Q&A: What has women’s needlework meant throughout history

MIDDLETOWN, Pa. - Women's needlework from the 19th and 20th centuries can offer a unique look into their political activism and what it meant to be a woman at different points in history, according to Mariah Kupfner, an assistant professor of American studies and public heritage at Penn State Harrisburg.

Kupfner studies the intersection of women's history and material culture. In 2025, Kupfner received a publishing grant from the Decorative Arts Trust for her first book, "Crafting womanhood, needlework, gender and politics in the United States, 1810 to 1920," set to publish later this year. Last year, her work was also featured in the "Sites of Feminist Memory" project that launched on the eve of International Women's Day and aimed to recognize the work of preserving the memory of suffragism. The project included a video interview about her 2023 article in a special edition of the journal Historie Sociale/Social History, which discusses two women involved in the suffrage movement and textiles they created.

In recognition of Women's History Month, Kupfner discussed her work in the Q&A below.

Q: What do you research? How is it related to women's history?

Kupfner: I'm a scholar of material culture so that means that I use objects as my primary form of historical evidence. I think that objects can be particularly useful for trying to access the stories of women and people of color, because often their voices are not privileged in written documentation. Even when they are, it can be kind of a skewed perspective that can represent more the voices of elite members of those groups.

I study textiles and women's needlework - for so much of U.S. history, almost all women have been expected to do some kind of textile work, so it's this really wonderful resource of the actual work of women's hands. But textiles were also viewed as a representation of femininity. So, the ways that textiles were made and preserved and represented is a really good way of understanding what it meant to be a woman at a particular time in history.

Q: How are textiles and needlework political?

Kupfner: I started thinking about this project because I started seeing contemporary needlework that was meant to be seen as surprising in some way, and it was often embroidery that had explicitly feminist messages in it, including rude or even obscene messages. The most common refrain about this was: It's not your grandmother's needlework.

It made me think - that has such an assumption in it about what our grandmother's needlework was. So, that led me to become a historian, really, and think about the ways that for centuries women have used needlework to make political statements - often because it was assumed that needlework was an appropriate thing for women to do. It enabled a sort of subversive entry point into places that they were typically excluded from.

I usually start with the anti-slavery movement, because women really consciously used needlework to become involved in that movement.

Q: Abigail Duniway and Nettie Asberry - and textiles they made - feature in your work. Who are they?

Kupfner: I think they represent different pathways in the women's suffrage movement in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Abigail Duniway was a white woman, born in Illinois, who made her way to Oregon in the 1850s. After her husband was disabled, her family relied on her for money. So, she ran a milliner's shop, which sold fabric. As she ran the shop, she heard from women about the ways that their lack of political rights made their lives challenging. She became a suffragist and started a newspaper called the New Northwest. She made these amazing proclamations in it about how the nation would be transformed if women had political rights: that families would be safer, that workplaces would be safer, and that also it was just a matter of justice that women ought to have the right to vote and to manage their own money.

She was really dismissive of the traditional trappings of femininity, so in her newspaper, she would talk about how much she hated quilting and embroidery.

But, she had actually started a quilt when she worked in her fabric shop in the 1850s, and she started it back up again to enter it into the 1st Annual National Suffrage Bazaar in 1900. She made this quilt into a pro-suffrage statement.

Nettie Asberry was the first child born free to a formerly enslaved woman in Kansas. She met Susan B. Anthony when she was young and became interested in the women's suffrage movement. She eventually moved to Washington, where she helped found the NAACP in Tacoma, and she started clubs for arts and music and needlework. Women's clubs in her state were segregated at the time.

I found the textile she made - a coat - for a World's Fair in 1909 in Seattle compelling. She wanted Black women's work in Tacoma to be celebrated on this international stage. She founded the Clover Leaf Club, and they made watercolors, lace and all kinds of beautiful things that were really important to her to have in the women's building at the fair. Mostly, the work of women of color was displayed in ethnographic buildings, but Asberry succeeded in having Black women's work placed in the women's building. However, she had to check on the exhibition regularly to make sure that it was not being tampered with or removed. She, with her sister, made a lace coat, and they won a medal for it at the fair. They saw this lace coat as continuous with their political organizing in the NAACP; both were statements about presence and equality.

Q: What do you want people to take away from Nettie Asberry's and Abigail Duniway's stories?

Kupfner: I think it's helpful for us to recall that the women's suffrage movement was diverse in terms of identity, but also in terms of what people were fighting for and how they did it. Women did not just use obviously political forms of protest, but they also integrated ideas about equality and the value of women's labors into their everyday lives. We can see these in the objects they stitched. They used crafts associated with traditional femininity to make space for themselves in political movements. My goal is to help us think about the actual texture of movements for women's rights.

What did it mean to fight for women's suffrage? I think these objects give us a really rich and complicated picture, which I hope we can use as a model for today - thinking about how expansive work for women's rights and civil rights, more broadly, can be.