by Clare Hunter
Community sewing projects have emotional and metaphorical currency. Much like the Chinese and Japanese idea of creating protective textiles by joining up donated cloth or collecting stitches from many different people, so community textiles are imbued with the spirits of the disparate people who create them, witnessed by others, as unique investments in, and registers of, community worth.
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Place
One winter in 1994, the singer and story gatherer Alison McMorland travelled to Mull (the second largest island of the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland) to record the memories of its oldest residents, now clustered in a care home. Mull is a place of ancient settlement, evidenced by the ruins of brochs (Iron Age towers), stone circles, standing stones and burial cairns. It is close to where Christianity began in Britain with the coming of St Columba, the Irish missionary, in AD 563 to establish his monastery on the nearby island of Iona. A Gaelic kingdom in the sixth century, a Viking stronghold by the ninth, Mull’s islanders survived by fishing and farming until, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, they fell victim to the programme of Highland clearances, when communities were evicted from their crofts and forced off their land to make way for sheep. By the early twentieth century, Mull’s population had fallen from 10,000 to 3,000. There were more sheep than people. Tourism saved it from economic collapse. Its deep valleys, long, shimmering lochs, white beaches, profusion of native and naturalised plants, have made it a haven for nature-lovers. Geologists come to study its 20 million-year-old rocks, glaciers and basalt cliffs. Bird watchers visit, hoping for a glimpse of the elusive white-tailed eagle.
Alison collected the stories of Mull’s oldest islanders as the wellspring of a community textile. They shared with her their tales of mischief and misadventure and rekindled their sense of community worth as postmistress, ploughman and piper. They spoke of the daily grind of their lives, hardship punctuated by harvests and holidays, and brought their past back into focus, recalling what they held dear.
Their stories were given to the Edinburgh-based artist Kate Downie, whose paintings chart what land clings on to and what it discards, its blight and its blossoming. Kate transformed the elderly voices into images with an artist’s sleight of hand, collaging fragments of memory in a sweep of brushstrokes: the slouch of an oil cloth on a kitchen table; the shafts of summer barley bundled in a field; a huddle of sheep in a drift of snow.
Hebridean spinner, weaver and dyer Flora McDonald then worked with local school children to transpose Kate’s design into wool and fabric dyed by the flora of Mull. They scavenged the moors and shorelines, the meadows and rock crags to prise the island’s colour palette from its natural home. They picked broom blossom and stripped nettles of their jags. They hunted out creviced star flowers and snipped fans of ferns laid low by winter. As the colours of Mull oozed from flower and leaf through chopping, crushing, boiling and simmering, Flora named the rainbow carpet that lay beneath the children’s feet: yellow pimpernel, ragged robin, oceanic lichen, wood sorrel, meadow sweet. Their pigments had yielded a rag bag of home.
The dyed cloth, wool and thread were sent to Glasgow, where experienced stitchers pieced back together the lives of Hettie the postmistress and Donald the piper and the rest: stories tinted in the flowers of their youth. The wall hanging returned to Mull, a map of sorts, charting an island’s landscape through its human history, telling tales of a lived land in the hues of natural materiality. Measuring over four feet wide and three feet high, the wall hanging is redolent with different textures: the linen weave of an apron, the straw residue of a harvested field realised in long sticks of thick cotton thread. Thistles are tufted in purple wool, the thatch pattern on a cottage roof rendered in quilting and the hills patchworked in a medley of fabrics to capture the diverse colours of heather, gorse and bracken. There are a pair of kilt socks hanging on a washing line, knitted in precise miniature detail, and a vegetable patch planted with tidy rows of three-dimensional embroidered cabbages shaded in the greens of Mull’s natural world.
