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TV, Documentary The American Experience Hearts And Hands (S1E12
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00:01WDCN National.
00:06Women of the North and South sent a part of themselves off to battle.
00:12They made quilts of hearts and hands for husbands, sons, and sweethearts,
00:17and they inscribed them with patriotic messages, like talismans.
00:24Nineteenth-century women stitch the history of our country into their quilts.
00:28Tonight on the American Experience, Hearts and Hands.
01:11The American Experience
01:11Contains
01:11One help the relationship of Jesus through faith and mankind.
01:11One help the relationship of Jesus through faith and peace.
01:20One help the relationships of Jesus through faith and intelligence through faith and mankind.
01:32Major funding for this series is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
01:37and by this station and other public television stations nationwide.
01:43Corporate funding for the American experience is provided by Aetna,
01:47Insurance and Financial Services, for more than 130 years, a part of the American experience.
01:58Hello, I'm David McCullough.
02:00It should come as no surprise that the lives of American women have been as entwined with our history as
02:06the lives of American men.
02:07But that is not as our history has always been portrayed.
02:11Tonight's film, Hearts and Hands, is a highly original labor of love and scholarship by producer Pat Ferraro.
02:19For generations, American women have been telling the story of their lives and country in a place few historians ever
02:27bothered to look,
02:28in the old, everyday medium of bed quilts.
02:32And if you think quilts were just an exercise in geometric design, then this hour may change your mind.
02:39Quilts became political statements.
02:41They were used as comments on war, on race, on the expansion of the country.
02:46In geometry, we learn, the whole is equal to the sum of the parts.
02:51This remarkable hour, I think you'll find, adds up to a great deal more than that.
03:11You can do this, and add up to a couple of hours, on the expansion of the world.
03:11And I think it's gonna be an important part of the world.
03:12You'll find, adds up to a great deal.
03:12You'll find, adds up to a great deal.
03:15After you get to the great deal, you'll find, adds up to a great deal too.
03:45I learned my letters in a few days, standing by Aunt Hannah's knee while she pointed them
03:50out with a pin, skipping from them to words of two syllables, and thence taking a flying
03:55leap into the New Testament. My sister Lydia and I had our stint, so much work to do every
04:05day before we could go outside and play. New England children, like Lucy Larcombe, were
04:10apprenticed early to the householder's tasks. By the time she was five, Lucy knew everything
04:16about making and sewing fabric. She learned how to repair worn-out cloth by making samplers
04:21of darning stitches. New England women made everything by hand. They even called their
04:29homes manufactories. I think it must have been at home that I got the idea the cheap end
04:35of woman was making clothing for mankind. I lifted up my eyes from my father's heels one
04:42morning amused. How tall he is! How many thousand, thousand stitches there must be in his coat
04:49and pantaloons! And I suppose I have got to grow up and have a husband and put all those
04:54stitches into his coat and pantaloons. Oh, I never, never can do it!
05:03Lucy grew up in a small Massachusetts whaling village. Her father was a captain on a whaling
05:10ship and stamped his logbook when whales were sighted. He was sometimes at sea a year or
05:15more. The sea was our nearest neighbor. Almost every home had its sea tragedy. I remember how
05:25my mother watched for my father at the window of our old home. Women made something beautiful
05:33out of months of waiting and worry. They did not know if their husbands would ever come back.
05:40They followed them to sea with quilt patterns that mirrored the unknown waters. Mariner's compass.
05:57ocean waves, world without end. Ship of life. One woman inscribed these words on a quilt with indelible ink.
06:18The great ship of life gliding over the sea of time. Bound to the shore of eternity.
06:24her anchor cast on the rock of ages.
06:27insidoresano bands
06:38guitar solo
06:40beat颱 structural twilight
06:47little Ke esa era
06:54beautiful
06:56musical
06:57A child does not easily comprehend even the plain fact of death.
07:04Lucy was ten years old when her father died. Her mother was left with eight
07:09children to support and few choices in the world. So the widow Larcom moved her
07:14family up the Merrimack River to the new mill town of Lowell where her children
07:18could find work in the mills.
07:38On Monday morning when she comes in she hanged up her coat on the highest pin
07:45turns around just to greet her friends crying.
