The (In)Visibility of Men in the U.S.-American Quilt World

This book is the result of my investigation into the male contribution made to the female-delineated area of quiltmaking and White masculinity concepts in contemporary U.S.-American quilt novels. Quiltmaking and conflicting gender role expectations have been of lifelong interest to me and writing a dissertation combining these two fields has been an exciting journey. Many people encouraged me to return to university as a doctoral student to conduct research and I would like to thank all my friends and family who motivated me in various ways: Dr. Kathrine M. Reynolds from the University of Sydney, Australia, whose enthusiastic research (on nineteenth-century emigration from the Duchy of Nassau to Australia) as a PhD student in her sixties, has served as a model to me. PD Dr. Silke Schmidt’s pioneering spirit promoted my initiation into a whole new circle of American Studies scholars (Americanists) at Philipps University, Marburg. At different stages of my work, I have immensely benefited from PD Dr. Silke Schmidt’s practical mindset and Dr. Kathrine M. Reynolds’s unconditional support. I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle who did not hesitate to accept me into her doctoral seminar. I thank the dissertation committee for their work, Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle from the Department of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Marburg University and Prof. Dr. Alfred Hornung from the Obama Institute at Mainz University in particular.

I am deeply grateful to the American Quilt Study Group (AQSG) whose seminars I could attend as an international member. I would like to thank AQSG for their excellent publications and outstanding quilt historian Merikay Waldvogel, Dr. Jonathan Gregory from the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Lincoln, and Dr. Erin French from Iowa State University for their inspiring discussions during the 2019 seminar. Quilt artist Joe Cunningham and late Marie Davenport-Schneider generously provided me with some books that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not get access to in Germany.

A large portion of this work was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. My husband has observed my masculinities studies with consummate ease helping me to track down material I needed. I would like to thank him and my open-minded daughter for their wholehearted support.

I also want to thank the Peter Lang publication team.

“America is not like a blanket – one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt – many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread” (Jesse Jackson in his speech “The Rainbow Coalition” delivered to the Democratic Party, 17 July 1984. Qtd. in Beresford and Hebert 19). The choice of this powerful trope by a well-known male African American politician indicates how deeply patchwork piecing is rooted in the culture of the United States. It is omnipresent: “Quilts are versatile. Through the ages they have served as warm blankets, cabin door and window coverings, and crop protection against freezing weather and grasshopper plagues. They have been used to celebrate weddings, to comfort the sick, to bundle babies, and to shroud the dead” (Kort, Wisconsin Quilts 8). In the 1988 article “The Power of the Pin: Sewing as an Act of Rootedness in American Literature,” critic Ozzie J. Mayers calls sewing “as American as the hunt or the subjugation of the frontier,” as it suggests “a kind of rootedness whereby the human spirit, not just [of] women, survives” (667). Yet, for a long time, American Studies scholars in Germany have not taken a particular interest in the history of quiltmaking in North America. They do not seem to have been captured by the aura of quilts or by the history they tell, despite the late twentieth-century Quilt Revival that led to a tremendous gain in the cultural popularity of these works in the United States. Likewise, there are few studies by German Americanists that shed light on sewing in U.S.-American literature, quiltmaking in particular. The lack of attention paid to quilting as a study area among male and female German Americanists alike might be based on a general perception that needlework¹ as a piece of a nation’s cultural heritage is negligible or that quiltmaking as a handicraft belongs to U.S.-American women’s domain and is one manifestation of outdated femininity concepts as discussed by Rozsika Parker, for example. She has done valuable research on women’s needlework as a means of suppression and subversion. American Studies scholars in Germany have paid insufficient attention to quilts and their cultural implications. There are a few exceptions to the rule such as Britta Feyerabend’s 2010 publications “Quilting Auto/Biographies” and “Fabricating Lives: Alice Walker’s Quilted Biographies.” Britta Feyerabend is “interested in how quilting and material culture in general, can be used to read the unwritten history of the American people” (www.obama-institute.com/ n. pag.). The first goal of my research is to contribute to this endeavor within the field of American Studies in Germany. This much-needed attention is also due to the increasing importance of the patchwork quilt “as the central metaphor of American cultural identity” (Showalter 169), a metaphor even replacing that of the melting pot. In such a context, the exclusive alignment of the quilt with the feminine is wrong; it limits the narration of the nation’s history and of contemporary U.S.-American quiltmaking practice that extends beyond the sphere of women. Inquiry into male contribution to quiltmaking as a craft and as an artform is underresearched. McBrinn deplores men’s erasure from the history of needlework. The exploration of their (in)visibility in U.S.-American quiltmaking in particular has only started. Therefore, the second purpose of my thesis is to expand investigation in an area of research that is also relatively new in the United States. Men’s (growing) engagement with the world of quilting and inscriptions of gender will be explored as a preliminary to examining the (in)visibility of male quiltmaking in selected quilt fiction, my focus of study in the main part of this dissertation. The word ‘fiction’ will be mostly used to refer to novels, although ‘fiction’ can also cover other imaginative work in prose, but generally not poetry or drama.²