Dyeing is one of the most ancient crafts. Archaeologists have unearthed Neolithic scraps of fabric, colour-clung despite thousands of years spent lingering deep in the earth. Until the invention of aniline dyes in 1856, all the colours for cloth and thread were coaxed from nature. It was not only their hue that was harvested; many of the plants used for dyes were chosen for their additional medicinal and spiritual qualities. The deep red extracted from pomegranates provided a remedy for dysentery as well as being a talisman for fertility; the blue of indigo controlled bleeding and encouraged intuition; the bright yellow of turmeric was an antiseptic and spiritual purifier. Each colour was imbued with the earth’s literal and symbolic bounty.
We call the cloth we embroider on the ‘ground’ and the thread that travels through it makes stitches like footprints, leaving its mark as the needle pushes on from one place to the next. Much traditional embroidery features images of the sun, water, plants, trees, the basic elements of survival: nature gathered into needlework to snare its energy and reflect its spirit. The names of embroidery stitches often honour the natural world, such as seed stitch, fern stitch, coral stitch, feather stitch, cloud filling stitch, star stitch. Others register their source: Algerian eye stitch, Armenian cross stitch, Antwerp edging stitch, Basque knot, Berwick stitch, Berlin plush stitch, Bokhara couching, Ceylon stitch, Croatian stitch, Dutch double cross stitch; cities and nations all mapping their claim on needlework.
Given such a close association between embroidery and the land, it is surprising that so few embroidered maps exist. But when, in the last half of the eighteenth century, girls began to access a more academic education in both Europe and America and geography became an integral part of their curriculum, from 1770 onwards, school-stitched maps in the form of samplers gained popularity. Early map samplers delineated both terrestrial and celestial worlds. Most were copied from printed maps, drawn free-hand on cloth by teachers or by schoolgirls using a pantograph. Publishers began to issue maps printed on cloth, ready for an embroiderer’s hand. One of the first was produced by Laurie and Whittle of Fleet Street in London in 1797. It proclaimed in elaborate font: ‘A New Map of Scotland for Ladies Needle Work’. In 1798 the same company published a ‘Map of the World for Ladies Needle Work and Young Students in Geography.’
In 1790, an anonymous stitcher decided to capture Arnold’s Farm in Essex in mathematical and agricultural precision. In the map’s cartouche, (the decorative heading that contains the map’s title and date) a red-tiled farmhouse has been embroidered by the banks of a flowing river, guarded on each side by family pets languishing on tasselled velvet cushions. Scatters of flowers and foraging birds decorate the cloth. But the real artistry lies in its detailed mapping of the farmland, with each plot precisely demarcated and the acreage of each field, mead and wood faithfully noted. Every stretch of soil is named – gravel pit field, eleven-acre piece, rook tree mead, little moor, upper gate field – and the schedule of their rotation listed. It is an exquisite piece of agricultural history sewn by someone who cared enough to mark it down in stitches. Perhaps this sampler marked a new beginning, embroidered to celebrate a first harvest and the promise of bountiful yields in the years ahead.
Elizabeth Snitch embroidered her Map of the County of Bedford Divided into its Hundreds in 1779 when she was twelve. Her father was a respected butcher and church warden in the Southhill village in Bedfordshire. Born the eldest of four children, she lost two brothers and her mother before she was eight years old. Her father remarried but three of her five half-brothers died in infancy. Her family was connected to the Dilly brothers, who were book and map publishers in London. Elizabeth’s map has been traced back to a 1759 map of Bedfordshire produced by Emanuel Bowen, an eighteenth-century print seller known for adding extensive notes and footnotes. Elizabeth has made a faithful copy, replicating his enumeration of houses, rectories, vicarages, parishes, members of parliament, the land acreage and charting the time and distanc
e in minutes from London. The outline of the country is sewn in red silk chenille thread, a form of thick tufted yarn, which provides a strong outline for her inner boundaries that are traced in finer yellow embroidery. Main roads are marked in red thread and the map itself is crammed with the names of villages and churches, market towns, even with market days registered in miniscule black stitchery, accompanied with symbols – tiny spired yellow buildings for churches, a red cross for modern charity schools – and outside of her bordered county the margins of the map are crammed with sewn explanations and descriptions. Her cartouche, on the map’s top right is encircled in green thread and wreathed in leaves and flowers. She has a red compass rose at the bottom beside her ruled stitched scale and, at the bottom left in tiny lettering she has signed it ‘Elizth Snitch 1779’.
