When my sister spent three months in the hospital, our family acquired a myriad of quilts, and more hats than we could count. Families experiencing a medical crisis need many things: childcare, someone to do some yard work, coffee, and frozen meals (to be heated when they’re needed), among others. Our community rallied around us and delivered all those things, and more, but since those are intangible, the physical remnants of that time included many adorable toddler sized hats, and enough quilts to last a lifetime instead. One of the quilts has a tag sewn into it, with the name of the emergency housing near the hospital that my parents spent time in (there weren’t enough beds in the hospital room). One was made by a family friend. One became a piece of artwork, hung on my sisters bedroom wall. Quilts hold memories, meaning, and sometimes even specific written information, and that makes them documents. 

Who writes history? I queried to myself more than once this quarter, thinking about not only the broader strokes of history that students learn in their classrooms, but also the intimate histories of families. While the textbooks are said to be written by the winners, those intimate histories are often kept by the homemakers. A few strokes inside the cover of a family bible, a letter to a friend, and the quilt hanging over the edge of the bed are the small but important ways that women create and keep their families records. Quilting specifically is a historically female activity; while the men worked in the fields, women would stitch individually, or gather for quilting bees.  The gendered division of labor that leaves women as the sole textile workers gave them a place to create their own, handmade stories and records. Women’s voices have often been discounted or ignored in the history books, just recently finding their way back into the popular narrative, and an important view into a specifically female version of history can be gained from their quilts. 

To keep this from becoming an exploration of a specific quilt, or even the genre at large, in this paper I want to discuss four different ways that any quilt does its work, and the importance of each.  At a surface level, it displays the picture, writing, or pattern of the quilt blocks, that record people, events, or stories. Additionally, it combines many diverse materials that may have meaning to the makers, or receivers. Thirdly, the act of quilt making brings women together, both within their families, and within their communities, serving as a method to transmit knowledge of everything from long standing traditions to current events from generation to generation and from person to person. Finally, quilts and the act of quilt making record the specific cultural identities of those who make them. 

The quilts that are most obviously documents to are those that include a written component. Women in the Changi prison in Japan during World War II created three quilts, each signing her name to a block, that were then sent to their husbands, who were in a separate camp, to let them know their wives were still alive (What is the Changi Quilt). It acts as a list of every woman who worked on it. During the Civil War, some women would “write messages or poems in ink onto the quilt itself before shipping it off” (Story Quilts). Friendship quilts, or album quilts, contained signed or inscribed blocks to express friendship, and were given as going away presents, or as a fundraising mechanism (people could pay to have their name added to a quilt block) (Carroll). Some quilts simply act as data bases for names, and others have longer prose messages. Many quilts commemorate a significant event, like a birth, wedding, or death (Burkett).  All these forms of quilt record information in much the same way that any written document does, easily read off the fabric, and so can be used to find peoples names, dates of important community events, or what ever other information the creators chose to write down. More often though, the pattern or elements included in the quilt are what held the meaning. 

Abstract geometric quilt designs are popular, but the fabric scraps of a quilt can also form pictures, or specific shapes that hold meaning. During World War II, women sewed five pointed stars into quilts and hang them in the window to show their community that a family member was away at war (Arellano et al.). People familiar with many quilt blocks know that the names of many quilting patterns or blocks “embody a religious, historical, or personal symbolism, or represent patriotism or grief” and “remain long after the person who first devised the shapes had been forgotten” (Leslie) and can hold information in that way. In a famous example, some have suggested that specific quilt blocks were used to transmit information about safe houses and routes on the underground railroad. While this sounds like a great story, it comes from one specific book: Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. Historians have discovered that some of the quilt patterns that were supposed to contain these secret messages were invented after the Civil War (Bryant). But that hasn’t stopped some “African American women from coding quilts for their daughters and granddaughters” (Bryant), so whether those coded meanings existed in the 1850s or not, they have become a part of quilt making culture today. Informing objects don’t need words to hold meaning; other codes and pictures can be equally impactful ways to represent ideas. 

I remember reading a series called In Grandmas Attic by Arleta Richardson as a child, and upon reflection, it beautifully illustrates my second point, the importance of the materials a quilt is crafted with. In each chapter, the narrator (a somewhat fictionalized version of the author) asks her Grandma Mable about an item that she’s found while staying with her, and many of these chapters focus on pieces of fabric on one of her quilts. Each piece of fabric inspires a story from Grandma Mable’s childhood, because each scrap in the quilt gained meaning through the experiences of the people who wore the fabric before it was quilted. “The quilts made from leavings, from shirt tails or tattered skirts—Those were made of memories” (Leslie). Quilts become storage for a families stories through the “remnant of a wedding or confirmation dress that the owner could not bring herself to use to sop up grease or scrub the floor” (Leslie). One quilt, crafted by Bernice, Irene, and Edna Rudd out of ribbons their father won at the county fair, illustrates how the materials contribute to the meaning of the piece. The women of the Rudd family compiled a record of “the impressive success William Rudd achieved in the cattle show ring...and the pride they had for their fathers accomplishments” (Nurse-Gupta) simply through the materials, without embellishing it with extra writing, or a specific quilt pattern that has meaning. The meaning of materials comes from the link they form between a families oral histories and a physical object. 

