Wendy Butler and Dr. Katharine Daynes, History

Receiving the Creative Research Grant for this project has been valuable in not only carrying out extensive research on this topic, but also in opening new ideas and opportunities for my future academic career. I gathered and read numerous books and articles in the broad area of women’s history and in the more narrow topics of immigration, western expansion, and needlework, that are more closely associated with my topic. I was able to take three credit hours of research credit from the History Department which allowed me time for the many hours it took to research and order these books and articles through inter-library loan and the bookstore. I also gained confidence in working with artifacts in museums as I worked with curators of museum collections at the LDS Church Museum of History and Art, the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum, and the Lion House and the Beehive House. Even though gaining access to all of these places was not easy, they all eventually allowed me to take close-up pictures of their samplers. I gained an appreciation of the rich resource to historians that these collections can be, and realized at the same time that institutions such as these are not designed to be as “user-friendly” to the outside researcher as special collection rooms in libraries traditionally have been. I became familiar with museums, their acquisition and cataloging process, and seriously considered the possibility of working in that profession.

Probably the most exciting and rewarding experiences I had, outside of the actual research, was in meeting other scholars who were interested in my topic as it related to their work. One was a Ph.D. candidate of Cornell University who was doing research at the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum on consumerism in mid to late nineteenth century Utah. He was an invaluable resource in my research. He also made the connections for me to speak to a Professor at the University of Utah who expressed interest in my work on samplers. All of this increased my confidence in my ability to pursue graduate studies in history and opened doors to do so. I also attended symposia where I was able to speak to other scholars about my work and receive encouragement, criticism, and ideas about what my sources tell me and where I can take my work.

The actual research was also a rewarding experience. While the only samplers that I located were found in museum collections, I can’t help but wonder how many are privately owned and whether the story can be fully told without them. Taken as a whole, the extant museum samplers from this period are a rich source in both number and content. I took pictures of over fifty samplers. Many of these samplers are true girlhood samplers and time, place, and creator can be verified as pre-Utah samplers. In fact, most of these were made by young girls before the family’s conversion to Mormonism. Some of the girlhood samplers were made by young Mormon girls either during their trek west, or in the first years of living in Deseret. The Ann Eckford sampler that I referred to in my proposal is one of these. In fact, my research shows that Ann and her sister Jean made nearly identical Nauvoo samplers as gifts to Mormon Elder S. W. Richards. I have not yet discovered the link to Elder Richards, but Ann Eckford eventually married Thomas Williams who was also polygamously married to Zina Young, a daughter of Brigham Young and Zina Huntington. There is also a group of samplers that seems unique to Utah that I call the “Identity Samplers.” These are samplers where women or girls stitched their relationships to others or placed themselves in a context on their samplers where their identity could not be lost. One sampler’s creator placed the initials of her parents on her sampler to clarify her place in a polygamous family. Other samplers were gifts from mother to daughter or from one polygamous wife in honor of another. One sampler was made by an eighty-seven year old lady who wanted her place in history as a Nauvoo pioneer recorded and thus, remembered.

My biggest problem with this research has been in deciding how to characterize and organize the samplers by type, time period, and meaning. I have concluded that this project is a large one and that it will be worthwhile for me to pursue it as my Master’s thesis in graduate school. This would allow me to break up the samplers into their diverse categories and treat each type as a separate collection of artifacts that give various readings and interpretations. I am currently writing a short article that I hope to publish in a scholarly journal on the girlhood samplers of early, pre-convert Mormon pioneers. This article will center on the regional origins of the samplers and on their symbolic content of natural, historical, and religious symbols.

Another problem I have encountered concerns analyzing the samplers. The historian of material culture must resist the urge to be interested in objects themselves and must remember that the importance of the object lies in its relationships to people. History is the study of people, not of things. The samplers lend themselves to a technical study of their composition, but the study could easily slip more into the realms of art history than the study of women and their relationships in early Utah families and communities. A material object must interest the historian for its meaning of social existence-its relationship to man. In the case of samplers, one is mostly concerned with the person who created it and secondly with the meaning that it conveyed to those who were to view it since it was intended as a display piece. Furthermore, it is important to understand that when we speak of “relationships” we stress not the relationship of the sampler’s creator to its creation, but to relationships among people concerning the item that was created. Creations, such as samplers, that give insight to relations between people are valuable resources.

The importance of relationships in studying the history of women is the most important thing I have learned in my research on this project. Women’s relationships defined women’s needlework, just as her needlework displayed these relationships. Daughter, sister, mother, wife—her work sustained who she was just as much as her relationships within a family determined how she would work. Men’s work was also patterned around relationships, but his relationships in commerce and society were more varied and complex. Utah women’s relationships will be an important theme of my work.