This was an age when there was a growing appetite for lists, for quantitative rather than qualitative data, for precise details of size and scale. It is unsurprising, therefore, that geography was the first science to be included in the schoolgirl curriculum. Geography had the advantage of accumulating facts. It encompassed other kinds of learning: of mathematics, surveying, drawing, anthropology and political economy. At a time of the expansion of the British Empire, mass migration to the American Colonies and dare-devil expeditions to far-flung lands, people’s eyes became more keenly fixed on distance. Wars and revolutions were recalibrating the global balance of political and economic power. The educated classes in Europe and the Americas, influenced by the seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophers of The Enlightenment, who had encouraged the development of intellectual thought and scientific study, began to favour a more extensive academic education for girls as well as boys. There was a major shift in girls’ education from the tutelage of mothers and governesses, which focussed on accomplishments such as handwriting, singing, dancing and drawing, to the more formal curriculums of boarding schools and ladies’ academies. Girls moved from their homes to schools beyond the village or outside the town gaining greater access to the wider world. Their horizons broadened, physically and socially, through a progressive education in which geography was key.
In America, geography was of even greater importance than in Britain or Europe. This was a country which in 1776 declared its independence from the British Empire and freed itself from colonisation. Now it was forging its own physical, societal and political identity, enshrined in its Bill of Rights in 1791. Embroidery was to play a significant role in recording its altered consciousness. The American geographer Judith Tyner has written a comprehensive and fascinating study of the development of American embroidered geography. Her book Stitching Up the World is written with the scientific rigour of a practised geographer and the humanity of a woman whose ancestry is traced in needlework. It documents the part played by schoolgirl cartographers in mapping their new world.
Until independence, education in the United States was laissez-faire. Voluntary, free from federal intervention, education for the most part was left to the guidance of different religious faiths. In 1779 in Virginia the More General Diffusion of Knowledge Bill was adopted. This marked a change in thinking. The bill advocated not just the principle of education for the majority, but also included women in its ambition. Its intention was not gender equality, but rather the better preparation of women to nurture their future children as responsible citizens. The first female academies were founded in the 1790s. Catharine Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) was an early pioneer of women’s education and in 1821 established the New York Female Seminary. Other academies followed in quick succession. It became a movement to prepare middle and upper-class white girls for their role as the guiding lights for the first American generation to inherit the nation’s emerging democracy. Women were to be the moral core of the new nation. The concept was manifested in a different curriculum for women in America from that in Britain. There was to be less emphasis on the niceties and superfluities of drawing-room accomplishments like playing a musical instrument, singing, learning French, and more attention paid to practical skills, such as the keeping of accounts, managing a workforce and maintaining efficiency in family affairs when men were called away. Girls were tasked with developing an emotional attachment in their children to their state and their nation as a way to strengthen national loyalty and embed patriotic pride. This then was the climate in which girls embarked on their further education, not as a route to individual gain but as a service to their country. Through education, girls were invited to have a place in the civic evolution of their country, and it was through embroidery that they first made their mark.
The first American geography book was published in 1784, the first atlas to exclusively chart America and its states in 1795, and it was a woman, Susanna Rowson, who produced the country’s first educational geographic textbook in 1805. Her life had been one of difficult adventure. Shipwrecked in horrific circumstances when she was five and poverty-stricken at sixteen, she had become the sole provider for her family. Novelist, actress, poet, lyricist, playwright turned educator, Rowson was a humanitarian, a voice for the women of her century and a fervent advocate of the abolition of slavery. In 1797 she established Miss Rowson’s Academy for Young Ladies in Massachusetts.
