Decorative needlework was a key medium through which American women constructed femininity and its relationship to public and political concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through samplers, needlecases, lace coats, silk sofas, cotton scraps, banners, and other textile things, scholars can see the ways in which women and girls related to education, property-holding, slavery and freedom, labor, and women’s right to vote. Needlework’s durable association with “traditional” notions about womanhood made it a potent resource through which to make gender in expansive and meaningful ways that had profound public, political implications as educational opportunities for girls and women were expanding, and the antislavery and women's suffrage movements were growing. Indeed, needlework's very conventionality and relationship to the past made it a useful tool for crafting womanhood anew. 

MARIAH KUPFNER is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Heritage at Penn State Harrisburg and the co-chair of the Material Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association.

Acknowledgements                                         

Introduction: Crafting Womanhood                                        
Chapter One: A House, Not Just a Home: Materializing Feminine Property            
Chapter Two: Landscapes of Violence and Freedom: Race, Possession, and the Home    
Chapter Three: Sentiment, Suffering, and the Materiality of Anti-Slavery Stitching        
Chapter Four: Fabricated Heirlooms: Women’s History on an International Stage        
Chapter Five: Workless Work and Textile Labors in the Suffrage Movement        
Conclusion: Using the Past as a Substance                            

Bibliography                                            
Notes                                                
Index