The Quilts of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

Résumé du livre

This dissertation explores when and why home-produced bedquilts and quiltmaking evolved as significant objects and activities in the 18th and 19th centuries among women residing in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I rely on probate inventory data drawn from six selected decades between 1750 and 1884, for estates from urban Lancaster Borough/City (primarily Germanic with a significant English element) and two disparate outlying rural areas: Drumore Township, settled by British Quaker and Scotch Irish Presbyterians; and the Cocalico valley, a Germanic region settled by persons of Anabaptist, Lutheran, and Reformed faiths. I use rates of ownership and appraised valuations of fiber-processing tools, spinning wheels, looms, and household furnishing textiles, as primary evidence to develop and interpret patterns of household textile production and consumption from the mid 1700s through the mid- and late-1800s. ... The quilts these rural women and their descendants produced in the ensuing years met profound needs for women's continued involvement in the production of cultural material and situated their makers within multiple contexts of gender, taste, needlework competency, social and community identities, and ideology.--Author's abstract.