Ohio Is My Dwelling Place: Schoolgirl Embroideries, 1800-1850<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0By Sue Studebaker. With a foreword by Kimberly Smith Ivey.\u00a0\u00a0(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.\u00a0\u00a0xxvi, 310 pp.\u00a0\u00a0Cloth, $70.00, ISBN 0-8214-1452-6.\u00a0\u00a0Paper, $34.95, ISBN 0-8214-1453-4.)<\/p>\n
In 1777, a Continental Army officer complimented Philadelphian Sarah Wister on her \u201cneedle wisdom.\u201d The young Miss Wister\u2019s sampler, hanging in the parlor of the family\u2019s Germantown home, served as the sole evidence of this trait. One necessarily wonders how much wisdom, a term so often applied to the learned, the experienced, or the elderly, may have been possessed by a sixteen-year-old Quaker girl. We do know that Sally (as she was called by family and friends) attended Anthony Benezet\u2019s school, British America\u2019s first public school for women. There Sally learned the basics of education, but also learned the \u201chigher branches\u201d of French and Latin. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century American girls\u2019 school curricula did approach that of boys; the differences, though, charted gender roles and class expectations. Sally Wister still learned needlework as she parsed French, as did other young girls of the time. In 1777, Alice Lee Shippen wrote to her daughter Nancy (who attended a Trenton, New Jersey, boarding school) of her expectations of these \u201cornamental branches\u201d of a young lady\u2019s education:<\/p>\n
Tell me how you improve in your work. Needle work is a most important branch of a female education, & tell me how you have improved in holding your head & sholders, in making a curtsy, in going out or coming into a room, in giving & receiving, holding your knive & fork, walking and seting. These things contribute so much to a good appearance that they are of great consequence.<\/em><\/p>\n From the mid eighteenth century through the Civil War, wisdom meant to Americans the ability to judge rightly in matters relating to life and conduct. Wisdom could also define learning or erudition, or a type of knowledge, as well as the spiritual life attained through biblical study. Young ladies\u2019 use of needle, thread, and other tools with which to create alphabets, verses, images, and symbols, was not the necessary skill of a tailor. A genteel girl\u2019s needlework signaled to all the acquisition of an education and a specific set of social graces. In Sally Wister\u2019s case, as in those of many other American girls in this era, \u201cneedle wisdom\u201d embodied in a sampler symbolized the pursuit of refinement, the acquisition of a specific skill and, especially after the\u00a0American Revolution, more cosmopolitan knowledge, and even a spiritual nature deemed peculiar to women.[1. Sally Wister’s “needle wisdom” found in Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, ed. and intro.,\u00a0The Journal and Occasional Writings of Sarah Wister<\/i>\u00a0(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated Universities Press, 1987), 61; \u00a0(Anne Home Shippen Livingston),\u00a0Nancy Shippen Her Journal Book<\/i>, ed. Ethel Armes (Philadelphia, 1935; rpt. New York, 1968), 39-40, quoted in Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch, “The polite lady:\u00a0\u00a0portraits of American schoolgirls and their accomplishments, 1725-1830,”\u00a0The Magazine<\/i>\u00a0Antiques<\/i>\u00a0135 (March 1989): 742-753, at 744-45.]<\/p>\n However rude their surroundings may have been, young white women in early Ohio were not exempt from the social necessity of these \u201cornamental\u201d accomplishments. As Sue Studebaker documents in Ohio Is My Dwelling Place: Schoolgirl Embroideries, 1800-1850, some 290 samplers representing fifty-seven counties (of the state\u2019s current eighty-eight) attest to the aspirations of Ohio\u2019s \u201cfirst\u201d families. Amongst the samplers she has painstakingly uncovered and reproduced (many in color) in this volume is evidence of \u201cneedle wisdom.\u201d Following the lead of indefatigable curators and collectors who, beginning in the 1970s, connected individual samplers to (often anonymous) needlework teachers, Studebaker seeks to \u201cweave together\u201d for each sampler \u201ca brief story of the stitcher, her family, and the circumstances that surrounded her life\u201d [xi].[2. These works include:\u00a0\u00a0Susan Burrows Swan, Plain and Fancy:\u00a0\u00a0American Women and Their Needlework, 1700-1850<\/i>\u00a0(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977); Glee F. Krueger,\u00a0New England Samplers to 1840<\/i>\u00a0(Sturbridge, MA: Old Sturbridge Village, 1978);\u00a0\u00a0Betty Ring,\u00a0Let Virtue Be a Guide to Thee: Needlework in the Education of Rhode Island Women, 1730-1830\u00a0<\/i>(Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1983); idem,\u00a0Girlhood Embroidery:\u00a0\u00a0American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850<\/i>, 2 vols.<\/i>\u00a0(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), Kimberly Smith Ivey,\u00a0In the Neatest Manner:\u00a0\u00a0The Making of the Virginia Sampler Tradition<\/i>\u00a0(Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Austin, TX:\u00a0\u00a0Curious Works Press, 1997).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0These studies build on the monumental compilation undertaken by Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe,American Samplers<\/i>\u00a0(Boston: Massachusetts Society of Colonial Dames of America, 1921).]<\/p>\n This she does through diaries, letters, newspapers, censuses, maps, and county, city, and town histories, especially those published at the end of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n After a brief introduction recounting the historic geopolitical organization of Ohio, Studebaker orders her work in three parts by region (Southern Ohio, Central Ohio, and Northern Ohio) following, roughly chronologically, the state\u2019s settlement. Within each part she further divides her discussion into chapters correlating (again chronologically) to counties. Each chapter offers a brief synopsis of the county\u2019s founding and establishment of schools before providing a catalogue of extant samplers found there. A final section (\u201cVictorian Impulses: Selected Needlework after 1850\u201d) and an epilogue (\u201cEverything Old Is New Again\u201d) relate briefly the decline of school instruction in needlework, the introduction of the sewing machine, and the concomitant interest in collecting historic girls\u2019 needlework. A list of documented Ohio samplers and of Ohio pioneer teachers and schools provide useful information for further research.<\/p>\n In this bicentennial year of Ohio\u2019s statehood, this compilation, the tireless work of travel to, and research in, public and private collections is to be commended. Studebaker has taken on a difficult task of reconstructing the individual lives and the social life of these makers and their samplers. One often delights in reading the specifics of a given family\u2019s experiences in their new homes in the \u201cOhio Country.\u201d Although certainly useful for local historians and curators seeking to augment existing chronicles, Ohio Is My Dwelling Place<\/em> may confound scholars of American social, cultural, and women\u2019s history. The reader finds a descriptive, if uneven, compilation rather than an analysis of the social, political, and cultural meanings of these historic samplers. In part this is due to the author\u2019s penchant for characterizing these artifacts with ahistorical aesthetic terms\u2014Anna Cumming Schenck\u2019s needlework is \u201cperhaps the prettiest\u201d of the samplers related to a Franklin County school [p. 49], for example, and Mary Wing Dodge\u2019s sampler displays elements that \u201cseem to be drawn by an unschooled hand.\u201d [p. 5] The very decorative nature of samplers has often led to their dismissal as useful historical evidence. The employment of terms such as \u201ccharming\u201d and \u201cquaint\u201d serve generally to dismiss rather than represent serious study. Such terms are also part of the lexicon created by the connoisseur in relation to the antiques trade, in which an object\u2019s value is more often based on the fluctuations of the market and collectors\u2019 interests rather than a\u00a0consideration of what professional historians would deem important. The elements of connoisseurship evident in Studebaker\u2019s work\u2014the attention to detail, the implicit comparison of styles, the level of expertise of the maker, and the like\u2014are necessary in any study of artifacts. Without an explanation of the bases of connoisseurship employed, the evaluation of these samplers appears speculative rather than definitive.[3. See Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,”\u00a0Winterthur Portfolio\u00a0<\/i>17:1 (Spring 1982): 1-19; idem, “Style as Evidence,”\u00a0Winterthur Portfolio<\/i>\u00a015:3 (Fall 1980): 197-210.]<\/p>\n Many historians interested in American women\u2019s experience would be troubled with Studebaker\u2019s strategy, if only because women\u2019s agency\u2014what women may present through their needlework\u2014takes second place to the wilderness-busting of their fathers and brothers. The imaginative play of text and image within these young women\u2019s works should compel scholars to seek various theoretical strategies with which to comprehend this rich body of evidence. For instance, Studebaker\u2019s choice of chronicling the samplers by county, even as the boundaries of Ohio\u2019s counties changed over time, does not necessarily interrogate the needle workers\u2019 understanding of place. It\u2019s one thing to relate how a young girl and her family came to the Ohio frontier and to chart the family\u2019s establishment of a new home, quite another to reconstruct how that young girl conceptualized her \u201cplace\u201d in the new country. Literary historian Annette Kolodny and women\u2019s historian Lillian Schlissel have found that women\u2019s westering experiences and related attitudes differed from those of their male counterparts. How may scholars understand the choices of image and text within nineteenth-century American schoolgirls\u2019 notions of the ever-shifting West, of place, of time?[4. On gendered attitudes towards the West, see Annette Kolodny,\u00a0The Land Before Her:\u00a0\u00a0Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860<\/i>\u00a0(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), and Lillian Schlissel,\u00a0Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey<\/i>\u00a0(New York: Schocken, 1982).]<\/p>\n Given that many of these samplers were schoolwork directed by teachers and parents in an era in which American geography and history textbooks were constantly revised and pedagogy debated, how may scholars chart through girls\u2019 embroidery the spread and acceptance of such political knowledge into the territories and newly formed states? Here, the research of Martin Br\u00fcckner on American geography and Nina Baym, on women writers of American history, would be useful to Studebaker\u2019s research on teachers and schools in the state.[5. Martin Br\u00fcckner, “Lessons in Geography:\u00a0\u00a0Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic,”\u00a0American Quarterly<\/i>\u00a051:2 (Summer 1999): 311-43; Nina Baym,\u00a0American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860<\/i>\u00a0(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).] Studebaker\u2019s inclusion of a colorful map of the Western Reserve, engraved by William Savery and published by William Sumner (not, as Studebaker states, drawn by Sumner), includes seven vignettes culled from popular imagery, among which are local flora (what girls would drawn from life and study through botany), a portrait head displaying expression (from Le Brun), and an image displaying six women as Roman goddesses often seen in Early Republican iconology. Itinerant artists were rendering with brush and paint family trees and maps and mourning pictures of Washington, as much as schoolgirls were producing the same with thread and needle. Such \u201ccuratorial\u201d practices in keeping and disseminating this political knowledge, especially in an era in which Americans were seeking to preserve Revolutionary ideals through family history and westward expansion, implicate a materialization of a larger nationalist ideology.[6. On the cultural work of artists and schoolgirls in the Early Republic, see Shirley Teresa Wajda, “`Social Currency’:\u00a0\u00a0Portrait Photography and the Fashioning of the American Middle Class, 1839-1889,” Chapter One (manuscript).]<\/p>\n In short, it may be possible, through girls\u2019 needlework, to \u201cmap\u201d an alternative history, and a national one at that. We may be able to learn how a region or a state becomes culturally part of the nation. Yet we may learn something more. Rather than read these samplers, taken together, as reflecting the larger story of (male) western settlement, may we also consider how these samplers, offering place names, images of\u00a0public and private buildings, and other historical information, created a chronicle of women\u2019s experiences, through the selection of certain motifs?<\/p>\n The selection of verses found on these samplers provides a fascinating index of larger cultural changes in the \u201cOhio Country.\u201d Studebaker astutely points out in her discussion of Quaker girls\u2019 needlework the tenets of that faith reflected in the verses as well as the imagery that decorates those sentiments. A cursory chronological review of the samplers in this volume reveals that the choice of verses may reflect the uneven religious fervor sweeping the state with the Second Great Awakening. Verses about virtue are replaced by verses of Christian belief. When a young schoolgirl stitched \u201cOhio is My Dwelling Place\u201d what did she mean? The answer is found in the context of such verses. Quaker Anna Garwood\u2019s sampler, wrought in 1832, reads: \u201cAnna Garwood is my name\/in Ohio is my station\/in Warren is my dwelling place\/and Christ is my salvation\u201d [45]. Lucretia Kirtland\u2019s earlier sampler of 1808 carries similar verses:<\/p>\n Lucretia Kirtland\u2014November 2nd 1807 Aged 10<\/em> The Kirtland family, living in what was then Trumbull County, was also living amidst a religious revival. Yet, we learn that several verses were \u201ccommon\u201d to samplers or are \u201cpopular\u201d amongst collectors, but we are at a loss to understand when and why.<\/p>\n In the early nineteenth century, when pedagogical practice was exhaustively debated by the likes of Cincinnatian Catharine Beecher, Antioch College\u2019s Horace Mann, and others, how may scholars apprehend, through a comparison of textbooks and samplers, the application of pedagogical theory and community standards and practices in girls\u2019 education? As needlework specialists Susan Swan and Betty Ring have found, penmanship manuals contained both writing \u201chands\u201d and embroidery \u201chands\u201d in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the same time, however, what was considered a proper education for girls and for boys became a topic of national discussion\u2014especially as industrialization organized anew American society. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne joined in the discussion as well, when he contrasted the courtly Hepzibah Pyncheon and her country cousin Phoebe in his 1851 work about the effects of the new industrial ordering of economy and society, The House of the Seven Gables.<\/p>\n To find the born and educated lady…we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord, and walked a minuet, and worked an antique tapestry-stitch\u00a0on her sampler. It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old Gentility.<\/em>[7. Nathaniel Hawthorne,\u00a0The House of the Seven Gables<\/i>\u00a0(New York: New American Library, 1981), 76.\u00a0\u00a0On Beecher and Mann, see, respectively, Kathryn Kish Sklar,\u00a0Catharine Beecher:<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0A Study in American Domesticity\u00a0<\/i>(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), and Lawrence A. Cremin, ed.\u00a0The Republic and the School:\u00a0\u00a0Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men<\/i>\u00a0(New York:\u00a0\u00a0Teachers College, Columbia University, 1957).]<\/p>\n May we consider more fully women\u2019s domestic practices as reflecting larger shifts in American political, economic, and cultural history? What was needlework\u2019s worth to household economy when industrialized manufacture of textiles and an expansion of a cash culture rendered home production less necessary? By the Civil War, Americans of the new middle class were rejecting \u201caristocratic\u201d practices, and raising a new generation of children whose educational needs were adapted more to the marketplace and consumerism. Berlinwork replaced what was once taught in school: the time-consuming task of custom drawing patterns, and the perfection of many different stitches. Berlinwork reduced sewing to one or two stitch types color-coded by number on point paper rather than linen. As Studebaker observes, girls \u201ccould `stitch by number\u2019 as people sometimes paint by number today\u201d [p. 258]. The \u201cfactory system\u201d of the Market Revolution had \u201ccome home,\u201d but as several historians have pointed out, the middle-class dwelling was where the Market Revolution began.[8. On the shifts in household technology and what those shifts meant for women’s roles, see Priscilla Brewer,\u00a0From Fireplace to Cookstove:\u00a0\u00a0Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America<\/i>\u00a0(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), and Ruth Schwartz Cowan,\u00a0More Work For Mother:\u00a0\u00a0The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave<\/i>\u00a0(New York: Basic Books, 1983), and Jeanne Boydston,\u00a0Home and Work:\u00a0\u00a0Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic<\/i>\u00a0(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).\u00a0\u00a0Nancy Dunlap Bercaw explores this shift towards middle-class domesticity via women’s craftwork in “Solid Objects\/Mutable Meanings:\u00a0\u00a0Fancywork and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture, 1840-1880,”\u00a0Winterthur Portfolio<\/i>\u00a026 (Winter 1991):\u00a0\u00a0231-48.]<\/p>\n What Sue Studebaker has produced in this handsome volume is an important addition to extant surveys of girls\u2019 and women\u2019s needlework. Studebaker\u2019s painstaking work provides a necessary extension of, and counterpart to, well-documented collections in New England and the East Coast generally. Nevertheless, whether a plain marking sampler or a needlework picture requiring skillful and nimble fingers, these artifacts tell more than decorative arts scholars have yet fully to engage.<\/p>\n Ohio Is My Dwelling Place: Schoolgirl Embroideries, 1800-1850.\u00a0\u00a0By Sue Studebaker. With a foreword by Kimberly Smith Ivey.\u00a0\u00a0(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.\u00a0\u00a0xxvi, 310 pp.\u00a0\u00a0Cloth, $70.00, ISBN 0-8214-1452-6.\u00a0\u00a0Paper, $34.95, ISBN 0-8214-1453-4.) In 1777, a Continental Army officer complimented Philadelphian Sarah Wister on her \u201cneedle wisdom.\u201d The young Miss Wister\u2019s sampler, hanging in the parlor of the family\u2019s … Continue reading Book Review: Ohio Is My Dwelling Place<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1622,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39926],"tags":[43926,18770,43954,43958],"class_list":["post-1406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-volume-2-issue-1-fall-2003","tag-2-1","tag-review","tag-shirley-teresa-wajda","tag-sue-studebaker"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1622"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1406"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1414,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions\/1414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWallingford [Connecticut] is my native place<\/em>
\nAnd English is my nation,<\/em>
\nPoland is my dwelling place<\/em>
\nAnd Christ is my salvation. [p. 232]<\/em><\/p>\nShirley Teresa Wajda<\/em>
\nKent State University<\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"