A Proper And Polite Education: Girlhood Embroidery Of The American South

CHARLESTON, S.C.

:The painstaking stitchery of exquisitely wrought schoolgirl embroidery is the subject of the new exhibit "A Proper and Polite Education: Girlhood Embroidery of the American South" at The Charleston Museum. The alphabets, verses, numbers and pictures worked in silk by colonial girls are as fresh and colorful today as they were more than two centuries ago. The exhibit, which comprises around 100 objects, is a treat for the eye and is open through September 30.

Aside from the sheer visual pleasure that the exhibition provides, it is a reexamination of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Southern schoolgirl needlework, of which recognition of and research into is relatively recent. Its scope extends to considerations of the cultural, ethnic and racial diversity of the early South, settlement patterns, the evolution of women's education and the implications of gentility. At the same time, it raises interesting questions about the distinctions between the Northern and Southern manifestations of the art of the needle.

The needlework on view was made by schoolgirls in the Chesapeake, the Low Country and the Back Country areas of the antebellum American South; that is, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. That they survived the ravages of the Civil War and several natural disasters is remarkable. They are displayed according to theme rather than chronology or geography. The exhibition opens with an explication of the origins of sampler making, and several early examples are on view. A sampler from the Egyptian Mamluk period, a Seventeenth Century Italian fragment and a circa 1700 sampler that was made in England or America demonstrate the techniques and designs that influenced later work.

The exhibit then focuses on the connections between girlhood education and the settlement of the South, the role of school mistresses, samplers and religious experience, embroidery and the African American experience, embroidery and social status in the South and techniques and stitchery itself.

Significant scholarship has been devoted to Northern schoolgirl needlework, but only within the last decade or so has its Southern counterpart begun to be studied. Samplers worked by Southern schoolgirls have long been thought to have been merely an offshoot of the Northern traditions in which schoolgirls were educated formally. The two are, in fact, vastly different.

Exhibit curator Kathleen Staples has done extensive research on Southern Schoolgirl embroidery. For her every sampler tells a story, often one that would otherwise remain unknown. The works on view and others that she has studied reflect the curious blend of religion, economy and social structure of the antebellum South. The spring 2006 issue Sampler and Antique Needlework Quarterly is devoted to her discussion of the exhibit at The Charleston Museum.

Needlework of the Northern cities, where formal "female academies" proliferated, can typically be grouped according to its stylistic similarities thought to have emanated from the classroom setting. For example, samplers incorporating the "Fishing Lady" were particular to Boston, as were Adam and Eve samplers.