We will focus in this unit on the "herstory" and origination of quilts as they are theorized and historicized by women like Finley, Webster, and more recently Walker as part of women's herstorical experiences.

For their disenfranchised and marginalized makers, quilts have herstorically served as fabric records of political and social opinions. Reading Parker, we'll examine the "smoldering silences" of the sewing scene, and study quilts with overtly political agendas, as well as quilts with religious, moral, or social messages.

While honing our compare and contrast skills, we'll begin discussing quilting as both process and product. How to Make an American Quilt points to quilting as a communal activity with its own organizational hierarchy; considering the quilting "bee," we'll review how quilts could forge connections and serve as signifiers for socialization and generational contact.

In the 1970s Johnathan Holstein began a revolution when he removed quilts from the bed and hung them on the walls of a New York art gallery. This bold move inspired debate over "high" and "low" art, the relation of geometrical patterns to modernist art (such as cubism and art deco), and the placement of quilting as "craft" and "art" (Walker and Dixon). Whatever their contemporary context, however, quilts remain significant for their herstorical value; they point to economic, personal, and familial struggles in the face of depressions and the Depression (Cogswell), as commemorative objects (Hedges), and as signifiers of personal herstory.

Quilting continues to be a vigorous, lively engagement among both women and men. As a metaphor and a trope, it has been usefully applied to rethinkings about the female body, authorship, and identity politics, as we will discover as we "piece" together Shelley Jakcson's narrative Patchwork Girl, using snippets from Mary Shelley's and Frank Baum's works. We will situate contemporary quilters' magazine, electronic communities, web quilts, and "art" quilts. These last objects will help us to reconsider the idea of "patchwork" since they are composed of anything from paper to paint.