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However
rude their surroundings may have been, young white women in early
Ohio were not exempt from the social necessity of these "ornamental" accomplishments. As Sue Studebaker documents in Ohio Is My Dwelling Place: Schoolgirl
Embroideries, 1800-1850, some 290 samplers representing
fifty-seven counties (of the state's current eighty-eight)
attest to the aspirations of Ohio's "first" families.
Amongst the samplers she has painstakingly uncovered and
reproduced (many in color) in this volume is evidence of "needle
wisdom." Following
the lead of indefatigable curators and collectors who, beginning
in the 1970s, connected individual samplers to (often anonymous)
needlework teachers, Studebaker seeks to "weave together" for
each sampler "a brief story of the stitcher, her family, and the
circumstances that surrounded her life" [xi].2
This
she does through diaries, letters, newspapers, censuses, maps,
and county, city, and town histories, especially those published
at the end of the nineteenth century.
After
a brief introduction recounting the historic geopolitical
organization of Ohio, Studebaker orders her work in three parts by
region (Southern Ohio, Central Ohio, and Northern Ohio) following,
roughly chronologically, the state's settlement.
Within each part she further divides her discussion into
chapters correlating (again chronologically) to counties.
Each chapter offers a brief synopsis of the county's
founding and establishment of schools before providing a catalogue
of extant samplers found there.
A final section ("Victorian Impulses:
Selected Needlework after 1850") and an epilogue
("Everything Old Is New Again") relate briefly the decline of
school instruction in needlework, the introduction of the sewing
machine, and the concomitant interest in collecting historic
girls' needlework. A
list of documented Ohio samplers and of Ohio pioneer teachers and
schools provide useful information for further research.
In
this bicentennial year of Ohio's statehood, this compilation,
the tireless work of travel to, and research in, public and private
collections is to be commended. Studebaker has taken on a difficult task of reconstructing
the individual lives and the social life of these makers and
their samplers. One
often delights in reading the specifics of a given family's experiences
in their new homes in the "Ohio Country."
Although certainly useful for local historians and curators
seeking to augment existing chronicles, Ohio Is My Dwelling Place may confound scholars of American social,
cultural, and women's history.
The reader finds a descriptive, if uneven, compilation
rather than an analysis of the social, political, and cultural
meanings of these historic samplers.
In part this is due to the author's penchant for
characterizing these artifacts with ahistorical aesthetic
terms--Anna Cumming Schenck's needlework is "perhaps the
prettiest" of the samplers related to a Franklin County school
[49], for example, and Mary Wing Dodge's sampler displays elements
that "seem to be drawn by an unschooled hand" 5. The
very decorative nature of samplers has often led to their dismissal
as useful historical evidence. The
employment of terms such as "charming" and "quaint" serve
generally to dismiss rather than represent serious study.
Such terms are also part of the lexicon created by the
connoisseur in relation to the antiques trade, in which an
object's value is more often based on the fluctuations of the
market and collectors' interests rather than a
consideration of what
professional historians would deem important. The elements of connoisseurship
evident in Studebaker's work--the attention to detail, the implicit
comparison of styles, the level of expertise of the maker, and the
like--are necessary in any study of artifacts. Without
an explanation of the bases of connoisseurship employed, the evaluation
of these samplers appears speculative rather than definitive.3
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