by Tiya Miles
17. Susan Tucker, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 4.
18. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 153.
19. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 40. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, household items and clothing were considered movable property or “paraphernalia” (small-scale personal property), both of which were counted among the kinds of property free white, married women could legally own. These were the items women tended to hand down, especially to daughters. Importantly, enslaved people were also defined as movable property in some colonies and states, making them another category of property that free white women could own and inherit. Joan R. Gundersen, “Women and Inheritance in America: Virginia and New York City as a Case Study, 1700–1860,” in Inheritance and Wealth in America, ed. Robert K. Miller, Jr., and Stephen J. McNamee (New York: Plenum, 1998), 94, 96, 104, 110. See also Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), chapter 2.
20. Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that fabric stands out as a material in its ability to convey different meanings at once, as well as in its tensile quality—a capacity to be stretched and stressed while maintaining its physical coherence. Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 4, 5, 28.
21. “Sewing together”: Mark Auslander, “Rose’s Gift: Slavery, Kinship, and the Fabric of Memory,” Present Pasts 8, no. 1 (2017): 6, doi.org/10.5334/pp.78. Auslander’s full quote about this dimension of the sack in the cited article offers a beautiful analysis: “She has created, out of this valued family textile, the fabric of their female lineage. The finished sack, while a lamentation of long ago injustice, is also a tangible family reunion, sewing together those [who] were torn asunder, and recreating the lines of descent that the slavery system had sought to annihilate.” Anthropologists Jane Schneider and Annette B. Weiner point to cloth “as a common metaphor for society, thread for social relations” and note “how readily its appearance and that of its constituent fibers can evoke ideas of connectedness or tying.” Jane Schneider and Annette B. Weiner, “Introduction,” in Cloth and Human Experience, Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, eds. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 2.
22. The archaeologist Elizabeth Wayland Barber has explored how “cloth and clothing invoke magic in their encoding.” Barber, Women’s Work, 155, 155n4. Barber notes that not all scholars of Greek mythology agree with the linguistic interpretation advanced by George Bolling about the role of the rose in Homer’s Iliad.
23. The literary scholar Maria Mårdberg uses this phrasing in an analysis of how the African American author Jamaica Kincaid employs narrative to reconnect a maternal line severed through slavery in one of her books. Maria Mårdberg, “ ‘A Bleak, Black Wind’: Motherlessness and Emotional Exile in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother,” in Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century, ed. Verena Theile and Marie Drews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 28. Auslander, “Rose’s Gift.”
24. “To inscribe”: Ulrich, Age of Homespun, 141.
25. Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 64. Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 17.
26. James R. Grossman, “A Chance to Make Good: 1900–1929,” in To Make Our World Anew, vol. 2, A History of African Americans from 1880, ed. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119, 122.
27. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 14.
28. On the intimacy of fabric see Bryan-Wilson, Fray, 12–13.
29. Arthur Middleton was drafted in June 2017, prior to his marriage to Ruth. His registration card lists him as a laborer in Philadelphia. Ruth Jones, Pennsylvania Marriages, 1852–1968, Lehi, Utah, Ancestry.com Operations, 2016. Dorothy Middleton Page (Dorothy Helen Middleton), Ancestry.com. U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936–2007. Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2015. Arthur Middleton served from August 26, 1918, to July 18, 1919, and was honorably discharged on July 24, 1919. Arthur Middleton, Application, Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, World War I Veterans Service and Compensation Files, 1917–1919, 1934–1948, Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2015. Women in domestic service had a variety of living situations (including sleeping on their employers’ premises, away from their own children). Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 113. Also see W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; repr.: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), on Black women as heads of households, Kindle loc. 1445, 1808.
30. “The most important”: Dunbar, Fragile Freedom, 4; Dunbar, Fragile Freedom, 34, 44. For descriptions of the early Black business class, also see DuBois, Philadelphia Negro, Kindle loc. 622, 630, 631, 999, 1001. Sharon Harley notes that most Black women who lived in Philadelphia in the antebellum period labored as domestic workers and washerwomen. A smaller percentage worked in the needle trades, for lower wages than their white counterparts. Sharon Harley, “Northern Black Female Workers: Jacksonian Era,” in The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, ed. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (1978; repr., Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997), 10–11.
31. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 208, 206. For a description of the first waves of Black migration following emancipation, see DuBois, Philadelphia Negro, chapter 12.
32. Barbara Blair, “Though Justice Sleeps: 1880–1900,” in Kelley and Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew, 10, 11.
33. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 111, 234. The historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham points out that only 1 percent of Black women had attained middle-class status in the 1890s. The vast majority were still limited to low-wage agricultural and domestic service labor. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 40.
34. DuBois, Philadelphia Negro, Kindle loc. 631, 2586.
35. DuBois, Philadelphia Negro, Kindle loc. 621, 630, 2583.
36. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 111. The grandmother and mother of Philadelphia-born Black intellectual Alain Locke ran a dressmaking business and through that work helped maintain their family’s place in the Black middle class. Stewart, New Negro, 22, 14.
37. Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces,” 8–9. The couple’s marriage application lists Ruth’s address as 501 Woodland and Arthur’s address as 1731 Uber in June 1918. Arthur gave this same address on his military service application in July 1918. Middleton and Jones marriage application, June 25, 1918. Arthur Middleton, Military Service Application No. 272507, Pennsylvania (draft card): Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, World War I Veterans Service and Compensation Files, 1917–1919, 1934–1948, Lehi, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2015. Arthur Middleton, World War I veteran’s compensation: Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, World War I Veterans Service and Compensation Files, 1917–1919, 1934–1948, Lehi, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2015. Pa.
38. U.S. Federal Census, 1930, Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2010. Images produced by Family Search; page 10B; Enumeration District: 0060; FHL microfilm: 2341816. Lawrence F. Flick, “Samuel Castner, Jr.�
� Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 40, no. 3 (1929): 193–225. George Eastman Museum, “Samuel Castner Papers, Louis Walton Sipley/American Museum of Photography Collection,” George Eastman Museum, September 5, 2018, eastman.org/samuel-castner-papers-louis-walton-sipleyamerican-museum-photography-collection. Township of Lower Merion, Building and Planning Committee, November 8, 2017, lowermerion.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=17724. Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens, xiii. Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 170. I am grateful to the public historian and descendant coordinator Hannah Scruggs, whose research assistance on Ruth and Dorothy Middleton was invaluable.
39. Melnea Cass, transcript, Digital, Black Women’s Oral History Project, OH-31; T-32, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 3, 5, 20. Quoted with permission from the Schlesinger Library.
40. Middleton family (Pink, Flander, Arthur) in the censuses of 1910 and 1920: Ancestry.com, 1910 United States Federal Census, Lehi, Utah, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, 2006. Ancestry.com, 1920 United States Federal Census, Provo, Utah, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, 2010. Arthur Middleton’s Transport record: Outgoing and Incoming, U.S. Army World War I Transport Service, Passenger Lists 1910–1939, pp. 92/60. National Archives, fold3.com/image/604049037?rec=621933109&xid=1945. U.S. Army World War I Transport Service, Passenger Lists, National Archives, 1910–39, USA. Arthur Middleton is listed as a member of the 856th Company Colored with a port of sail from Brest, France, in July 1919. After his discharge, census records do not list him at the same address as Ruth Middleton.
41. Melnea Cass, transcript, 21, 25, 27, 64–66, 70–71, 107, 40–41, iv.
42. Trummel Valdera, “Younger Set Activities,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 13, 1938, 6–7. The author of this youth-oriented social page refers to “Dot Middleton.”
43. U.S. Federal Census, 1940, Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2012, provided in association with National Archives and Records Administration.
44. Martha Horsey’s employment agency: Philadelphia City Directory, 1924.Ancestry.com. U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995 [database online]. Philadelphia City Directory 1924. Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2011.
45. Helen Middleton, Arthur Middleton’s sister, married a Dutch Caribbean man named Louis Stebo (or Steba) in 1935; they lived in Brooklyn. Helen Middleton Delayed Birth Certificate: Ancestry.com, South Carolina, Delayed Birth Records, 1766–1900 and City of Charleston, South Carolina, Birth Records, 1877–1901, Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2007. Helen and Louis Marriage index: Ancestry.com, New York, New York, Extracted Marriage Index, 1866–1937, Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2014. Louis and Helen Stebo in the 1940 census: U.S. Federal Census, 1940; Census Place: Kings County, New York; roll: m-t0627-02578; page: 9B; Enumeration District: 24–1244. United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940). T627, 4,643 rolls. “Virginian: A Dinner Guest Here,” Philadelphia Tribune, June 6, 1929, 6. “Baby blue” quote: social pages, Philadelphia Tribune, December 8, 1927, 4. Visits with sister-in-law: “Gad-Abouts,” April 21, 1938, Philadelphia Tribune, 5; “Newsy Nibbles,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 4, 1940, 8. Additional social occasion mentions from the 1920s and 1930s: Philadelphia Tribune, July 25, 1929, 4; August 13, 1931, 4, February 18, 1932, 5, June 30, 1932, 5; September 8, 1932, 5; October 19, 1933, 6; December 21, 1933, 6; March 28, 1935, 9; December 30, 1937, 6; “Newsy Nibbles,” Philadelphia Tribune, February 24, 1938, 6.
46. “Spacious home”: “Club Parties,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 28, 1935, 9. Philadelphia Tribune, October 19, 1933, 6. “Society at a Glance,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 3, 1938, 5.
47. Modish: Trummell Valdera, “Younger Set Activities,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 10, 1937, 6. “Blue taffeta”: “Younger Set,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 7, 1938, 6. “Gray wool”: Trummell Valdera, “Younger Set Activities,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 21, 1938. “New gadget”: Trummell Valdera, “Younger Set Activities,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 14, 1939, 9. “Annoyed”: Trummell Valdera, “Younger Set Activities,” Philadelphia Tribune, February 3, 1938, 6.
