Virtuous Habits of Perseverance
Quilting and the Education of Girls in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 5
GUEST ARTICLE by Lynne Zacek Bassett
Behold
Alas Our Days We Spend,
How Vain They Are How Soon They End...
The mottoes that little girls embroidered on cross-stitched samplers impressed on their minds the importance of piety, love, duty, and accomplishment. Today, these samplers offer the most literal evidence of such moral lessons, but even in the making of patchwork quilts, nineteenth-century school mistresses and mothers taught their girls habits of industry, precision, and perseverance.
By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had made printed cotton fabrics common and inexpensive for the first time in Western history. The fashionable elite lost their interest in patchwork quilts, for they were no longer the only ones who could afford the variety and quantity of materials necessary to make them.
Writers of advice literature dismissed patchwork as “old-fashioned,” “ugly,” and suitable only for families that needed to pinch pennies. However, patchwork was deemed an acceptable--and even desirable--activity for children. In 1832, Lydia Maria Child wrote in The Little Girl’s Own Book: “…little girls often have a great many small bits of cloth, and large remnants of time, which they don’t know what to do with; and I think it is better for them to make cradle-quilts for their dolls, or their baby brothers, than to be standing round, wishing they had something to do.”
In
The American Girl’s Book in 1831, Eliza Leslie offered that
“Children may learn to make patch-work by beginning with
kettle-holders, and iron-holders; and for these purposes the smallest
pieces of calico may be used.” For the convenient dispensing to children
“for practicing their stitches of needle-work upon,” many mothers
followed the advice given in The Workwoman’s Guide of 1838
(or their own common sense) and kept a “rag bag…hung up in some
conspicuous part of the house, into which odd bits, and even shreds,
of calico, print, linen, muslin, &c.” were deposited.
Piecing calicoes not only kept children occupied, but it was considered an educational opportunity as well. A young woman working in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, writing under the pen name “Annette” for The Lowell Offering in 1845, suggested from her own childhood experience, “Parents, never purchase for your children mathematical puzzles—you can teach them and amuse them by making patchwork.” Although there is no direct evidence that children were taught math and geometry skills using patchwork, it is not unlikely.
Popular children’s author “Peter Parley” (Samuel G. Goodrich) advocated using everyday occurrences to create lessons in his 1834 book, Peter Parley’s Method of Teaching Arithmetic to Children; for example, the purchase of fabric yardage: “Here is a shopkeeper selling cloth, which he measures with a yard-stick. A yard…is three feet, or thirty-six inches. All kinds of cloth are sold by the yard. [Problem] 1. In a piece of cloth 1 ¼ yards long, how many inches? In 1 ½ yards? 2 ¼ yards?”
Girls born after the Revolutionary War had a much greater possibility of learning advanced mathematics and geometry skills than had their mothers or grandmothers. Women of the same generation as Cummington, Massachusetts, resident Sarah Snell Bryant (1768-1847) probably worked out their simple patchwork patterns like she did in her diary in 1806—by drawing lines in a grid and then scribbling in squares or triangles until they produced a pleasing design. Girls like Boston schoolgirl Eliza Southgate had a much more thorough education in geometry, and would have been able to draft challenging quilt block patterns. Eliza sadly wrote home to her parents in 1798 that her "Mariner's Compass" and a "Geometrical piece" (possibly a template-pieced mosaic quilt) had been “purloined.”
"An hour of patchwork each day…"
Whether or not girls were specifically taught mathematics through stitching patchwork, it certainly was an important method of introducing them to the needle. Patchwork projects also taught girls precision and self-discipline. Lydia Maria Child asserted in The Mother’s Book of 1831 that “if a child is taught to fit [patchwork] herself, it may be made really useful. If the corners are not fitted exactly, or the sewing done neatly, it should be taken to pieces and fitted again, for it is by inattention to these little things that habits of carelessness are formed.”
Some girls bowed to this lesson better than others did. Looking back on her childhood on the Bullard family farm in Holliston, Massachusetts, in the 1850s, Frances Joanna Kingsbury recalled with dismay, “The time came when a check was put on my wild happy life out of doors. An hour of patchwork each day except Sunday. How I hated it, sewing with laborious toil two or three squares, each stitch over and over.” Lucy Larcom of Beverly, Massachusetts, shared the dismay of Frances, bemoaning in her memoir, A New England Girlhood, her inability to bring her patchwork “into conventional shape”: “My sisters, whose fingers had been educated, called my sewing ‘gobblings.’ I grew disgusted with it myself, and gave away all my pieces.”
At the other extreme, both in opinion and rhetoric, was the Lowell mill girl, “Annette.” For her, sewing a patchwork quilt marked an important stage in growing up: “It is one of my earliest recollections, and that of the memorable period when I emerged from babyhood to childhood—the commencement of this patchwork quilt. I was learning to sew! O, the exultations, the aspirations, the hopes, the fears, the mortifications, the perseverance—in short, all moral emotions and valuable qualities and powers, were brought out in this grand achievement—the union of some little shreds of calico.”
Like Annette, Lucy Larcom worked in the textile factories of Lowell; she, too, wrote for the mill girls’ literary magazine, The Lowell Offering. The two young women must have known each other—did they ever debate the value of patchwork?
