Quilting & the New Deal

Unsung History

As part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), so-called “unskilled” women were put to work in over 10,000 sewing rooms across the country, producing both garments and home goods for people in need. Those home goods included quilts, sometimes quickly-made utilitarian bedcoverings, but also artistic quilts worthy of exhibition. Quilts were featured in other New Deal Projects, too, like the WPA Handicraft Projects, part of the Women’s and Professional Projects Division. Throughout the Great Depression, the programs of the New Deal created a supportive and innovative environment for the art of quiltmaking.

Joining me in this episode is historian, writer, and podcaster Dr. Janneken Smucker, Professor of History at West Chester University and author of A New Deal for Quilts.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “A Mazurka played on harmonica,” performed by Aaron Morgan and recorded as part of a WPA project by Sidney Robertson Cowell on July 17, 1939, in Northern California; the recording is available via the Library of Congress.The episode image is “Grandmother from Oklahoma and her pieced quilt. California, Kern County,” take by Dorothea Lange in February 1936 through the U.S. Farm Security Administration; the photograph is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

Additional Sources:

• “The Works Progress Administration,” PBS American Experience.
• “Works Progress Administration (WPA),” History.com, Originally posted July 13, 2017, and updated September 21, 2022.
• “Question 22: 1940 Census Provides a Glimpse of the Demographics of the New Deal,” by Ashley Mattingly, Prologue Magazine, National Archives, Summer 2012, Vol. 44, No. 2.
• “Women and the New Deal,” Living New Deal.
• “Women’s Work Relief in the Great Depression,” by Martha H. Swain, History Now, February 2004
• “WPA sewing project kept Hoosier women working through the Great Depression,” by Dawn Mitchell, Indy Star, January 19, 2018.
• “‘We Patch Anything’: WPA Sewing Rooms in Fort Worth, Texas,” Living New Deal, May 27, 2013.
• “Frugal and Fashionable: Quiltmaking During the Great Depression,” The Quilt Index.
• “WPA Milwaukee Handicraft Project,” Milwaukee Public Museum.

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