07:49Lucy was 11 when she became a doffer in the mill.
07:53I did not want to be a burden to anybody so I went to work with a light heart.
07:59It was my task with the other girls to change bobbins on the spinning frames.
08:04The mill girls came from farms all over New England to run the machines that
08:09replaced the work they used to do at home.
08:12The mills promised cash wages and broadened horizons.
08:16And the girls days were now given over to the clock.
08:31Since I have wrote you another payday has come around. I earned fourteen dollars and fifty cents.
08:37The folks think I get along just first rate. The thought that I am living on no one is a
08:42happy one indeed.
09:01The mill girls were working fourteen hours a day six days a week.
09:05But by the 1830s there was too much cloth on the market and prices dropped.
09:11The mill owners cut wages and increased the operating speed of the looms.
09:16Girls like Lucy worked twice as hard for less pay.
09:20I am very tired and it seems to me as though cotton wool was in my ears all day.
09:27The noise of the machinery, the noise of the machinery.
09:32I have discovered that I could accustom myself to the noise so that it became like silence to me.
09:39I defied the machinery to make me its slave.
09:44It seems to me that going home is where I wish to be every day.
09:52One mill girl wrote about her quilts in the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine published by the Factory Girls.
10:00How I prize my album patchwork.
10:03To me it is a bound volume of hieroglyphs, each of which is a key to some painful or pleasant
10:09memory.
10:11I remember one fragment in particular.
10:14It was a delicate sea moss pattern.
10:17A fragment of a dress belonging to my dead sister.
10:21When I looked at it, I always saw her face before me.
10:31The mill girls wove two kinds of cloth at Lowell.
10:35One, a cotton calico used for dresses and quilts.
10:38And the other, a rough, sturdy fabric, slave cloth, which was shipped south to clothe the slaves.
10:48In the 1830s, women simply did not speak in public.
10:53So when Angelina Grimke, a Quaker abolitionist from South Carolina, spoke at Lowell,
10:59the mill girls turned out in droves to listen.
11:02I recognize no rights but human rights.
11:06This is part of the great doctrine of human rights and can no more be separated from emancipation than the
11:12light from the heat of the sun.
11:14The rights of slave and woman blend like the colors of the rainbow.
11:22The mill girls added their names to the thousands of signatures on a petition to abolish slavery.
11:31After ten years in the mill, Lucy left to become a teacher and writer.
11:38I weave, I weave, I weave the live long day.
11:41I weave to win my daily bread.
11:44But ever as I weave, the world of women haunteth me.
11:49Afar by sunnier streams, my sisters toil with foreheads black.
11:54Their shame, their sorrow, I endure.
11:58The blot they bear is on my name.
12:00Dark women, slaving in the South.
12:10I was but a child myself.
12:14Only four years old when duty transferred me from the rude cabin to the household of my master.
12:21It was my task to take care of mistress's new baby.
12:26Elizabeth Keckley was a house slave on a Virginia plantation.
12:30Her mother worked as a sewing slave and helped the mistress make quilts.
12:40Quilts made by house slaves were passed down for generations as heirlooms in the master's family.
12:48Elizabeth Keckley's master was also her father.
12:52And she was property of the family, just like the quilts her mother sewed.
12:59Black and white hands stitched these bed quilts side by side.
13:04But the intimacy the women shared depended on silence.
13:30On the face of things, Southern Quilt spoke of a life of leisure and refinement.
13:36Time, endless amounts of time, were needed to applicate their elaborate designs.
13:52One woman applicate a portrait of Charleston, South Carolina in fastidious detail.
13:58Her quilt showed the elegant port city, supported by the cotton economy.
14:32When a baby rose rose with a prine in a full-time dream,
14:50Most slave women worked all day in the fields like the men, tending and picking cotton.
14:57Slaves were not allowed to speak their native language, and their own religions were banned.
15:02But the music they played and the patterns women applicate on their own quilts were African,
15:09in rhythm and design.
15:23Mother worked in the fields all day and piece quilts at night.
15:28Both and the white folks too.
15:31I've never seen how my mother stands for such hard work.
15:40I can feel them spinning wheels now.
15:44Turn it round and sing.
15:48Hear the slaves singing while they spin it.
