Webinar: Stitches of Death: Mourning Needlework and Young Women’s Education in Early America

Mourning pieces, a type of needlework, were produced in young women’s academies from the 1790s to the 1850s. These schools offered a broadly Protestant education and trained young women according to the Enlightenment principles of reason and sensibility. Training schoolgirls in sensibility required teaching them to cultivate their God-given moral sense, and producing mourning pieces became an important part of this education. Jamie L. Brummitt, professor of religion, death, and technology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, traces the rise and decline of mourning pieces and discusses the ways in which women used them to preserve the memories of the dead. They would sometimes stich hair cut from the dead into their needlework, or would otherwise include names, death dates, or gravestone epitaphs.  A mourning piece from Old York’s collection will be featured in this talk.