske was a great-aunt who had raised four children of her own and was living on the farm her husband owned. Girls and young women traditionally made most extant samplers as educational exercises in a school setting. Why did Amy Fiske restitch her child- hood sampler so late in her life? Like that of most women of her generation, those who reached the age of forty between 1820 and 1860, Amy Fiske’s life story is frustratingly vague in the documents 1 she left behind. There are few details to explain her this new stage of their life and enjoyed its benefits. accomplishments, her tastes, or her outlook on life. Many experienced a combination of negative and But her sampler is almost more telling than a letter positive effects. The samplers, quilts, and other dec- would be; both the text on the sampler and the orative needlework made by these maturing women materials used to make it offer insight into her life demonstrate their complicated response to the and the life of her community. Amy Fiske’s action, changes around them. The objects they created restitching her sampler, is a personal response to carry cultural meanings and reactions—both posi- the changing roles of aging women during the an- tive and negative—to the events taking place in the tebellum era (1820–60). antebellum era, including industrialization, the abo- lition movement, and women’s rights activities. G H Of course, some of the motivations to stitch are ageless—women, old and young alike, used needle- The needlework (including samplers, quilts, and work to express love and to be remembered—but other decorative needlework) that aging white, these motivations could often become more acute middle- and upper-class women like Amy Fiske left as women aged.3 The familiar medium of needle behind offers a way to explore how these women and thread employed by women from childhood experienced social and cultural changes taking place to old age offered the comfort of continuity during between 1820 and 1860, as well as their personal re- personal, community, and national transitions. As actions to growing older. These stitched objects one antebellum needlework guide explained, “We were generally made of the women’s own volition. find [the needle] the first instrument of use placed They chose the materials and the patterns as they in the hand of budding childhood, and it is found pleased, in direct contrast to the needlework made to retain its usefulness and charm, even when trem- by girls and young women that was stitched in a bling in the grasp of fast declining age.”4 Many aging school setting under the guidance of a teacher. For women seem to have been motivated by nostalgia aging middle-class women in antebellum America, when they picked up their needles, which set them this difference meant that their needlework served apart from girls and young women. Needlework al- as a source of identity allowing them to define them- lowed nostalgic women to produce objects that re- selves, serve as a model for others, and leave a piece sembled items they had made and owned in the past of themselves behind. and to recapture memories of picking up their nee- In a survey of early nineteenth-century letters dles as girls, prospective brides, and young mothers. and diaries written by older women, historian Terri While the action of stitching needlework could Premo determined that aging women “found much provide a sense of continuity for aging women, evi- of nineteenth-century life unsettling,” as “political dence of generational struggle can also be seen in and technological change seemed rampant and not the needlework products made by women born dur- necessarily welcome.”2 Yet the aging process was ing the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu- neither all positive nor all negative. Some women ries who matured and became elderly during the experienced a loss of power and other negative antebellum period. These aging stitchers were often effects as they grew older, while others embraced inspired by the example set by their mothers and 2 G A Stitch in Time grandmothers and were taught needlework when Based on a biblical reference, the age of seventy be- educational opportunities for white middle- and came a traditional benchmark for the human life upper-class girls flourished during the Federal era. span. In the Bible, Psalms 90 reads, “The days of But by the 1820s and 1830s, and increasingly into our years are threescore years and ten; and if by the 1850s, the skills that these women learned were reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is becoming less and less necessary. Their daughters their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut and granddaughters no longer learned to stitch off, and we fly away.”10 On her seventieth birthday, at school and instead relied more and more on for example, Joanna Graham Bethune (1770–1860) factory-produced and store-bought thread, yarn, wrote in her diary, “According to Scripture, I have and cloth, as well as published patterns.5 How did lived the years allotted to man, and must now, if I these societal and cultural changes alter the appear- have not before, daily expect to be called to give an ance and meaning of antebellum needlework for its account of my stewardship.”11 makers and for their families? And how did needle- Steps in the biological cycle—motherhood, work help aging women in antebellum America widowhood, and menopause—defined “old” for express their beliefs, values, and fears in a chang- most antebellum women. An 1835 to 1845 portrait ing world? of Esther Belcher Bird (1792–1840) of Foxborough, Massachusetts, resembles countless others from that era (figure I.2). Bird is seated on one end of a sofa “I Have Lived the Years Allotted and wears a dark dress with a white embroidered to Man”: Defining Old Age collar and a gray embroidered scarf. As befit a woman of her station at that time—a married There is no consensus about the nineteenth-century woman in her late thirties or early forties and definition of “old age.” Most scholars suggest that mother to six daughters—Bird wears a white ruffled sixty was widely considered to be “old” by people cap on her head. On the back of the portrait is a of the early nineteenth century. Indeed, according paper label with a handwritten inscription, “Put on to David Hackett Fischer’s research, in 1850, only cap when first baby was born 1814 Old woman 4.3 percent of the U.S. population was aged sixty then.”12 Bird’s caption may have been mostly tongue- and over, and only 1.5 percent was aged seventy and in-cheek (since she was only twenty-two when over.6 However, this determination often differed de- her first child was born), but she was not the only pending on gender, with women considered to be woman to associate the wearing of her cap with the “old” once they reached menopause. Others make aging process. Traditionally, women began to wear the case for sixty-five or seventy as the definition of caps over their hair when they married and became “old.”7 Writing in 1856, sixty-five-year-old Lydia H. mothers. Women who had not married by the age Sigourney (1791–1865) asserted that “only five in one of thirty or so also began to wear a cap each day.13 hundred of our race attain the age of seventy.”8 One Indeed, unmarried fifty-year-old Rebecca Dickinson of Sigourney’s contemporaries explained that few (1738–1813), a generation older than Bird, wrote in a live to “three score and ten,” citing the statistic that 1788 diary entry that she “felt the pott on her head,” 970 out of 1,000 died before they reached seventy.9 probably referring to the conspicuousness of her Introduction H 3 FGUREI.I 2. PORTRAIT OF ESTHER BELCHER BIRD (1792–1840) BY AN UNIDENTIFIED ARTIST, 1835–1845, PROBABLY FOXBOROUGH, MASSACHUSETTS. Collections of Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Massachusetts, 64.1.50, photograph by Henry Peach.
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