When she published Rowson’s Abridgement of Universal Geography in 1805, followed by Youth’s First Steps in Geography in 1811, Rowson became a trailblazer for girls’ geographic education, credited with being the first woman geographer. Her Abridgement of Universal Geography contained no maps. Instead, it was a narrative that explored the cultural, economic, religious and hierarchical social organisation of different continents. What she was intent on instilling in her students was an awareness of the country they belonged to in relation to others; she wanted to educate girls about the world beyond themselves, and to understand difference. She dwelled on themes such as the position of women, the nature of tyranny and the concept of liberty, but her dominant theme was that of slavery, what she called the ‘barbarous, degrading traffic’ of human beings which she denounced as a ‘disgrace to humanity’. Her book appeared the same year that Samuel West, a Quaker reformist printer, published Injured Humanity, a series of vignettes on the torture, enforced family separation and abuse of slaves. The anti-slavery campaign was gaining ground. By 1805 the trade in, and shipment of, slaves to America was prohibited. But the South still relied on its slave labour. The fight was not totally won.
Through Rowson’s exercises (the conversational questions and answers she appended to her first book), students were invited to become part of a discourse on cultural and racial identity, to consider the world outside their classroom and the true value of liberty in the face of the injustice meted out to the disempowered. Her exercises encouraged curiosity and a rigorous interrogation of what they were told. This was geography that embraced social, not just physical, mapping. It introduced the physical world as a place to be experienced, not just measured, a geography which required thinking about the experience and sense of place.
Two of the earliest American map samplers we know of, sewn in 1779 and 1780, come from Mrs Rowson’s Academy. They are both of Boston harbour, its dozens of islands and its street plan registered in a density of colours. Boston was a site of triumphant revolutionary progress, from the catalytic Boston Tea Party to a key victory of the Patriots over the British. By the start of the nineteenth century, when these samplers were sewn, Boston had evolved into a wealthy and cosmopolitan port, the centre of America’s mercantile trade. The stitchers, Lydia Withington and Sally Dodge, seem eager to lay claim to their national identity. In their cartouches they embroidered the American emblem of the eagle with outstretched wings, its motto E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) inscribed on the Great Seal.
In Rowson’s school, students first measured their maps out on paper, complete with grids, latitudinal and longitudinal lines and a compass rose. A student might start with the layout of her school grounds, then extend her drawing to include the fields t
hat surrounded it and the patchwork of a neighbouring estate. She might graduate to marking down the stretch of her town, city, then state. Then she might transfer her knowledge to a sampler, expanding her horizons stitch by stitch until she had encompassed her whole nation. While in Britain girls were sewing what had always been there, American schoolgirls were mapping out a New World – marking out boundaries of emerging states, tracking geographic and political change. They couched down state borders and expansions in rows of coloured thread, travelling around them again and again and they documented settlements and named rivers in painstaking cross-stitch that demanded close attention. They tinged their embroidered war-won shorelines with a fade of blue ink stretching out from land to sea to highlight their country’s independence. Not just in Susanna Rowson’s school in Boston, but in Maryland, New Jersey, Hudson River, Virginia, New York City and elsewhere, girls marked down their destiny on map samplers.
Their needlework was a way not just to record, but also to explore and become familiar with the geography of a United States. When you sew, you must pause when the direction changes, alter the angle of your needle to go around a corner, shorten a stitch to make a sharp turn, lengthen it again to skim along a line. Through sewing, these schoolgirls were feeling out the shape of their country they belonged to. Each stitch was a forward step, traversing their nation slowly, inch by inch, discovering its flow and taking its measure. They were committing to memory the contours and boundaries of a newly-born America and how their own state related physically to others. In doing so they composed a mental grid of where they belonged by stitching it slowly and repetitively on their samplers. For them, it would have been not just a geographic but an emotional journey: discovering new horizons, calculating their own possibilities. These were young women creating a different kind of cartography in a medium that was, at the time, uniquely theirs. Embroidered maps created by women and guided by female teachers, interpreted and charted the nation for which they had been given responsibility of care.