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In the basement of the Rio Grande Depot housed alongside the manuscript and photograph collections of the Utah State Historical Society (USHS) is an artifact collection of over 31,000 historical items. After a five-year inventory and reconciliation project, these items have been aligned with their appropriate provenance and have been uploaded to a searchable catalog accessed through the Utah State History library and collections website. As one of the curators responsible for cataloging the artifacts over a multi-year period, I highlight here a specific item in the collection that suggests the oft-connection between material object and autobiography. This object, the collection, and material culture more generally present compelling questions for researchers, scholars, and educators of material culture and women’s history. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor Emerita at Harvard and member of the USHS artifacts collection review team, has shown that in the right interpretive hands material culture offers a fruitful historical source. For Ulrich, textiles and household items are as important in filling in the “gaps” of social and women’s history as the written word. In the essay “Of Pens and Needles: Sources in Early American Women’s History,” she argued that “sophisticated source criticism invites us to turn the problem of documentation on its head, taking the supposed paucity of evidence as a fruitful point of inquiry rather than as a damper to research.” Stitchery, quilts, furniture, diaries, and other ordinary objects offer unconventional means of gaining insight into “class divisions, education, technology and commerce, family relations, attitudes toward the body, work and leisure, marriage and death.”1 Furthermore, as the historian Alan Taylor noted in a review of The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, Ulrich showed how “through the transmission of names and objects women created lineages that sometimes paralleled, but often crosscut, the more conspicuous and official patrilineal system.”2 In Ulrich’s work, material culture holds a certain power that runs parallel to the written word as source material, especially when considering the generational connections between women. Everyday
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Material Objects as Autobiography
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Crazy Quilt:
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