15:55One Rachel knew every kind of root, bark, meat and dairy that made red, blue, green, whatever color she wanted.
16:05When she hung them hanks upon the line and the sun had dry, it was every color of the rainbow.
16:18Slave quilts were pieced together from bits of worn out clothing and elegant scraps from the mistress.
16:25Most wore out with hard use.
16:28A slave might be allotted only one blanket every three years.
16:33So quilts were a necessity.
16:35But beauty was as powerful a necessity as warmth in the slave's life.
16:49The sun went off to a small spot and then to darkness.
16:57Harriet Powers transformed her memories of life as a slave into a visionary quilt using the West African applique tradition
17:06of her people.
17:07She left us in her own words the story of each square.
17:12Jonah cast overboard of the ship and swallowed by a whale.
17:18Turtles.
17:23The falling of the stars on November 13th, 1833.
17:29The people were frightened and thought the end of time had come.
17:33God's hand stayed the stars.
17:38The vomits brushed out of the beds.
17:43Cold Thursday.
17:45A woman frozen while at prayer.
17:50The angels of wrath and the seven vials.
17:57Bob Johnson and Kate Bell of Virginia.
18:01Rich people who were taught nothing to God.
18:05They had entered everlasting punishment.
18:08The independent hog ran 500 miles from Georgia to Virginia.
18:19The independent hog, Powers described, was a code word for an escaped slave.
18:27Thousands of slaves risked imprisonment, torture, and death when they ran away from their masters.
18:38Free blacks and sympathetic whites had organized the Underground Railroad.
18:44Really networks of safe houses where a slave might hide.
18:48They say quilts were hung on the clotheslines to signal that a house was safe for a runaway slave.
18:55Harriet Tubman, a 30-year-old field slave, escaped with her brothers on the Underground Railroad from a Maryland plantation.
19:04There was one thing I had a right to, liberty or death.
19:10If I could not have one, I would have the other.
19:15For no man would take me alive.
19:18After two days, Tubman's brothers turned back.
19:22Harriet continued on to Philadelphia and freedom.
19:42Abolitionists made Underground Railroad quilts to reflect in geometric patterns the pathways and tracks on a slave's treacherous journey north.
19:51Quilts were now a form of non-violent protest.
20:00Deliver me from the oppression of man.
20:05Jacob's Ladder.
20:09Underground Railroad.
20:14North Star.
20:19Once in the north, Harriet Tubman did not rest.
20:23She returned 19 times to bring out her whole family and over 300 slaves.
20:32No one knows how many slaves escaped with the help of people like Tubman.
20:37Perhaps 100,000 or more.
20:50They inked their needle cases with the inscription,
20:53May the use of our needles prick the conscience of the slave holder.
21:03Elizabeth Keckley, now a grown woman, supported her master's entire indigent family with her needlework.
21:10Forced by a white man.
21:12Forced by a white man.
21:12She had born a light-skinned son when she was 16.
21:16Why should my son be held in slavery?
21:19I would rather work my fingers to the bone, bend over my soul until the film of blindness gathered in
21:27my own eyes.
21:29When she proposed to buy both herself and her son, Keckley's master had the legal right to refuse.
21:35But she borrowed $1,200 from her clients and became one of a small number of slaves who were allowed
21:42to purchase their freedom.
21:44She and her son moved north to Washington, D.C.
21:50Elizabeth Keckley's reputation as a seamstress helped her find work as a dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln.
21:57She sewed in the White House, while the South seceded from the Union and raised the Confederate flag at Fort
22:04Sumter.
22:08President Lincoln called for troops and predicted a six-week war.
22:14Elizabeth Keckley's own son enlisted in the Union Army.
22:25For the gay and happy soldier were contented as a dove, but the man who will not enlist never can
22:32gain our love.
22:37Women of the North and South sent a part of themselves off to battle.
22:42They made quilts of hearts and hands for husbands, sons and sweethearts, and they inscribed them with patriotic messages, like
22:51talismans.
23:01God bless the brave who go to save our country in her dark, dreaded hour of danger.
23:20In every object that I see, some of my friends seem to point at me.
23:26Love of friends can never cease in time of war and time of peace.
23:48Men spring to arms faster than the mills can manufacture.
23:52To relieve this pressing necessity, contributions are urged from the stores of families.