For beginning patchwork projects, Eliza Leslie suggested a template-pieced hexagonal mosaic design.(Her instructions and illustration were reprinted without credit by The Lady’s Book—later known as Godey's Lady's Book—in 1835.) The process of cutting hundreds of precise paper templates, basting fabric over each, and then whip-stitching each piece together, edge-to-edge, would surely have kept a child busy for days! This was an important lesson in patience and perseverance.
Lydia Maria Child would have considered it disgraceful that Lucy Larcom gave up her patchwork project: “On no occasion whatever should a child be excused from finishing what she has begun. The custom of having half a dozen things on hand at once, should not be tolerated. Everything should be finished and well finished. …Habits of perseverance are of incalculable importance; and a parent should earnestly improve the most trifling opportunities of impressing this truth.”
“…the wise and virtuous habit of perseverance”
“Busy
Idleness,” (1832),
a short story for children
by Jane Taylor, moralizes on the importance of finishing what is
started, using a patchwork quilt as an example. The main character,
Charlotte, is left to employ herself as she pleases while her mother
is away for six weeks, with the understanding that an exact
accounting of how she spent her
time
would be required upon her mother’s
return.
Charlotte flits from project to project, eventually settling upon
making a “patchwork counterpane, large enough for her own little
tent bed….
While
she was arranging the different patterns, and forming the
alternations of light and shade, her interest continued unabated; but
when she came to the practical part of sewing piece to piece
with unvarying sameness, as usual it began to flag. She sighed
several times, and cast many disconsolate looks at the endless
hexagons and octagons, before she indulged any distinct idea of
relinquishing her task; at length, however, it did forcibly occur to
her, that, after all, she was not obliged to go on with
it…. So with this thought…she suddenly drew out her needle,
thrust all her pieces, arranged and unarranged, into a drawer, and
began to meditate a new project.”
On
her mother’s return, Charlotte is obliged to lay all of her
unfinished projects out on a table for inspection. Her mother’s
disapproval is made clear when Charlotte is rewarded with a number of
lovely presents, but all with some important element removed, like
the hour hand from a little pocket watch. Charlotte’s frustrated
mother tells her, “I
should be very glad if this disappointment should teach you what I
have hitherto vainly endeavored to impress upon you…. That
employment does not deserve the name of industry, which requires the
stimulus of novelty to keep it going.—Those who will only work so
long as they are amused,
will do no [more] good in the world, either to themselves or others,
than those who refuse to work at all.”
The author ends her tale after a long admonition, certain that
Charlotte, as well as her young readers, have learned the important
lesson of perseverance.
FURTHER READING
Bassett, Lynne and Jack Larkin. Northern Comfort: New England’s Early Quilts, 1780-1850. Nashville, Tenn.: Rutledge Hill Press, 1998.
Child, Lydia Maria. The Girl’s Own Book. New York: Clark Austin & Co., 1834. Reprinted by Applewood Books of Bedford, Mass. (First published as The Little Girl’s Own Book in 1832 by Carter, Hendee and Babcock of Boston.)
_____. The Mother’s Book. Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1831. Reprinted by Applewood Books of Bedford, Mass. in 1992.
Larcom, Lucy. A New England Girlhood. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1889. Reprinted by Northeastern University Press in 1986.
"The Patchwork Quilt.” The Lowell Offering. Vol. V, 1845, pp. 201- 203. Reprinted in Eisler, Benita. The Lowell Offering, Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977.
Cross-Stitch Samplers and Hexagon Patchwork Teach Girls to Sew
Addendum by Patricia Cummings
Hexagon
Patchwork done with English paper-piecing.
Constructed
by Patricia Cummings, 2005. Photo by James Cummings
Traditionally, little girls were taught to sew, quilt, and embroider. The vintage Girlhood Samplers that are so highly prized today command top dollar on the antiques market. They were really an educational tool so that young girls could learn their ABC's and numbers, at home, by cross-stitching them. Samplers sometimes feature more elaborate motifs, such as houses, animals, or flowers. Often, a moral or religious saying is included. Stated simplistically, the making of Samplers has evolved over time.
As part of a Sampler made by an eleven year old in 1789, there are two sections, each with two four-line stanzas of poetry. One set of poems is called “Against Idleness.” The other set is entitled, “And Mischief.” Two of the lines reveal a prevailing sentiment of the day, “For Satan finds some Mischief/ For idle Hands to do.”1
In the twentieth century, Jane Eayre Fryer wrote The Mary Frances Sewing Book: Adventures Among the Thimble People.2 In this book, a girl named Mary Frances learns how to sew from the Sewing Bird, who is really a Fairy Lady, as well as from the “Thimble People.” All of the stitches she learns are taught and illustrated on an even weave background that looks like Aida cloth. There are projects and sewing exercises described throughout the book, which is pleasant reading, both for adults and for children. Read more about the importance of children learning to sew, in the next chapter.
1 Samplers: How to Create Your Own Designs by Julia Milne (NY: Mallard Press, 1989), 13.
2 Originally published in 1913, the book has been reprinted by Lacis Publications, Berkeley, CA, 1997.
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