For centuries, quilting has stitched cultural values and identity to the female body. In this often private activity, women worked individually and together piecing patchwork and quilting to create an intimate connection to past, present and future. Quilting made an ideal form of needlework that aided in fabricating the traditional, socially constructed ideal of femininity. While excluded from public discourse, women gathered in this domestic domain outside the knowledge and control of the patriarchy. Women carefully and patiently stitched a place and a voice for themselves, becoming advocates for suffrage, temperance and abolition. Through quilt texts, women used their constraints to create space that expanded their domestic rhetoric into a public realm.

Historically, quilting was perceived by men as a harmless and trivial way for women to pass the time, decorate their homes and care for their families, but also provided a nonthreatening medium for women's social commentary (Radner 106). Quilts reflected every theme of everyday life - religion, family history, community setting, plant and animal life, children's toys and fairy tales, friendships and love, death and mourning, weddings and other celebrations, and all manner of work from the construction of log cabins to production in the cotton gins (Aptheker 68). In 1845, a Lowell, Massachusetts woman described quilts as '…the hieroglyphics of women's lives' (Aptheker 68).

A quilt, says Laura Fisher, is often described as a textile sandwich (15). It is composed of three layers: the top fabric layer; thick, inside, dense batting; and the bottom, backing layer, typically of a solid fabric. The quilting itself is actually the stitching that holds the three layers together and prevents them from shifting. Besides their functions as household bedding, quilts are noted for their artistry. Pieced tops were often 'scrap bag' creations, the components of which were salvaged from remnants or worn-out garments, says Fisher (15). Fabric scraps, collected from friends or from a worn piece of favorite clothing were recycled into a larger mosaic. The quilt became a community "textile," the diverse fabric sources becoming a relay for embedded memories.

In the dailiness of the nineteenth-century woman's life, quilting served as an activity of solitude and creativity. Mayers suggests that we can view sewing as a kind of rootedness, as a symbolic act of survival, which suggests "an urge not to flee but to pin oneself down in order to discover the unconscious, unarticulated and private modes of expression buried within." (Elsley 1996, 49). At the quilting stage, quilt making served a social and political function, strengthening the "bonds of womanhood."

Within this community, women crafted a feminine rhetoric of the quilt - a style and methodology of communicating distinct from patriarchal knowledge-making practices. The quilt making activities gave space and voice to feminine knowledge, creating a space for women to be (Elsley 1996, 98). Through the quilts, the silenced stories of everyday life survive. The stories trace a path of connection between oral tradition, storytelling, the invention of meaning, and the preservation of cultural identity. Quilts endure today, binding feminine practices and history together in a monument to female rhetorical power.