by Tiya Miles
Needlework picture. African American student Rachel Ann Lee fashioned this canvas-work scene, an example of the needlework some Black girls did in northern schools in the mid-nineteenth century. Rachel Ann Lee, Oblate Sisters of Providence School, Baltimore, Maryland, 1846, wool, linen, and metallic thread, 2009.0013 A, B, museum purchase with funds drawn from the Centenary Fund, courtesy of Winterthur Museum.
While enslaved Black women in the United States were forced to sew clothing and textiles for plantation enterprises, they were rarely trained in the ornamental needlework of embroidery, marking an invisible line of status between feminized sewing ladies of the big house and defeminized sewing laborers of the slave quarters. White women of the elite classes and the aspiring middle classes embroidered to be (and be viewed as) feminine women, a category from which Black women were almost universally barred. Enslaved Black women who were exposed to “cultured” dress and manners sometimes had access to training in embroidery prior to the Civil War. Following emancipation, formerly enslaved African American women of the aspiring working and middle classes took up a range of needle crafts associated with the feminine ideal, such as crocheting and embroidery.
In the pages of the St. Simon the Cyrenian Church monthly newsletter in 1917–18, for instance, a sewer identified only as “Jane,” presumably a Black woman seeking a like clientele, advertised “Art Needlework,” “Infants’ Wear,” and “Lessons in Knitting and Crocheting” on Fifty-second Street.54 Melnea Cass, as we know, fashioned her children’s clothing by hand in Boston. In another example, a Black woman named Beatrice Jeanette Whiting, who grew up and remained in Cass’s hometown of Richmond, Virginia, studied embroidery as a teen or young woman. Born in 1890, of the same generation as Ruth and Melnea, Beatrice Whiting hailed from an educated family and became a high school home economics teacher remembered by students for introducing them to sewing. Whiting’s sewing exercise book from her own time learning to embroider in the early 1900s features twenty-seven practice pages sewn in white and red thread. The accession record for Whiting’s sample book, housed at the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, notes her improvement in skill and “excellent” stitching by the final exercise. Whiting may have treasured this evidence of her youthful effort featuring all manner of sophisticated hems and stitch patterns, for it was saved together with her “embossed leather” memory book, filled with inscriptions from students and colleagues upon her retirement in 1960.55
Beatrice Jeanette Whiting’s sewing exercise book, front inside cover and first page, ca. 1915. African American sewer Beatrice Whiting completed these sewing exercises in the early 1900s, in Richmond, Virginia. From 75 Stories, 75 Years: Documenting the Lives of American Women at the Schlesinger Library, exhibition, 2018. Photograph by Kevin Grady/ Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Black women’s enthusiasm for adopting the fine needle arts was also evident in public exhibits of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like the cotton and craft fairs where prize-winning quilter Harriet Powers displayed her work in the 1880s. At an annual African American fair held in Powers’s hometown of Athens, Georgia, a local newspaper reported on the wares of the “women’s department,” describing “a great many very pretty quilts and home-made bed coverings…a white knit quilt that is quite pretty…some nice fancy work, conspicuous among which we noticed silk pillows and cushions.” The reporter noted, in addition, that students from the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary (now Spelman College) had submitted “credible specimens of crayon work, embroidery and sewing.”56
Attaining these comparatively rarefied skills common to white women of certain classes was a source of pride for Black women who were striving to gain ground in an arena that white women across the class spectrum had long claimed: the ability to maintain domestic spaces of their own for their families. For “Black Victorians,” especially in northeastern cities like Philadelphia, where Ruth Middleton resided, the appearance of the “decorous” home was paramount to the respectability of the family, and women’s textile and lace work was instrumental to the achievement of this aesthetic.57 St. Simon the Cyrenian Church in Philadelphia hosted sewing and knitting classes, among other activities, for local youths and exhibited articles of clothing made by the participants. Among the “Pages of Interest to Women” printed by The Philadelphia Tribune were meeting announcements for the Willow Green Embroidery Club, the Friendly Sewing Club, and the Fireside Sewing Club, each of which would meet in a private home.
Indeed, much of this social sewing took place inside the home and would eventually enhance home decor, even as members of the Black intelligentsia, like W.E.B. Du Bois, urged “the mass of Negro people” to “sacredly guard the home, to make it the centre of social life and moral guardianship.”58 Anna Julia Cooper, a contemporary of Du Bois’s and a scholar, teacher, and principal in Washington, D.C., likewise praised the Black domestic endeavor in her treatise A Voice from the South, noting that “this hope for our country primarily and fundamentally rests…on the homelife and on the influence of good women in those homes.”59
In the decades spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Melnea Cass did club work and Anna Julia Cooper praised home life, educated Black women in northern, southern, midwestern, and western cities formed local associations that embraced and linked both. Among the major goals of these women was advancing the progress of Black women in society and strengthening the Black family unit, which suffered from persistent poverty, a lack of economic and educational opportunity, and the cloud of everyday racial prejudice. They shared the sense that they were duty-bound, as African American women, to bear the burdens of their race, of their sex, and of the nation. Those burdens were understood to be contemporary as well as historical, consisting of the weight of past wrongs and present urgencies.