24:00Women, we ask you to go house to house and store to store.
24:05The troops in the field need blankets and bedding and flannel shirts.
24:12Neither North nor South could clothe the sudden ranks of soldiers.
24:17So the governments called on the women for help.
24:20And the women responded, transforming sewing circles and church groups into war aid societies.
24:26Almost overnight, they turned out masses of clothing, quilts, and bandages.
24:33They even sold their precious heirloom quilts to raise money for more materials and supplies.
24:40Hurrah for the homespun dresses we southern ladies wore in time of war.
24:46Every piece here sad memories it brings back to me.
24:51For our hearts were weary and restless, and our life was full of care.
24:57The burden laid upon us seemed greater than we could bear.
25:03We passed no idle moments. We all wear homemade.
25:08Spinning and weaving went on all through the war.
25:11The homemade cloth wore like leather.
25:15Why, I knitted a pair of socks a day as long as the war lasted.
25:20Socks for soldiers is the cry.
25:23Confederate women improvised uniforms from whatever was at hand.
25:28Each southern town sent its soldiers to the battlefield in a different style of dress.
25:36The south continued to fall behind.
25:48With the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, President Lincoln freed the slaves.
25:54Elizabeth Keckley commemorated the slaves' liberation with a quilt made from elegant silk dress scraps.
26:00A liberty eagle in the center.
26:12In a massive feat of organization, northern women formed the United States Sanitary Commission.
26:21In New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago, they held huge fairs that raised millions of dollars for the union.
26:28Quilts and needlework were a main attraction.
26:57The commission distributed clothing and food to men on the front lines.
27:00And supervised conditions in makeshift hospitals.
27:08Meticulous records kept by the Sanitary Commission show that the New York branch alone sent 26,000 quilts to the
27:16front.
27:28One northern woman followed the war battle by battle, inscribing her quilt with the name and date of the 47
27:36battles her husband fought and survived.
27:53Harriet Tubman nursed the sick and wounded on the Union front.
27:57The first man, I'd go to the hospital every morning.
28:01The first man I'd come to, I'd thrash away the flies and they'd rise like bees around a hive.
28:09Then I'd begin to bathe the wounds.
28:12By the time I'd get to the next man, the flies would be round the first, black and thick as
28:19ever.
28:33Four years later, the war was over.
28:37When the southern troops surrendered at Appomattox, the soldiers were barefoot, their clothes hung in rags.
28:46One woman made a quilt from remnants of Confederate uniforms.
29:04In Alabama alone, 80,000 widows mourned.
29:10In Alabama alone, 80,000 widows mourned.
29:29Elizabeth Keckley had lost her only son.
29:33She was still Mrs. Lincoln's seamstress and confidante.
29:37I saw Mrs. Lincoln for a moment.
29:40She was to attend the theater that night with the President.
29:44There was great rejoicing throughout the North.
29:47But scarcely had the fireworks ceased to play when the lightning flashed the news over the magnetic wires.
29:55Mr. Lincoln shot.
29:59Never was joy so violently contrasted with sorrow.
30:06Every house draped in black.
30:21The End
30:22The End
30:24The End
30:38Nashville, Tennessee. May 1865.
30:44My dear cousin, I do not write often now, not for want of something to say, but because I fear
30:51I am becoming a sad-souled woman, embittered by years of hardship and sorrow.
30:59I set out mignonette and petunias on the borders.
31:03I am as fond of flowers as ever.
31:06It is one trait of civilization left after the hardening, barbarizing influence of the horrid war.
31:22After the war was over, thousands of immigrants and settlers made new lives on the Midwestern prairies.
31:28As they built their quilts block by block, women helped build homes and communities.
31:51The settlers decided to build a community home, one that had a real shingle roof.
31:56Everyone was willing to help.
32:00The End
32:00The End
32:31Working with the simple quilt block log cabin, women created hundreds of variations by rearranging the light and dark strips
32:40they made. Light and dark. Double light and dark. Barn raising. Straight furrow. Courthouse steps.
33:07Pineapple. Windmill blades. Streak of lightning.
33:22This evening, just at dark, the sky looked perfectly frightful. It has been ablaze with lightning ever since. The wind
33:31is blowing so hard it shakes the house and rocks the windmill.
33:58I went to Mrs. Lowe's quilting. There was 15 to quilt.
34:04Friendships had a way of growing as women worked together to finish a quilt. As they stitched, they talked out
34:11their lives and problems.
34:13We ladies should be very proud. Through our efforts of selling signatures on our quilt, we have purchased 150 volumes
34:21as the beginning of a free library.
34:26We are to present each member with an album quilt with all our names when we're married.
34:32Susie Daggett says she's never going to be married.
34:34But we must make her a quilt all the same.
34:45I will give you some silk scraps, if you would like to have them, for a few more scraps of
34:50print.
34:50You need not buy any. I would much prefer the scraps left from garments.
34:57I have such good news. We have a little Jersey calf, four weeks old. I'm so proud of having a
35:03Jersey cow in Prostet.
35:20I rose about five. Had an early breakfast. Got my housework done about nine.
35:25Baked six loaves of bread, made a kettle of mush, had a suet beef boiling, and managed to put my
35:33clothes away and set my house in order.
35:37May the merciful Lord be with me.
35:41Nine o'clock p.m. I was delivered of another son.
35:50My husband took me to town last week to buy a yard of red cloth, but he bought me a
35:56whole bolt of it to cheer me up.
35:58I consider the inventor of the turkey red cotton dyes the greatest benefactor of all the dry goods crew.
36:05What's more refreshing to the eye and through the eye to the inner sense than a bit of turkey red?
36:37The building and the hard work had been done.
36:41With a flood of European immigrants, the Midwest was a settled region by 1876.
36:47Jubilant about its future, the whole country celebrated its first centennial.
36:58If Midwesterners felt crowded or pinched or adventurous, there were still other frontiers further west.
37:18My mother's memory, added to my own experience as a pioneer pathbreaker, led me to dedicate my life to the
37:26enfranchisement of women.
37:28As I look back over so many receded years, I recall so much that is worthy of record.
37:36Born in a log cabin in Illinois, Abigail Scott Dunaway was the second of 12 children.
37:43In 1852, Abigail and her family joined a river of settlers, the largest migration in American history.
37:52Abigail's mother pleaded with her husband not to uproot their family, but he was determined to take up free land
37:58in Oregon.
38:00Ah, the tears that fell upon these garments, the heartaches that were stitched and knotted and woven into them as
38:08relatives and friends of a lifetime dropped away.
38:11Leaving tomorrow in four wagons, I'm taking all my feather beds in quilts, 50 bushels of corn, 500 pounds of
38:19hog meat.
38:20The top of our house wagon was lined with thick comforts to make it impervious to wind and weather.
38:25I took my little chair of sugar maple wood, a chest of books, calicoes bought during the Revolutionary War, which
38:33I used to make my quilts.
38:34One valise, a box of soda crackers, sugar, rice, flour, pots and pans, a washtub of little trees, plus mother,
38:41a good fat sister, self, two children, and all my patchwork.
38:48The End
39:10Abigail was 17 years old when her father gave her the task of keeping the family journal on the overcast.
39:17April 2, 1852, leaving home.
39:22April 30, we are now rolling over a splendid prairie, blue-tinged timber in the distance, wild flowers at our
39:30feet.
39:31Made 20 miles today.
39:33The cold wind blowed disagreeably through our wagons all day and made us willing to walk most of the time
39:39to keep warm.
39:54The tribe of Indians that occupy this territory are called Sioux.
39:58It is thought if emigrants use proper precautions, they need fear nothing.
40:06Women who looked closely at the tribes they passed were struck by the bold geometric designs that blazed across objects
40:15of daily life.
40:15When I see the baskets Indian women trade with one another, I am reminded of my own mother's quilts.
40:25Later, these designs would influence pioneer women in their own work.
40:38The journey had plunged women into the unknown.
40:42The trail embedded itself so deeply in their minds that they would never forget.
40:49Indian tepee.
40:52Prairie sun.
40:58Cactus basket.
41:02Feathered star.
41:08Rocky Mountain Road.
41:12June 5.
41:13Made 20 miles today.
41:16Camped near the river.
41:17Past four graves.
41:20June 8.
41:22Past eight fresh graves.
