Aunt Martha's Quilts, pt. 2

Here are two of Aunt Martha's finished quilts, now about 120 years old. It is almost beyond my comprehension that a woman who was probably making all the family's clothes, growing the produce they ate and preserving it, baking bread and churning butter, raising and slaughtering poultry, doing laundry on a washboard, bathing the family in water heated on a stove using corn cobs, watching two little boys, Nathan and Clarence, would still have time to sit by kerosene lamp and piece tiny bits of fabric together and then quilt them into something warm, practical and beautiful.





Feminists love to sing the praises of our pioneer farm women--their independence, interdependence and creativity. However, the work was so overwhelming, back breaking and never ending, I'm sure most of the them were thrilled to leave the farm for factory and office when the time came--just as the men did.