48. “Matron”: Philadelphia Tribune, January 18, 1940.
49. Study of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania: St. Simon the Cyrenian Church (1964), “St. Simon the Cyrenian Church, Diocese of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” p. 13, https://philadelphiastudies.org/2018/04/07/study-of-the-episcopal-diocese-of-pennsylvania-st-simon-the-cyrenian-church-1964/. Ruth Middleton was confirmed at St. Simon the Cyrenian Church in 1940. Ruth J. Middleton is pictured and listed among people receiving the laying on of hands; she is not identified individually in the photograph. Philadelphia Tribune, January 18, 1940; Philadelphia Tribune, March 7, 1940, 18. Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces,” 10. After a three-month preparation, Dorothy Middleton was confirmed in March; she was a young teenager at the time; “Seventy-eight Confirmed at St. Simon’s Chapel,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 6, 1933, 14. According to the Archdiocese of Pennsylvania, many of the St. Simon records have been lost due to asbestos. Reports of the church in 1917–18 can be found in The Monthly Message of the Parish of the Holy Apostles, digitized at philadelphiastudies.org.
50. “Parties”: Dorothy Middleton, “Younger Set Activities,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 4, 1940, 9. “Formals”: Dorothy Middleton, “Younger Set Activities,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 4, 1940, 8. In the April 4 issue, Middleton notes that Trummell Valdera, the regular author of this column, had moved to Washington.
51. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984; repr., London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 5.
52. Jennifer Van Horn’s analysis of school samplers created in early-nineteenth-century Pennsylvania demonstrates that middle-class white girls forged social capital for their families by embroidering samplers that would hang on the walls of the home. Such samplers showed off the family’s ability to relinquish girls from manual domestic labor for the purposes of finer work. Van Horn also argues that middle-class families, through girls’ embroidery, were forging a class-based culture of their own that was not simply a mimicking of upper-class aesthetics and values. Jennifer Van Horn, “Samplers, Gentility, and the Middling Sort,” Winterthur Portfolio 40, no. 4 (2005): 219–48. Middle-class African American girls in the North also studied embroidery via the sampler form, though in much smaller numbers. For more on Black girls and sampler work, see the research blog of Kelli Coles, a designer and scholar of Black girlhood and textiles. Kelli Coles, Made in the African Diaspora, kellicoles.tumblr.com/tagged/blackgirlneedlework.
53. Parker, Subversive Stitch, 148, 151, 152; “Evoke the home”: 2.
54. Monthly Message of the Parish of the Holy Apostles, December 1917, p. 30; November 1917, p. 31; January, 1918, p. 33; February 1918, p. 30; and March 1918, p. 30, digitized at philadelphiastudies.org.
55. African American Child’s Sewing Exercise Book with 20 Hand-Sewn Sample Pieces, accession record, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Mass. Beatrice Jeanette Whiting Papers, Sewing Exercise Book, ca. 1915, MC897, folder 1.1, Schlesinger Library. Beatrice Jeanette Whiting Papers, Retirement Gift Album, 1960, MC897, folder 1.2v, Schlesinger Library. The accession record notes a Richmond oral history that quotes a sewing student of Whiting’s; also see a reference by a sewing student in the Retirement Album, sequence 90. The estimated date range of Whiting’s sewing exercise book is broad, from the bookseller’s estimate of 1900–1905 to a Schlesinger librarian’s estimate after acquisition of circa 1915 (which indicates a range of plus or minus five years). Because books like this were more commonly made by children, my discussion assumes a date in the middle of this range, when Whiting would have been a teenager. It is also possible that Whiting created this book as a model for her students to follow when she
first began teaching (by 1916), in her twenties.
56. Weekly Banner-Watchman (Athens, Ga.), November 30, 1886, quoted in Kyra E. Hicks, This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces (N.p.: Black Threads, 2009), 25–26.
57. “Black Victorians”: Jeffrey Stewart uses this richly descriptive term in his biography of Alain Locke, a Philadelphian. Stewart, New Negro, 17. Women’s sewing and decorating with textiles are prevalent in the Black Victorian culture of domesticity that Stewart describes (pp. 7, 15, 16, 17, 19, 25, 29). To see an example of this Black middle-class style from the period, visit Cedar Hill, Frederick Douglass’s family home outside Washington, D.C., which is today a national historic site.
58. “Mass of Negro people”: DuBois, Philadelphia Negro, Kindle loc. 2767. Du Bois also expressed concern that Blacks were spending more than they could afford on clothing and “extravagantly furnished parlors, dining rooms, guest chambers, and other visible parts of the homes” (Kindle loc. 2601).
59. Anna Julia Cooper, “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration of a Race,” in A Voice from the South (1892; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 12.
60. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, 1984), 93. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 152. Also see Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 149, 152–53.