41:24Hear of considerable sickness in great many trains.
41:27Met a company who had started back on account of illness and death.
41:32Farewell, my friends.
41:34I'm bound for Canaan.
41:38I'm traveling through the wilderness.
41:44The trail itself developed a sawtooth edge.
41:47Worn by thousands of feet going off the side to read the grave markers.
41:52Who dost leave my mind distressed.
41:57I go away behind me.
42:01Abigail's mother was stricken with cholera along the Platte River.
42:06June 21.
42:08Our mother was taken about two o'clock this morning.
42:12Her wearied spirit took flight and then we realized we were bereaved indeed.
42:18We buried her wrapped in a blanket in a shallow grave by the side of the road.
42:24In the outskirts of the basin clusters of wild roses and other flowers grow in abandon.
42:43Abigail and her sisters walked on barefoot for six more weeks until they reached the lush Willamette Valley in Oregon.
43:02Pine tree.
43:11Log cabin.
43:19Dove at the window.
43:23Wedding ring.
43:27A year after she arrived, Abigail married a young rancher named Ben Dunaway.
43:32And they hacked a farm she called hardscrabble out of the dark Oregon woods.
43:38Abigail raised a large family and in the midst of her farm chores somehow found the time to write.
43:44And published a novel about her own experiences on the Overland Trail.
43:49My advice to who may read these pages is,
43:53Do not yield to difficulties but rise above discouragement.
43:59After ten years of struggle on their homestead, Abigail's husband Ben co-signed a bad loan and they lost the
44:06farm.
44:07Not long afterwards, he was badly injured and Abigail was left with four children and her husband to support.
44:15In 1866, with no property of her own and few choices, she turned to her needlework skills to make a
44:23living.
44:23She borrowed money and opened a millinery store.
44:26My millinery business flourished reasonably well in a financial way,
44:32but the lessons it taught were of far greater value than dollars and cents.
44:37On a buying trip to San Francisco, Dunaway met Susan B. Anthony,
44:42one of the leaders of the National Woman Suffrage Movement.
44:46Abigail was exposed to radical new ideas.
44:49The suffragists were speaking about the plight of thousands of immigrant women and children
44:54sewing piecework for starvation wages.
44:57Suffrage leaders rejected sewing as a symbol of women's oppression.
45:11In 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed.
45:17As the country moved boldly forward into the machine age,
45:20a new leisure class of women made the same journey in a few days
45:24that had taken Dunaway six months in a covered wagon.
45:40The quilts these women made broke into a dizzying array of fragments.
45:44They called them crazy quilts.
45:49We have quite discarded in our modern quilts the regular geometric designs once so popular.
45:55Now we are very daring.
45:58We go boldly forward without any apparent design at all.
46:36For some women who stayed at home,
46:38quilts were an acceptable channel for creative expression,
46:41and they pushed the quilt form in new directions.
46:47Other women ordered their quilt patterns from ladies' magazines,
46:50bought the fabric pre-cut, and made quilts by formula.
47:01Suffrage leaders urged all women of leisure to put away their needles
47:05and take up the cause of women's rights.
47:09We have served our apprenticeship at washing, patching, quilting,
47:14darning, ironing, and plain sewing.
47:16Now we propose to edit and publish a newspaper.
47:20In 1871, Abigail Dunaway sold her millinery shop, borrowed $3,000,
47:28and with the help of her family began to publish a newspaper,
47:31The New Northwest.
47:32She opposed the prescriptions of the popular women's magazines.
47:47The parlor is the face of the house.
47:50Its character demands a richer style of furnishing and a more fastidious taste than is required with other rooms.
48:20The sewing machine, mass-produced and marketed as a labor-saving device, did save time.
48:26But many women used it to add more ruffles and frills to clothing patterned after models in the ladies' magazines.
48:33And they filled up their time with elaborate home decoration.
48:37Women can have immense power if they stay at home.
48:40It is praiseworthy to be a wife and mother, civilizer and beautifier.
48:49In the New Northwest, Dunaway offered an alternative analysis.
48:53We see under existing customs of society, one half the women are overtaxed and underpaid, hopeless yet struggling toilers in
49:04the world's drudgery,
49:06while the other women are frivolous, idle and expensive.
