In Quilting, Warm Glow of History Lends Joy to the Present Renaissance : Quilts Used to Be the Real Cover Story When It Came to Women’s Lives

Traditional American quilts, admired for their warmth and beauty, also yield clues to the daily lives of the women who stitched them.

Women did not leave for posterity the written records that men did, especially women who had neither the education nor the time to write, says Susan Porter, a specialist in women’s social history at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

“A lot of women who didn’t write wrote their history into the quilts,” Porter said.

A quilt tells not only of a woman’s personal joys and sorrows, but also of her spiritual and economic life and political views.

Quilting originated in 12th- or 13th-Century China when women discovered that stitching three layers of fabric together made a coverlet of exceptional warmth.

But patchwork, or piece work, is uniquely American, an invention of necessity by Colonial women, according to Marta Gredler, director of the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell.

“American settlers had very little fabric they were able to bring over with them from England,” Gredler said. “And until the Industrial Revolution, until the mid-1800s when fabric became much more readily available, they really were reusing every bit and scrap they had. The whole idea of patchwork and piece work grew out of that.”

Quilts are also rich in symbolism. Some quilts made by slaves in the antebellum South, for example, incorporate African mythological symbols, according to Gladys-Marie Frye, a folklorist at the University of Maryland who specializes in studying slave culture.

Frye has an extensive collection of slave quilts. Some were recently exhibited at Radcliffe University’s Bunting Institute. From July 20 to Sept. 17, they will be at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City.

One quilt, she says, was made in 1852 by a slave named Yellow Bill as a gift to his mistress. At first glance, one sees flowers and a basket, but a more careful look shows the basket is surrounded by snakes, an ancient African symbol of fertility, Frye says.

“If the mistress knew what was in the quilt, she might not have been so happy,” Frye said.

The social structure of the Old South is frozen forever in a quilt at the Lowell museum that was stitched by white plantation women and their black slaves in the early 1800s.

“It’s actually labeled by rows,” says Gredler. “We have these slips of paper that are literally pinned to the side of the quilt, saying ‘This row made by white folk,’ ‘This row made by colored folk.’ ”

Each block was also signed--the black women with only their first names, the white women with full titles.

Some of the slaves’ techniques were of African origin but were copied by white women and became part of the American quilting tradition, according to Frye.