Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1983. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 18-19).

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 1973. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 384-426).

This thesis investigates creative expression through needlework by wealthy or elite women in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, focusing on women in the United States South. This inquiry begins in broad terms and proceeds to the close examination of one particular needlework sampler held in the collection of the Valentine Richmond History Center. The first chapter uses prescriptive literature popular in the eighteenth century to establish the restrictive, obedient, and subservient expectations for women’s behavior. The second chapter explores the reasons that the same books that prohibited many forms of pleasure promoted needlework as an acceptable activity for women. This chapter addresses the practical aspect of needlework, the presence and significance of textiles in the home, and the ways needlework expressed creativity. The final chapter analyzes a needlework sampler stitched in 1812, connecting it both with the themes introduced in the first two chapters and a wider range of issues.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Bernard L. Herman, Dept. of Art History. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-39).

No description available.

This dissertation examines core themes of the developing women’s movement in the United States from 1820 to 1920—the abolition of slavery, women’s property ownership, education, political identity, motherhood, and the franchise—through the lens of decorative needlework. I read the stitch as a key medium through which women visually and materially articulated their relationship to these concerns. My project has four main aims: first, to examine decorative needlework as a site of gender construction, performance, and contestation; second, to explicate the complex temporal dynamics of this stitched craft; third, to highlight the racialized, classed, and national dynamics of this work; and fourth, to theorize the sedimentary nature of crafted and gendered forms. Analyzing the rise of architectural iconography and feminized depictions of property in schoolgirl samplers, the uses of femininity and representations of Blackness in antislavery needlework, and suffragists’ debates about the political efficacy of needlework, I argue that American women used their needlework both to signal their belonging to normative femininity and to broaden its definition in deeply classed and racialized ways. As they made samplers and other textiles, I contend, stitchers worked to craft useable femininities, gendered positions from which to speak, act, construct themselves, and be remembered. My project seeks to excavate the racialized meanings of this clearly gendered work. I trace the intimate entanglements between white supremacy, colonialism, nativism, and white women’s work to materialize their own authority through textiles. I also probe the needlework strategies employed by Black and indigenous women who both encountered decorative needlework as a coerced form, but also worked to claim public visibility, remembrance, respectability, and remuneration with their stitches, challenging the whiteness of idealized femininity. By studying the ways in which white, Black, and indigenous women used the stitch to materialize gendered and racialized relationships to property, education, citizenship, empire, enslavement, and freedom, this dissertation recaptures the significant contributions that needleworkers made to women’s cultural and political activism and reconsiders gender itself as a crafted form, materially produced in the repetition of the stitch.

In the Surface Development Test, self-perceived Sewing Expertise was significant in predicting participants' test scores. For the Paper Folding Test, Knitting and Crocheting Expertise were significant, suggesting expertise may mitigate age effects.; Spatial ability has been a topic of much research and debate over the past few decades. Yet, there are gaps in the current literature. Spatial ability refers to the aptitude of an individual to mentally rotate objects, visualize spaces, and recognize patterns (Linn & Petersen, 1985). A highly spatial task that is not addressed in research literature is crafting. Crafting may refer to knitting, crocheting, sewing, and other hobbies that include manipulations of materials. These crafts are spatially oriented, because they necessitate mental rotation, pattern recognition, and 3-D visualization to create an object. While research tends to favor males on certain spatial tests (Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995), research on the relationship between expertise and spatial ability has concentrated on traditionally male dominated domains, such as architecture and video games (Salthouse & Mitchell, 1990; Sims & Mayer, 2002). The traditionally female domain of needlework crafting expertise has not been studied empirically. First, a literature review is presented to give an overview of previous spatial ability research. The paper then describes the needlework crafts of sewing, knitting, and crocheting, including their historical significance and the spatial processes involved. A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that more expertise in needlework crafts will correlate with better performance on spatial ability tests. Three hundred and four adult women (ages 18-77) completed the study. Participant experience level was determined by self-perceived level of crafting expertise. Participants performed three spatial ability tests from the ETS Factor Reference Kit (Ekstrom et al., 1976): Paper Folding, Surface Development, and Card Rotations. Results indicated that age was correlated negatively with performance in all spatial tests. Only age was significant in the Card Rotations Test.

In October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785-1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained: “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.” Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework – primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States – made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this dissertation explores how Fiske and women like her experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America, and probes their personal reactions to growing older. Falling at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study and the history of aging, this dissertation brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapter 1 explores the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework. It considers samplers modified later in life through the removal of the maker’s age or the date when the sampler was made. Chapter 2 examines epistolary needlework, that which relates a message or story in the form of stitched words. Chapter 3 focuses on technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period, particularly indelible ink and the rise of the sewing machine, and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production. Chapter 4 considers how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. The materials, style and techniques represented in these gifts often passed along an embedded message, allowing the maker to share her opinions, to demonstrate her skill and creativity, and to leave behind a memorial of her life. Far from being a decorative ornament or a functional household textile, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. In the end, the study argues that these “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source on the lives of mature antebellum women.