Hearts and Hands: The Influence of Women & Quilts on American Society
A film by Pat Ferrero
"Hearts and Hands" chronicles the lives of ordinary women as well as individuals such as Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Willard and Abigail Scott Duniway through the great 19th- century events: industrialization, abolition, the Civil War, westward movement, temperance and suffrage.
Alliance board member Julie Silber worked with filmmaker Pat Ferrero researching the quilts and historic photographs used in the film (first released in 1987) and accompanying book.
Emphasizing quilts as a means of revealing the social history of women, Pat Ferrero's "Hearts and Hands" eloquently presents fragments of time, illustrated by needlework, which tell a story of the ultimate triumph of women during a century from which we usually hear few female voices. For Ferrero, these quilts are texts, and needles the pens, that create a pattern of historical fragments carefully gathered and arranged to reveal an aesthetic, double-edged picture of women's power in the 19th century.
-Reviewed by the California Folklore Society
Successfully challenging the notion that nineteenth century quilts were merely functional, occasionally artful, but certainly never part of the historical record, the film demonstrates that for nineteenth century women, quilts were the podium, the pulpit, and the judges' gavel which their society denied them. Their quilts speak the language of abolition, patriotism, politics, social justice, and westward expansion, [and] they incorporate fragments of the personal into explorations of nineteenth century culture. "Hearts and Hands" facilitated discussion of the impact of gender, race, and class on official history and the difficulties historians face in retrieving the histories of previously marginalized groups. The film's appropriation of archival materials-photographs, quotations from journals and letters, and the quilts themselves-provides the substance necessary to flesh out the theoretical abstractions of female communication, historiography, and historical documentary.
-Judith Lancioni
Rowan University, School of Communication
Click here for information on how to order the complete video
A Hearts and Hands" companion book is available through Thomas Nelson Press.