Preserving Virtue: Quilts as Symbols of Lost Values

Most Americans associate quilts with a colonial past, imagining that their American foremothers demonstrated Puritan ethics of industry, frugality, domesticity, and maternalism by salvaging scarce scraps of homespun fabric to fashion ingenious bedcoverings to warm children and family.  Instead, quilt making exploded only after the cotton gin ushered in the reign of “King Cotton” and spurred the revival of slavery as a profitable institution while the industrial production of textiles in Great Britain and New England produced cheaper and abundant supplies of brightly patterned fabric.  As middle-class white women limited the number of children in their families, gained increased purchasing power from wage-earning husbands, discovered increased leisure time as they were freed from constant spinning and textile production, they redeemed themselves by making quilts that celebrated those lost virtues.

This paper considers the ways that elderly quilt makers in their oral histories of quilting into the twenty-first century still struggle to reconcile competing values of industry and leisure, frugality and consumption, individuality and maternal self-sacrifice.  It considers  virtue from a variety of historiographical perspectives on the market revolution including the “myth and symbol” school of early American Studies scholars and the recent considerations of Mark Noll’s God and Mammon and Stewart Davenport’s Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon.