Featuring textiles from the Kentucky Museum and Kentucky Historical Society,
Whitework: Women Stitching Identity explores the significance of early white embellished textiles that have been largely ignored, undervalued, and misinterpreted.
Whitework holds a “special place” within the cultural geography of textile making, connecting regional textile making with broader narratives of American women’s lives, political participation, and self-expression during the formative years of the Early Republic.
What is Whitework?
Disregarded for years as an exaggeration of American colonial self-sufficiency or as fancy work made for a future home, recent research has shown that whitework textiles are elaborate both in make and meaning. In make, the textiles are often an elaborate arrangement of intricately stitched motifs expressed in large scale. Some are created as “whole-cloth” quilts from two layers of woven cloth stitched together, typically with a loose cotton filling between, while others are embroidered and draw on a wide vocabulary of stitches, styles, and yarns. In meaning, the women who chose to make these white textiles, whatever techniques they used, committed countless hours to their creation. The variety, individuality, and artistry of the resulting textiles suggest that these women were not merely making a decorative item; they were using their needlework as a medium for self-expression. Additionally, historical context reveals that these textiles were primary vehicles through which women silently supported the political and economic development of the United States in the years following the Revolution through the early decades of the 19th century by boycotting British goods, including white embellished bedcovers.