This richly illustrated book blends history, material culture analysis, and ethnography in order to “examine the changing functions of quilts within the context of everyday family life over several generations” (158). In the foreword, Michael Owen Jones suggests a more far-reaching purpose. He says that Horton’s combined use of historical documents, interviews, and artifact analysis might serve as a methodological model for using material behavior, that is, behavior associated with the production and use of artifacts, as an approach to historical ethnography.
The inspiration for the study was a group of sixteen quilts made by a South Carolina Scots-Irish family between about 1850 and 1917. Near the end of her life, Mary (Snoddy) Black (1860–1927) and two daughters labeled these family quilts, recording data such as pattern names, makers, recipients, time period and location of their making, and fabric sources. The quilts are displayed now at the philanthropic Mary Black Foundation in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which initiated the study.
The family’s upper-crust status distinguishes it from many ethnographic subjects. A hospital founded in 1925 by Black’s husband, a doctor, is named for her. The Black & Phillips Foundation copyright reflects a daughter’s marriage to a Phillips Petroleum heir. This study thus is a reminder that material culture analysis is a tool for delving below the surface of mainstream, literate European-American society as well as for studying societies of marginal, non-literate, prehistoric, or exotic “others.”
Many quilt history publications include quilts that lack provenance, a situation that hampers ethnographic study. We are lucky that Horton’s folkloristic instincts led her to recognize the special potential of a group of quilts associated with a well-documented family and accompanied by verbal cues that record at least one family member’s view of what she wanted to be known about them. These labels, combined here with Horton’s expertise in quilt history and her study of the family genealogy, do much to compensate for the notorious underdeterminedness that both frustrates and entrances scholars who try to decode the meanings of artifacts.
In this case, by combining artifactual clues about behavior and values with historical documentation of the family and its times, Horton was able to draw the important insight that the uses of quiltmaking go beyond fulfillment of the creative urge, the need for warm bedcovers, the desire for social interaction, and public statements of personal views. Women also use quilts as symbols of values, such as kinship loyalty and thrift, for which quilts are particularly suited due to the multi-valent quality associated with much material culture, that is, the ability to “simultaneously represent a number of different ideas” (151). Further, quilts function to express power relations in the domestic arena, where women may use them to create solidarity as well as exclusion.
While Horton’s focus is on relations between women of the same family, it is possible that the data compiled here could also throw light on the use of quiltmaking in setting or transcending social boundaries between people of different genders or ethnicities. For instance, African-Americans who were slaves, tenants, neighbors, or servants of the Snoddy, Benson, and Black families have a substantial presence in the book, and additional study could possibly contribute to an understanding of how quiltmaking functions in race relations and in the structuring of social hierarchy generally.
Given recent interest in the complementary roles of language and artifacts by scholars such as Webb Keane, it is interesting to note their interaction in this study. There are several instances in which the ethnographer was able to use the material culture to contradict or add to the family’s verbal cues. In one case, Horton recognized 1870s fabrics in a quilt whose label described it as having been made by Mary Black’s mother during the Civil War (154–55). This suggests the possibility that one goal of the labeling project was to create family myths. In several cases, the quilts’ openness-to-interpretation allowed the ethnographer to add her own perceptions to the verbal meanings recorded by the family. Thus Horton describes one as “a very bold quilt, perhaps not a style typically associated with a middle-aged, unmarried woman of the Victorian era,” and another as “a rather uninspired jumble of lifeless shapes” (70, plate 14; 122). It is a judgment call as to whether she has accurately read the meanings in the context of their makers’ social milieu.
I would like to see some consideration of how Horton’s findings on these South Carolina quilts fit with Fawn Valentine’s work on the expression of Scots-Irish cultural traits in West Virginia quilts, but such a comparison could be fodder for another study [1]. Also, Horton says that Art Deco influenced quiltmaking fashions in the 1910s but probably meant Art Nouveau, as Art Deco emerged in the 1920s.
The wealth of quilt history data that has been piling up since the 1970s quilt revival has received little attention in folklore publications. Perhaps folklorists are put off by the mainstream status of quiltmaking, by the strong commercial component, by the inapplicability of the participant-observation method to historical data, or by the overwhelming quantity of material. For those of us who see the separation of quilt history and folklore studies as a significant loss to both fields, this book is a satisfying integration of the two. Horton treats a quilt historical subject ethnographically, and locates her work firmly in the material culture branch of folkloristics with introductory quotes from James Deetz and Henry Glassie and with the foreword by Jones. Mary Black’s Family Quilts is an engrossing and stimulating read to anyone interested in southeastern U.S. culture, quilt studies, material culture, or the interaction of language and artifacts.
[1] Fawn Valentine. 1995. “Aesthetics and Ethnicity: Scotch-Irish Quilts in West Virginia,” in Uncoverings 1994, ed. Virginia Gunn, 7–44. San Francisco: American Quilt Study Group.
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[Review length: 963 words • Review posted on May 31, 2006]