In her 2014 article “‘One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts’: Expressions of Cross-Cultural Communication,” U.S.-American quilt scholar Marin F. Hanson quotes historian Ken Ames; he “has proposed that ‘things [objects] constitute one of the most significant classes of human behavior and accomplishment, and therefore, one of the most valuable kinds of historical document’” (80–81). If the world is simultaneously material and social and all material possessions carry social meanings, “the things that surround us are an inseparable part of how our relationships to other people are mediated, and the environment, society and culture we live in” (Woodward 1). Objects such as quilts yield information on the values and ideas of a society and, as Thomas Schlereth suggests about artifacts in general, they are “concrete evidence of the presence of a human mind operating at the time of fabrication” (3). If objects, their creation and efficacy as well as their status, reflect belief patterns, material culture is also related to gender. In a more recent publication, Mark Moss has unraveled the secrets of “masculine adornment” (47–66), thus explicitly thematizing the connection between masculinity concepts and men’s space. With objects not only reflecting beliefs but playing an active role in people’s lives, the analysis of quilts and quiltmaking in their social context can contribute to understanding gender concepts either not recorded in written documents in the same way or perceived very differently through objects and material practice, that is, through their genderedness. Acknowledging patchwork and quilting as material practice can elucidate both men’s and women’s social roles and processes of change. The issue addressed is that of perceptions or even potential transformations of socially and culturally constructed gender roles as they become feasible through material culture – material practice in particular – and their presentation in imaginative work. As the object world inserts itself into our consciousness and the quilt novels I will analyze are “extended fictional prose narratives”³ about characters seemingly acting in everyday life, they both reveal expectations and values underpinning people’s lives. One distinctive feature of quilts that needs to be discussed in this context is their status. Igor Kopytoff’s “cultural biography” proposition explicates the commoditization and potential singularization of objects and serves as a tool to analyze men’s influence on the connection between quiltmaking or quilts and prestige.

Although words like ‘things,’ ‘objects,’ ‘artifacts,’ ‘art objects,’ ‘works of art,’ ‘artworks,’ and ‘goods’ are contested terms among material culture scholars, some of the differentiations made are of little importance to my study. I will use ‘things’ as a generic term, (human-made) ‘objects’ and ‘artifacts’ interchangeably when referring to quilts. ‘Goods’ will be a synonym for ‘commodities,’ that is, things of a certain economic value that can be bought or sold. To begin with, any ‘work-of-art’ status that quilts display is irrelevant for my study. When the category of ‘art’ – as opposed to mere skill or accomplishment – arises, I will follow A.C. Danto’s institutional definition of art as quoted by Alfred Gell: “[…] ‘art’ is whatever is treated as art by members of the institutionally recognized art world […] – critics, dealers, collectors, theoreticians, etc.” (5). U.S.-American quilt history provides an ideal example to investigate the liminal space between crafts and arts or their cross-pollination against the background of gender issues.

I will use the word ‘quilt’ as a generic term referring to a decorative cover or a hanging made of two layers, usually with a batting layer between them, almost always connected by tiny stitches. Besides evenness, the speedy execution of eight to twelve stitches per inch might be considered a criterion of skill. The top layer can be pieced, appliqué-style, a combination of appliqué and piecing, or whole-cloth. A quilt can be entirely handmade or machine-sewn. Whenever pieces of fabrics are sewn together in a pattern, the term ‘patchwork’ is used. It mostly makes up the quilt top, but sometimes can also be found in the backing. ‘Quilting’ usually refers to the process of stitching the different layers of material together, frequently in a decorative pattern visible in the quilt top and the backing. This was once executed by hand only. Now ‘quilting’ has also come to include the practice of sewing together the quilt top, the batting, and the backing on a sewing machine. One particular contemporary type of quilting is long-arm quilting on a special (industrial) sewing machine that is often equipped with computers for the quilt design with a frame ranging from three to more than four meters in length. An individual quiltmaker nowadays might create a top and pay a professional long-arm quilter for the finishing process of quilting (and binding). However, there are artifacts called quilts which have no batting or are not even quilted; inlaid patchworks may serve as an example. I will also use ‘quilting’ as a synonym for quiltmaking; this normally causes no difficulty because of the context provided. ‘Quilting’ as a countable noun refers to a meeting of quiltmakers who cooperate for the purpose of stitching a quilt top, a batting, and a backing together as the second last part of the finishing process before the binding is fixed and the quilt is ready for use. ‘Quilting’ can stand for ‘quilting party’ or ‘quilting bee’, although, according to Bassett, “[t]he term ‘quilting bee’ was not used until late in the nineteenth century” (170). One tries to distinguish between utility quilts and artwork, or – with reference to overall categories of type – traditional quilts, art quilts, and modern quilts, although such lines can be blurred. Quilts can be part of a consumer culture, if made from mass-produced kits, for example; or they can be the exact opposite, its rejection, that is, the expression of individual emotions and responses to the world. The broad spectrum of people quilting entails the immense variety of quilts. Further fields in quilt appraisal may be the age of a quilt and its place of origin as well as patterns/motifs and sewing techniques. All of this is related to the study of fiber (e.g., cotton, linen, wool, silk), type (e.g., broadcloth, velvet, feedsack, satin), fabric pattern (e.g., paisley, geometric, floral, checked), methods of printing, and shades of color.