The work of a quilt starts long before it is completed. For many communities, the act of creating a quilt conveys as much information as the completed object does. On a small scale, “quilting symbolized shared skills and experiences that were passed down from generation to generation” (Nurse-Gupta) of women within a family. Women’s mothers “taught them how to make these things, as they were all part of...what had always been a woman’s life, passed down though a lineage of women” (Leslie). Quilts provide a way for matriarchs to teach centuries old traditions to their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters. Humans being humans, when people spend long stretches of time working on hand crafts like sewing, its accompanied by telling stories, hence the phrase “spinning a yarn” for telling a story. Just like the materials provide reminders of important family stories and history, the time spent creating a quilt provides time for mothers to tell those stories to their daughters, as well as passing on the skills of the trade. On a large scale, quilting bees brought entire communities of women together. “Second only to church, quilting bees were the primary contact for women”(Burkett), as far spread homesteads made it difficult to just pop over to the neighbors for a quick chat. Frolics, another name for quilting bees, allowed women to swap all the latest town gossip (Leslie), and so provided women a way to inform other women of current events. 

Quilting is not a uniquely American phenomenon; Europe started quilting as early as the thirteenth century, and “European settlers brought the warmth of quilts or “how to make them” to this continent.” (Leslie). However, American communities quickly adopted and modified quilting to meet their own needs, and became an important part of many communities cultural identities. Additionally, quilting provides a way for many under-represented groups to express their identities. Floris Barnett Cash argues that “African American women, who’s voices are largely unknown, have often unconsciously created their own lives and are voices of authority on their experiences. The voices of black women are stitched into their quilts”. The African American community made many important contributions to American quilting, creating original designs, and using their quilts to tell their stories. Quilting knit slave communities together and let them “[create] their own culture or way of life as a means of liberating themselves from an oppressive environment.” (Cash). It contributed to the collective African American culture and identity. 

In the same way,  Indigenous communities in North America learned and further developed quilting techniques, as a way to preserve their unique cultural identities. Each of the ways that quilts convey information contributes to the identities expressed in them. Mary Bighorse of the Osage people works traditional Osage ribbonwork into her quilts, a unique material and craft that she learned how to create from her aunts. A Mohawk quilter, Sheree “Peachy” Bonaparte depicts “the “tree of peace” design, a symbol of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy” (To Honor and Comfort). They use materials and patterns taught to them by older women in their families to preserve their cultural identities. 

These four different ways that quilts communicate information mean that the importance of quilts to a historian cannot be understated. Within the fabric lie names, relationships, family stories, important events, and personal and cultural identities. The quilt itself provides links between memory and the oral histories of families, as different elements inspire family stories. “Many of these quilts hold a treasure trove of information for the genealogist” (Carroll) because of the lists of names written or sewn into them. But I argue that quilts are most important because they are a unique place that women’s voices can be found, who might not otherwise have a way to make their own mark on the historical record. Quilting is a complex art form—the math involved should not be underestimated—but it takes no formal education to make a quilt. The pioneer women, slave women, and Native American women who created these quilts may not have had access to the formal education, high social status, or abundant physical resources that would allow them to leave behind other forms of records that would be kept and preserved. Their skills in textile arts, however, created family heirlooms, with enough durability, usefulness, and meaning to be handed down from one generation to the next. The voices of quilts are quiet: one may have to look for them to know they are there, but they persist within every stitch of a family’s quilts. Quilts are rather nontraditional records, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t intentionally informing. The key that unlocks this knowledge is knowing which questions to ask. 

People are remembered based on what they leave behind, in whatever form that may take. For many women, the quilts they left behind them became their legacies. “Every quilt, like anything else that’s hand made, has a story, but the relationship between stories and quilts has always been particularly strong” (Story Quilts). Quilts hold the stories of wars, oppression, and grief, as well as the stories of weddings, freedom, and joy. No event is too large or small to be found inside someone's quilt blocks: inside the writing, pattern, materials, oral stories exchanged around a quilting frame, or identities expressed inside them. Quilts gave American women of all backgrounds a place to socialize, as well as a medium to mark major events, tell stories, and continue their traditions. 

Unfortunately, the only quilt I’ve ever made doesn’t have a very interesting story behind it. I chose the materials because they were on clearance at the craft store.  No life changing event is found inside my basic alternating blocks of blue and pink fleece, lined with gray. The construction is questionable; when I last looked at it carefully I noticed several places where it is coming apart at the seams. However, that doesn’t mean it has no story at all to share. That quilt’s story is one of a girl learning, trying something new, and seeing what comes out. I doubt that it will survive long enough to become a family heirloom, but I’m thankful for what it taught me about the difficulty of creating such a complex item as a quilt, because that allows me to see each other quilt I encounter as more than simply a blanket to keep warm under. Now I can understand the effort that went into each quilt, and the importance of each story that the women of the past have to tell. 

Quilt Archive

Quilt archive quilts from top to bottom: Osage Tribal Blanket quilt, Mohawk Tree of Peace Quilt,  Changi Quilt (What is the Changi Quilt),   World War II Blue Star Banner quilt, 1847 Album Quilt (Carroll),  Rudd Family Fair Ribbon Quilt (Nurse Gupta)