Gossip at the Quilting Bee: A Crucial Form of Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract:

Just as the cloth was transformed and became defined as a quilt, so, too, the special qualities of the quilting bee supported the transformation of quilters into defined, agential groups. Indeed, the historical context of both quilting bees and quilt-making is significant, the activities at their peak of popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the same time as the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—generally marked as the formal birth of the organized women's rights movement.