American Girlhood: Needlework, Memory, and the Making of a Nation
Guest-curated by Emily Whitted, with collaboration from Stephen & Carol Huber
Two hundred and fifty years after the founding of the United States, American Girlhood: Needlework, Memory, and the Making of a Nation turns to the girls who stitched their way into history. In the aftermath of the Revolution, early American girls from Massachusetts to Georgia wielded needles to make sense of their new national identity—producing samplers and embroideries that were simultaneously educational and artistic, practical and deeply personal: stitched spaces of demonstration, declaration, and self-fashioning. Guest-curated by Emily Whitted, a scholar specializing in early American material culture and textiles, this exhibition brings together over fifty works drawn from museum collections and private hands across the country to trace the rich legacy of girls’ needlework from the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries and follow its resonance into the present.
The checklist is deliberately wide. Marcy Hay stitched her sampler at eleven years old, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, two years after the Battle of Bunker Hill burned her birthplace to the ground. Christeen Baker, a Choctaw girl enrolled at a mission school in Mississippi, stitched hers as evidence of education— addressed “To Mrs. Hammond”—a year before the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek forced the removal of her nation; whether she survived the journey is unknown. Diantha Griswold of Wethersfield, Connecticut stitched a memorial to her mother and brother, who died before she was old enough to remember them, against a skyline she could see from her window. These are not minor objects. They are primary documents. Woven throughout the exhibition is a second, essential story: the generations of collectors, scholars, and preservationists—among them the members of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, who published the landmark American Samplers in 1921—who recognized these objects as history worth keeping long before the academy did. Their stewardship is itself a form of authorship.
“Needlework has proven a consistently enduring form of connection to the founding of the United States. As both educational and artistic expressions, samplers were powerful forms of self-fashioning for early American girls and women at their making and live on to shape our collective memory of who is remembered from our Revolutionary past.”-Emily Whitted
In the year of the Semiquincentennial, the question the exhibition leaves with every visitor is the same one it opens with: what role will needlework play again in our nation’s making and remaking?
About the Curator | Emily Whitted is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the guest curator of American Girlhood: Needlework, Memory, and the Making of a Nation. Her research broadly explores the history of textiles, women’s history, and material culture in early America. Her current and past work includes projects with the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the National Park Service and National Council on Public History, the Mercer Museum & Fonthill Castle, and the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation. She also holds an M.A. in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware.
On view May through December.
