As women traveled from Europe to North America and out towards the Great Plains, these women were often isolated. They had limited resources and nothing fun to do. Using scraps of fabric to create quilts became a way to reuse materials, get creative, and sometimes socialize with gal pals. And so, the quilting bee became a thing. At a quilting bee women from the area would bring quilt tops that were already pieced and work together to quilt the top. It would be like an all-day thing with dinner served to all the families that came to help. When night fell it was often time to turn up and get the dancing going. The quilts were often given to young women for their hope chests.
They say once it’s on the internet, it exists forever. But before we had instagram, cloud storage, or even digital cameras, people had to keep physical records of stuff around if they wanted to remember it. Faking your death was probably a lot easier back in the ol’ days. So Victorian Ladies were out here making scrapbooks. And they were kind of weird. Along with photos and letters, they’d arrange locks of human hair and cigarette butts and other gross things on the pages. Color prints were like a brand new concept so those Victorian ladies were all about it. As newspapers became cheap and widely available during this time, they would keep the clippings.
“You see often in books by college and high school girls these bizarre juxtapositions, like a picture of Rudy Valentino next to a church prayer card, or a box of Barnum’s animal crackers pasted right next to some steamy, embraced Hollywood couple for some movie that had just come out. You could see the tension in trying to figure out who they were and what their identities were vis-à-vis these emblems of religious and popular culture. ”
Okay can we just give it up for my girl Emily out making some feminist collage poetry waaaaay ahead of her time? Dickinson wrote poetry on backs of envelopes, chocolate wrapers, whatever scrps of paper she had lying around. However, what most people don't know is that they way she tore or folded or stiched the paper adds additional meaning and context to her poetry. She often bound her poetry into books which when originally found by men, were assumed to be just scrapbooks like all the other ladies had. This abstract form of poetry was totally before her time and makes her a collage queen in every sense of the world.
So like, Victorian ladies were into science obviously, but men are the worst and restricted them from studying it. And so, as natural history became a popular field, flower pressing became a way for women to study the world around them in an "acceptable" way. Also bonus points because respecting nature was considered a good Christian thing to do. The flowers were often arranged in intricate designed as shown above. This activity was also done for sentimental and romantic reasons. Emily Dickinson was actually really into flower pressing when she was younger!
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