According to the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress, a quilt is a textile bedcover typically formed of three layers: a decorated top, a plain backing, and a fluffy filling between them. The layers of a quilt are usually sewn together with stitches through all the layers. They may also be tied or “tacked” together with yarn knots.
Quilting constitutes a key element of traditional folklife in North America. Quilts offer a way to document and interpret the history of families and communities over generations. Moreover, they are composed of materials that symbolize and express patriotic or religious values, as well as ethnic or racial identity. (Radius Images/Corbis)
The quilt has been the focal point of interest and research to both folklorists and scholars in many fields, including textiles, art history, women’s studies, communications, American studies, and popular culture. Quilts provide a visually rich journey through American history, starting with Old World traditions and continuing with pivotal moments that impacted quilting culture, such as slavery and the Civil War, the Depression, and new sewing technologies.
European settlers to the American colonies brought with them a variety of bedding textiles, including quilts and coarse-shagged textiles, also called woven bed rugs, coverlets, and blankets. In colonial households, quilts were less numerous and more highly valued than other bedding. The popularity of quilts expanded in the late eighteenth century with improvements in textile technologies. The 1840s saw an expansion in American quilt making with new developments in domestic textile technology that provided quilt makers with more fabric options at less cost and, at the same time, westward migration contributed to the dissemination of patterns and styles.
During the Civil War, women’s groups used quilts to raise funds for churches, community groups, and other causes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these fundraiser quilts typically included embroidered names of businesses or people who paid a few cents. The finished quilt was usually auctioned or raffled, and church groups often used the money for mission work or to provide furnishings for their church building. The immediate post–Civil War period saw the most widespread involvement in American quilt making as a large number of colorfully designed patterns were developed and circulated as domestic fabrics. As quilts were inexpensive and quite plentiful, all social classes stitched quilts for both utilitarian and decorative uses.
In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even into the twentieth century, women made quilts partly because they could not own businesses. Quilts were sewn either alone or in a group, representing one of women’s few accepted outlets for creative expression and a form through which they could tell their personal stories. Throughout American history, a strong connection has existed between women’s lives and their needlework. A quilt represented many things. It was considered a mark of excellence, an artistic statement, and an expression of the quilter’s self-image. Traditional quilters entered their work at local fairs or exhibited them for sale in craft shops. The quilts were also specially prized keepsakes given for wedding or birthday presents, celebrations of children’s births, or farewell presents for someone moving away to remind the receiver of family and other precious memories.
American quilt making during the twentieth century was influenced by two major factors. The first was the Colonial Revival movement in the decorative arts, which encouraged women to make quilts as their ancestors had done. The second was the publication of quilt patterns in popular magazines that included advertising, articles, and needlework columns. Both factors did much to promote quilt making as a new hobby.
Since the 1970s, quilts have enjoyed a revival with the formation of local quilting clubs, with members meeting regularly to exchange information, hear lectures or take classes from guest quilters, and create quilts to raise money for causes ranging from AIDS babies to women’s shelters to public television. In 1976, several local groups united to form the New England Quilters Guild, whose museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, features a library, quilt collection, and rotating exhibitions. The Alliance for American Quilts initiated Quilters’ Save Our Stories in 1999, a project intended to capture and preserve the voices of the quilt-making community.
Ethnic identity was often forged through making quilts. Many Native American groups adopted quilt making at contact with white settlers because settlers gave the natives access to woven cloth. Plains tribes especially found that quilts substituted easily for decorated buffalo robes and that some patterns were similar to traditional Native American designs.
The subject of African American women’s quilts is controversial as surviving African American quilts from the nineteenth century are rare and not really distinct from those made by nonblack quilt makers. There were unique African American quilt makers who produced work of significant creative artistry, such as nineteenth-century quilter Harriet Powers with her scenes of biblical and local history, but little documentation survives that would produce a more complete picture.