In keeping with the gender sensibility of their times, clubwomen believed that the role of the Black wife and mother stood central to the improvement of Black family life and the advancement of the race as a whole. They also aimed to defend Black women against defamation in American public culture, where journalists and correspondents routinely accused them of sexual immorality, impropriety, and vice. The impetus for connecting scores and then hundreds of local Black women’s clubs into a formalized national network, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), in 1896, had taken shape in response to a flagrant incident of politically motivated public shaming. After a group of Black women in Boston, led by Woman’s Era magazine editor Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, saw anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells pilloried as “having no sense of virtue and…being altogether without character” in a southern newspaper, they called a meeting for Black women to come together and act.60 As club organizer and intellectual Fannie Barrier Williams put it at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893: “The morality of our home life has been commented on so disparagingly and meanly that we are placed in the unfortunate position of being defenders of our name.”61
Black women organizers issued a vehement self-defense in print and in speeches, referring to Christian theology, royal women in antiquity, and the accomplishments of contemporary Black women in order to ground their claims of propriety and moral standing.62 Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the expanded NACW, stressed this advance in her 1896 speech titled “The Progress of Colored Women”: “So gloomy were their prospects, so fatal the laws, so pernicious the customs, only fifty years ago. But, from the day their fetters were broken…colored women have forged steadily ahead in the acquisition of knowledge and in the cultivation of those virtues which make for good.”63 Their strategy of using personal comportment as a weapon of defense was just as important to clubwomen as eloquent rebuttal. For many of these women, standing against public disparagement meant the constant demonstration of high moral character and proper feminine attributes reflective of Victor
ian mores.64
As a Black clubwoman, Mamie Garvin Fields participated in this major social movement at the local level in Charleston, South Carolina. In her memoir, Fields depicts a Black southern family striving to achieve and maintain middle-class standing in the post-Reconstruction South, a quest in which domestic life was central. Her family defined status as having a financial position secure enough for men to work in a profession or at a skilled trade, earning enough so that the women could work in their own homes rather than in the homes of white families, while their children could regularly attend school rather than laboring for wages. The space of the private home beyond white supervision was paramount, even if it was a home shared with extended kin. Mamie Garvin Fields grew up in this kind of relatively privileged social world. Her uncle, in whose home Mamie’s mother lived from a young age, served as a Methodist minister. Mamie’s parents disdained the thought of Black women in the family performing domestic work in white people’s homes or “carrying around anybody’s white baby.”65 Instead, Mamie’s mother worked as a dressmaker until she married, at which point she became a full-time homemaker. Mamie’s father labored as a skilled carpenter. Mamie became an educator and a community organizer in mutual aid societies and Black women’s clubs. A twentieth-century resident of Charleston, Mamie Garvin Fields came to exemplify the middle-class values her family upheld, despite her grandparents’ history of enslavement on a farm in the Barnwell District (the same county where Ashley was enslaved in 1853).
As Mamie Garvin Fields tells her story to her granddaughter (and co-author) in the book Lemon Swamp, she connects sacrosanct domestic space with women’s fiber arts and care for heirloom fabrics. Embroidery and well-wrought cloth represent the attainment of middle-class respectability and the opportunity for Black women to be “ladies” rather than “field hands,” “wenches,” or “fancies” (in the pejorative terms of the slave auction block). Mamie Fields’s grandmother kept a trunk “full of soft linen and handmade finery from the West Indies” and “dried petal flowers, which she had sewed into little silk bags.” This captivating grandmother “entertained the girls, showing [them] her wedding dress and veil, the hemstitched petticoats, the scarves and antimacassars to put on the furniture,” while making promises about which of her “beautiful things” she would pass on to each young relative when she died. In this elaborate ritual of opening and examining the contents of the trunk, Mamie Fields’s grandmother was demonstrating for the children what it meant to be a properly feminized Black woman through the language of textiles, and enveloping them in a fantasy of grand inheritance and maternal lineage.66
Although Mamie confessed that she “never got so much as a doily out of that trunk!,” she became expert at “needlework.” After she attended college and began working as an elementary school teacher, Mamie Fields, along with some close friends, formed a group dedicated to “uplifting” the race. In 1927, they founded a Charleston organization called the Modern Priscilla, which joined with the NACW, the umbrella organization of Black women’s clubs dedicated to improving living conditions and opportunities for African Americans. The work of the NACW was national and regional, as well as local.
