On Female Education

Academic and popular engagement with needlework created during the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century has labored under the influence of both a romantic reliance on text rather than object and a regard of embroidery through a feminist lens, casting it as both the product of, and resistance to, misogyny. Relying on embodied knowledge in combination with rigorous statistical analysis presents an alternative interpretation. This study will reveal that education built female agency and competency in a wide range of applicable skills through an investigation of the large numbers of polychrome and whitework samplers, and pictures, mirrors, and boxes with allegorical or Old Testament stories worked in tent, satin, or stumpwork stitches—objects previously identified as English boarding school works—including the few examples from seventeenth-century colonial America. When these objects are approached from a data-driven standpoint—and contextualized through the life and career of one embroiderer, Martha Edlin—female agency, creativity, and problem solving in everything from coverture to business management become clear, complicating the current narratives of women’s education and power.