Quilts provided a social voice for women through their use as commemorative documents. Historical scenes and commentary were often sewn into the fabric of these decorative yet functional artifacts. As North American women took part in social movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as abolition, temperance, and suffrage, they employed their traditional skills in making quilts that raised consciousness and funds around issues of social injustice.
During the twentieth century, national groups used quilts collectively to make political statements, including the Peace Ribbon (or Quilt) in the nuclear disarmament movement in which images and messages of peace were sewn into sections by people throughout North America and displayed at various public actions, such as in the 1980s when pieces of the Peace Quilt were held up by members of a human chain encircling the Pentagon.
Another example of the “protest quilts” was the “AIDS Quilt” (NAMES Project), which was first displayed along the entire length of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on October 11, 1987, during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It included 1,920 panels. The NAMES Project has enlisted relatives and friends of people who died of AIDS to sew memory patches, which are then stitched into large sections that are often presented at gay and lesbian civil rights demonstrations. When fully displayed, the AIDS quilt covered several acres.
Then there are the commemorative quilts. Popular samples appeared during the 1976 bicentennial celebrations with all manner of symbols, including flags, outlines of the United States, and the Liberty Bell similar to the patriotic symbols that appear on Fourth of July quilts and other holidays during the year. A popular celebration of Christmas sees the complete panorama of that holiday, including trees, Santa Claus, hearth and home, and religious drawings of Christ and the Nativity. Quilts are ingrained in popular culture. There are quilts in several museum collections that are constantly displayed and quilt museums, such as the Museum of the American Quilters Society (also known as the National Quilt Museum), located in Paducah, Kentucky, which houses a large collection of quilts, most of which are winning entries from the annual American Quilters Society festival and quilt competition held every April.
The first nationwide quilt fad occurred between 1880 and 1900 with crazy quilts that also became some of the first forms of social protest. Designs stitched into quilts represented not only traditional patterns but also reflections of quiet protest as in the crazy-quilt epidemic of the late nineteenth century, a patchwork technique in which irregularly shaped pieces of fabric are attached to a cloth foundation and often decorated with embroidered designs. Partly a rebellion against rigid design standards, it was also a protest against constricting social codes for women.
In early American art, quilts were a popular theme, highlighting the domestic virtues, for example, an illustration of a quilting party in western Virginia in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion (October 21, 1854). In films, quilts often propelled the plot, such as the Amish women quilting after serving lunch to the men building the barn in Witness (1985) as the young widow debates her future with the English with an older woman in the community, or How to Make an American Quilt (1995) in which a bride-to-be hears tales of romance and sorrow from her elders as they construct a quilt.
On television, there were documentaries such as Quilts, a discussion of American quilts and quilting that was produced by Wisconsin Public Television and aired on PBS originally in July 2003. Another is The Art of Quilting, which first premiered on PBS in March 2007. It honors America’s contemporary art quilters by visiting art quilt exhibitions across the country and through personal interviews with nationally and internationally noted fabric artists. A Century of Quilts (2001) featured selections from the best 100 American quilts of the twentieth century, the stories behind their creation, and the quilters as they work.
Martin J. Manning
See also AIDS-Origins Traditions; European Sources
Further Reading
Ferrero, Pat, Elaine Hedges, and Julie Silber. 1987. Hearts and Hands: The Influences of Women and Quilts on American Society. San Francisco: Quilt Digest Press.
Freeman, Roland L. 1996. A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press.
Horton, Laurel, ed. 1994. Quiltmaking in America: Beyond the Myths. Nashville: Rutledge Hill.
Kiracofe, Roderick. 1993. The American Quilt: A History of Cloth and Comfort, 1750–1950. New York: Clarkson Potter.
Orlofsky, Patsy, and Myron Orlofsky. 1992. Quilts in America. New York: Abbeville Press.
Shaw, Robert. 2009. American Quilts: The Democratic Art, 1780–2007. New York: Sterling.