49:10Both these conditions are wrong.
49:23It never occurred to me that I ought to know housework and do it.
49:27I knew all the carpenter's tools and handled them, made carts and sleds, but a needle and a dishcloth I
49:34never could abide.
49:37Frances Willard's mother believed that a child must follow her own nature.
49:41Her daughter, she knew, had a destiny quite out of the ordinary.
49:46I was born to a fate.
49:49I was to become a wanderer on the face of the earth.
49:53Women were to become my comrades, gathered far and near in the loyal temperance legion.
50:03Early in the century, reformers had taken up the temperance cause.
50:08It was women who bore the brunt of the domestic violence that resulted from the abuse of alcohol.
50:14Their protests culminated in a spontaneous crusade by the women of Hillsborough, Ohio in 1873.
50:21Women-like, they took their knitting, their zephyr work, or their embroidery and swarmed into the drink shops.
50:29They became an army, drilled and disciplined.
50:34Within a month, the women of Ohio had closed 3,000 taverns.
50:46Frances Willard soon moved into center stage.
50:49A former educator and college dean, she was elected the second president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
50:57From the outset, quilts and domestic symbols were part of her organizing strategy,
51:02banners that brought home into the world of politics.
51:10We adopted a symbol of white ribbon, emblematic of purity and peace.
51:16For the first time, women have grasped hands, inscribing their banners with the motto of the crusade.
51:22For God and home and native land.
51:34In the next 20 years, Willard would lead thousands of middle-class housewives, wives of ministers, doctors and businessmen, out
51:43of the home and into the political arena.
51:46There was born upon my mind, from loftier regions, I believe, the declaration,
51:51you are to speak for woman's ballot as a weapon of protection to her home.
51:58The chapters of the WCTU made up a nationwide network of women, powerful enough that even without the vote, they
52:05could influence social reform.
52:07From their Chicago headquarters, members published their own newspaper.
52:12Under Willard's leadership, they allied themselves with the emerging labor movement and with issues of women's rights.
52:17They lobbied for an eight-hour workday and equal pay for equal work.
52:23King alcohol has many horns by which he catches men.
52:28He is a beast of many horns and ever thus has been.
52:33For there's rum and gyms and beer and wine and brandy.
52:38Blue and white were the colors of the WCTU.
52:41Loyal women made quilts that pledged them to the movement.
52:45Quilts with T's for temperance.
52:48The temperance goblet.
52:51Oh, are not these of English crew as ever a mortal knew.
52:56Oh, are not these of English crew as ever a mortal knew.
53:03Drunkard's path.
53:03King alcohol is very sly, a liar from the first.
53:09You make you drink until you're dry, then drink because you thirst.
53:16Oh, are not these of English crew as ever a mortal knew.
53:19This quilt contained a square for each state.
53:22It hung in graceful folds a banner.
53:26At a signal, every woman rose to sing the hymn that started the movement in Hillsboro, Ohio.
53:33We pray drum hops till the air around.
53:35With his voices and days gone by.
53:38When our fathers marched to a stirring sound.
53:40With their courage to do or die.
53:42The women's Christian Temperance Union was never weak.
53:46But it is a giant now.
53:49Willard called on the WCTU's 200,000 members to launch a worldwide petition drive.
53:56She organized missionary women in 50 countries to collect 7 million signatures on a petition to abolish the drug and
54:04alcohol trade.
54:06In 1893, the Polyglot petition was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
54:13And women honored Willard as one of the outstanding women of the century.
54:23In the Pacific Northwest, Abigail Dunaway continued to work tirelessly for suffrage.
54:29She introduced bill after bill in Oregon, and in 1914, she finally shepherded a suffrage amendment through the legislature.
54:39At 79, this woman, who had crossed the plains in a covered wagon before Oregon was even a state, became
54:47its first female voter.
54:50Dunaway, who rejected quilt making, donated her own quilt made from millinery scraps to raise money for a suffrage candidate.
54:58I am not retired yet.
55:01I am still working to bring equal suffrage to every part of the United States.
55:11Ordinary women of the 19th century also had a vision that transcended the limitations of their lives.
55:17Every quilt they have left us is a testimony to the creative spirit, a gift of hearts and hands.
55:26The End
55:27The End
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