The elegant embroidered picture was made by an unidentified
Charleston worker sometime after 1782. It is made of silk
thread on a satin-weave silk ground with linen backing.
Students at the Mary Balch school in Providence, R.I.,
produced samplers and other needlework with distinctive floral
borders surrounding one or another of the public buildings in town.
They also worked in fruit baskets and floral swags and used rococo,
rice, diagonal cross, split, Oriental and diagonal darning
stitches.
Southern schoolgirl needlework, for the most part, exhibits a
noticeable absence of particular themes, except where the
embroidery was created in religious schools. The distinction
between Northern and Southern embroidery derives from a
combination of factors that are geographic, economic and
cultural. The agrarian nature of the colonial South, its diffuse
population and the institution of slavery gave rise to a society
that differed greatly from that of the North.
Settlement in the South began with the arrival of the English in
Jamestown in 1607. Later immigrations of Scots, Germans and other
Europeans, colonists from Barbados and the French islands, and
Africans only added to the rich cultural olio that flourished. An
English social structure prevailed over all - complete with its
own aristocracy.
Southern embroidery evinces strong English influences, whereas
Northern examples, particularly early Boston ones, betray aspects
of the Puritan. Newport samplers often featured architecture, and
Philadelphian ones exhibit influences of Quakerism.
A sampler wrought between 1820 and 1825 by a girl of the Cherokee
nation is one of the favorites of Kathleen Staples, the
exhibition curator. The sampler was worked before its removal
under the tutelage of Baptist missionaries, and Eliza Bayard was
actually the Christian name of the unknown embroiderer's
benefactor.
Mary Bella Hopkins was 12 years old when she completed her
sampler on November 28, 1828. She used cross and square eyelet
stitches to create a compound of houses suggestive of
gentility. The sheep at the bottom are frequently seen in
Charleston samplers of the period.
The unusual horizontal configuration of Sarah Ann Walker's
1840 sampler was seen sometimes in western North Carolina and
eastern and central Tennessee, and its color (red and green) and
the use of wool yarn instead of silk thread imply Scottish
influences.
"A Proper and Polite Education" examines the needlework
traditions of the antebellum South, at the same time it
spotlights the evolution of the education of women. In
conjunction with the burgeoning prosperity, an aspiration to
gentility developed, fueled by the economy. Improving one's
social position was important. Even more important, however, was
education, particularly of women.
Reading and writing were primary, but needlework had its place -
if only in the pursuit of gentility rather than utility. Children
(girls and boys) attended schools and seminaries or were tutored
at home. After the Revolutionary War, female education took on a
more serious note and studies expanded to include grammar,
arithmetic, science and history. Girls were also instructed in
painting in watercolor and on velvet, embroidery, crewel,
tambour, netting, beadwork, filigree, artificial flowers and lace
making. Skill with the needle was the mark of a cultivated,
educated and marketable female. Since a thriving trade in
ready-made clothing prospered in the South, particularly in
colonial South Carolina, needlework, for some white girls, was
almost a social grace. Masters were employed to teach drawing,
music, dancing, French and Italian. Such training was key to the
gentility to which so many aspired.
Education was not merely for the gentry, however. For African
girls who were sent to school, education and skill with the
needle assured them a more stable future than they might
otherwise have enjoyed. Since ready-made clothing was available
in Charleston and other cities, useful needlework would include
embroidery of seat covers, curtains and other household articles.
One enslaved woman used her considerable needlework skills to sew
for families in addition to her master's and was able ultimately
to buy her freedom.
An African American sampler worked by Rachel Ann Lee at the
Oblate Sisters of Providence School in Baltimore is dated July
3, 1846. The sampler retains the original black painted frame.
The cypress trees and the animals and the nicely dressed woman
suggest a southern European theme. Collection of Bill and Joyce
Subjack.
In Maryland, where a slave economy coexisted with the largest
free African American society in the United States, and where a
long tradition of religious freedom prevailed, several religious
orders made it their mission to instruct the young African
Americans. In 1829, a group of African American women from the
islands established themselves in Baltimore as the Oblate Sisters
of Providence, a Roman Catholic order. They instructed their
students in academics and ornamental arts and religion, with the
aim of instilling in them the skills to become mothers of families
or household servants.
Another important bastion of girlhood education, also Roman
Catholic, was St Joseph's Academy, established by Elizabeth Ann
Seton, founder of the Sisters of Charity. The goal of the school
was the education of girls from poor families, but subsequent
financial difficulties prompted the nuns to open their doors to
the daughters of the affluent. Students at St Joseph's produced
impressive mourning embroideries and embroidered images of the
school's log building. The quality of the needlework created
under the tutelage of the nuns was considered superior then and
remains highly prized today. Some 38 embroideries worked at the
school have returned there in recent years.
In Charleston, as in Maryland, an influx of French-Caribbean
refugees introduced new and desired elements of gentility and
refinement. Several opened schools, the most expensive and most
desirable of which was Ann Marsan Talavande's French boarding
school that attracted the daughters of the elite. In 1751, Anna
Maria Hoyland advertised her services as teacher of reading and
sewing in the Charleston newspapers. By 1757, her day school
expanded to include boarding students, and she engaged a male
teacher to instruct students in writing and arithmetic, dancing,
music and French.
Other similar schools taught the daughters and the servants of
the gentry. The Quakers, too, were a large presence in the South,
particularly in North Carolina and Virginia.
Isabella Elizabeth Safford embroidered the picture in 1800 with
gilt metal purl stitch, metal spangles, silk thread, silk
chenille, watercolor on a satin-weave silk ground and dated it
July 24, 1820. She later married a minister.
In North Carolina, which was more rural than the other
Southern states, education was closely linked to religion. Children
of plantation owners were instructed alongside the servants of the
house, whether they were slaves, free African Americans or
indentured servants. The earliest school was the Salem Girls
Boarding School, established in 1772 (and still in operation) by
Moravians, who were committed to the education of women.
Jacob Mordecai opened his Female Academy in Warrenton, N.C., in
1809. He was the first to offer a classical education to women.
Like other schools of the era, the influence was French and,
although Mordecai and his family who helped run the school were
Jewish, the school was distinctly Protestant. Mordecai's Female
Academy and the Milton Female Academy, which opened its doors in
1820, drew students from North and South Carolina, southern
Virginia and Georgia. Mordecai's advertised educational aim was
"to form the mind to the labour of thinking upon and
understanding what is taught." Admissions were high. Subjects of
study included reading and writing, grammar, spelling,
composition, history, geography and the use of the globe,
arithmetic and the plain and ornamental branches of needlework.
Three examples of work by students at the Female Academy are on
view.
"A Proper and Polite Education: Girlhood Embroidery of the
American South" remains on view through September 30. Founded in
1773, the museum itself was modeled after the British Museum,
which was established in 1759. It is America's first museum.
The Charleston Museum is at 360 Meeting Street. For information,
843-722-2996 or www.charlestonmuseum.org.
