Many historians interested in American women's experience would be troubled with Studebaker's strategy, if only because women's agency--what women may present through their needlework--takes second place to the wilderness-busting of their fathers and brothers.  The imaginative play of text and image within these young women's works should compel scholars to seek various theoretical strategies with which to comprehend this rich body of evidence.  For instance, Studebaker's choice of chronicling the samplers by county, even as the boundaries of Ohio's counties changed over time, does not necessarily interrogate the needle workers' understanding of place.  It's one thing to relate how a young girl and her family came to the Ohio frontier and to chart the family's establishment of a new home, quite another to reconstruct how that young girl conceptualized her "place" in the new country.  Literary historian Annette Kolodny and women's historian Lillian Schlissel have found that women's westering experiences and related attitudes differed from those of their male counterparts.  How may scholars understand the choices of image and text within nineteenth-century American schoolgirls' notions of the ever-shifting West, of place, of time?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.⁴

Given that many of these samplers were schoolwork directed by teachers and parents in an era in which American geography and history textbooks were constantly revised and pedagogy debated, how may scholars chart through girls' embroidery the spread and acceptance of such political knowledge into the territories and newly formed states?  Here, the research of Martin Brückner on American geography and Nina Baym, on women writers of American history, would be useful to Studebaker's research on teachers and schools in the state.⁵ Studebaker's inclusion of a colorful map of the Western Reserve, engraved by William Savery and published by William Sumner (not, as Studebaker states, drawn by Summer), includes seven vignettes culled from popular imagery, among which are local flora (what girls would drawn from life and study through botany), a portrait head displaying expression (from Le Brun), and an image displaying six women as Roman goddesses often seen in Early Republican iconology.  Itinerant artists were rendering with brush and paint family trees and maps and mourning pictures of Washington, as much as schoolgirls were producing the same with thread and needle.  Such "curatorial" practices in keeping and disseminating this political knowledge, especially in an era in which Americans were seeking to preserve Revolutionary ideals through family history and westward expansion, implicate a materialization of a larger nationalist ideology.⁶