Northward of Mamie Garvin Fields, in Boston, Melnea Cass became president of the NACW’s northeastern region. The Charleston club, which took its name from a Boston ladies’ art magazine (suggesting the transregional shape of Black women’s club consciousness), “dressed fine because needlework was our forte,” Mamie Fields recalled. The Black women of Charleston’s Modern Priscilla “published directions to make everything for the home and for yourself, from crocheted tablecloths to the crocheted yoke for your shirtwaist, and from old-fashioned flounce curtains to the newest type of skirt.”67 In addition to promoting her social club’s dedication to sewing and yarn art and passing these skills along to her students in the classroom, Mamie ensured that her own granddaughters learned the feminine craft of embroidery that African American women had long been dissociated from. Mamie Fields, who refers to herself and her friends as “ladies” in the memoir, made it a point to teach her granddaughters “crocheting, embroidering, and the like.”68
For Mamie Fields’s generation, which was also Ruth Middleton’s generation, sophisticated sewing was a sign of feminine, middle-class refinement and a simultaneous projection of Black women’s dignity. After living through the insidious racial environment of the early twentieth century, Fields was “determined to pass on a heritage” to her granddaughters, which she did through telling stories about the struggles and accomplishments of their family and teaching sewing skills that exemplified African American women’s virtue and their essential contributions in the home and in society.69
Given what we know of Ruth Middleton’s slow shift into a more specialized level of domestic service, her exposure to the domestic spaces of highly educated white people’s homes, and her eventual acceptance into the ranks of the Philadelphia Black middle class, her choice to embroider, rather than write, her family story suggests cultural as well as political motives. Through this artistic medium, Ruth demonstrated her skill in a craft that signified her class aspirations and her identity as a refined Black woman who embraced the domestic arts of the feminine “sphere.” In addition to claiming this elevated space for herself, she simultaneously claimed it for her foremothers. Ashley, who had little more to her name than a battered sack, and Rose, who possessed scarcely more than a tattered dress, would be memorialized through an art form that showcased feminine worth, propriety, and delicacy, a posthumous display of respect withheld from them during their lifetimes.
There is, of course, a complicating aspect to Black as well as white women’s embrace of a craft that was so closely wedded to fixed ideas of what “proper” womanhood entailed. In the 1700s and 1800s, women were relegated to the endeavor of embroidery, which was defined as a craft rather than a fine art, an indication of its relatively low cultural value when compared to masculine-associated activities like painting or sculpture. Embroidery gained even greater social importance in the nineteenth century when women of means were banished into the domestic sphere, where their lives were tightly regulated. Embroidery, often taken up in the feminine spaces of drawing rooms and requiring quiet diligence, represented a sequestering of women’s lives in the home and signified “absolute innocence and subservience.” No artistic act is ever without nuance. Even as embroidery work was encouraged to “still and silence” privileged women, it could serve as a vehicle for circumventing societal rules. In Victorian novels, embroidery played the symbolic role of representing lost speech for women characters, serving as a “loophole” for “what they were unable to say openly,” writes a foundational scholar of embroidery.70 Despite the constraints of the form, women did use needlework as a way of expressing personal feelings and wishes.71
Embroidery was a flexible art in its ability to convey meaning. It was also a slighted form because of its association with women. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists seized on the possibilities presented by these competing characteristics. Artists in the studio and activists in the streets took up embroidery to satirize cultural convention and invest typically feminized imagery (such as embroidered floral bouquets) with double meanings that exposed and criticized the confinements of domesticity. Feminist fiber artists brought a cottage pastime out into the public arena, reinvesting fabric imagery with the rhetorical message that the personal is political. A form that implied “impotence” could be turned against cultural expectation to slyly imply a refusal to cede power.72
The clever, creative, sometimes quiet, and often tongue-in-cheek reclamation of the needle arts among women has seen a resurgence since the 1970s. Around the year 2000, women began to reclaim knitting and sewing circles as spaces of solidarity, to use handiwork as a social connector and form of giving, and to make political commentary through craft in a movement termed “craftivism.”73 A knitting wave gave rise to the “pussy hat” following the 20
16 presidential election (in which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but Donald Trump won the presidency) and continues in the form of knit-bombed urban landscapes that force a reexamination of common objects and community values. The current resurgence of arts and crafts traditionally associated with women extends to embroidery. The journalist E. Tammy Kim explained in a story about her admiration for her Korean grandmother’s embroidery work from the 1940s that her own return to the “hoop and thread” came in a “moment of anger and news overload.” The political upheaval of the Trump presidency pushed her practice, and, she observed, “the fabric arts tick upward in times such as these, when women feel particularly indignant.”74
As a young African American woman facing the daily task of cleaning her wealthy employers’ home while looking out at a segregated world where Blacks could be killed just for occupying urban spaces, Ruth may have taken up her needle as an expression of gender identity as well as familial remembrance. Her chosen medium mirrored the gender and class ideals of dominant society even as it undercut that very society’s exclusion of Black women from those ideals. Perhaps the darkened crease line still apparent across the upper edge of the sack indicates how the textile may have once been folded for tabletop display or set behind a frame as part of a domestic statement. Perhaps Ruth felt, as E. Tammy Kim speculated about her grandmother, that embroidery “lent her a quiet, fleeting freedom.”75 Sewing has been oppressive work, but it has also been healing work. Sewing, like telling, is meditative. A suture is a stitch.