“Virtue’s the Chiefest Beauty of the Mind”: Black Girlhood Needlework, Repetition, and Agency in 1830s Baltimore

Abstract

Focusing on two samplers stitched by free Black girls in 1830s Baltimore, this article argues that formulaic forms of needlework are potent sites of cultural meaning and access points into the contexts of childhood stitchers. Situating these samplers alongside disciplinary debates in material culture, women’s history, and the scholarship of child-produced culture, this article pushes against notions that originality and clearly individualized voice are the most important signs of agency and a historical actor’s power. Ostentatious subversion is not the only metric of agency and self-determination. Instead, formulaic works placed in context can reveal the distributed or collaborative agency of many actors whose efforts were amplified in community. This article emphasizes the networks of actors involved in schoolgirl samplers—families, teachers, other stitchers, and many artisans. For free Black girls in the antebellum period, these works could function as antislavery arguments and articulations of what it meant to embody free selfhood—not as monadic and singular, but part of meaningful and legible community.