Enslavement and Its Legacies: “May the points of our needles prick”

Abstract

Antislavery women asserted the home and the practice of needlework as fruitful sites of abolitionist activism where the forcefulness of their messages was amplified through associations with domesticity, femininity, and morality. These typically white stitchers demonstrated a potent sense of needlework’s capacities to provoke and to bind. But this stitchwork objectified enslaved figures and tethered Blackness to supplication and suffering even as it was directed primarily at cultivating white women’s sympathetic, self-directed subjectivity, enabling them to move from the home into economic and sociopolitical spheres.