Making a Living Making Quilts: A Historical Perspective

Sunday, March 15, 2020

Charlottesville Shirt Factory

What might a quilt made of shirt factory remnants in 
the 1940-1960 years look like?

Cora Lewis Hunt Carver (1893-1977) of Charlottesville, Virginia, was remembered in a local history as a "quilt maker who sold quilts for $25 to local residents and sewed in a shirt factory on Monticello Avenue where she was given permission to take remnants for the quilts."

Quilts from online auctions: Ca. 1960 Factory Cutaways?

The factory, probably the Monticello Shirt Factory, closed about 1990. Based on Cora's age I'd guess the time discussed is 1940-1960s.
"Monthly she returned with quilt tops to Nelson County with her aunts and cousins who would each create 5-10 complete quilts. Depending upon family crises at the time, number of returning quilts varied...illness, birth of babies, etc. She won first prize for her designs in the earliest state fairs."
We don't know what the Nelson County quilts looked like
but we can guess they were busy.

As in some of these wonderful combinations of stripes,
plaids and pineapples.

1955 Spiegel catalog


In her cottage industry Cora provided work for rural relatives and recycled local remnants
and probably made a little extra cash for herself.


Thursday, March 5, 2020

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Commercial Artist

Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860 - 1935)

Charlotte Perkins is best known as a writer and leader in the women's movement from the 1890s till her death in 1935. When she was young she supported herself and her mother with commercial art. Her diaries are full of references to painting and drawing greeting and advertising cards.

Charlotte's drawing for a Soapine trade card.
The Schlesinger Library at Harvard has her papers.

The published card advertising laundry soap

In February 1881 when she was 21 she described her day in Providence, Rhode Island after waking up under "14 thicknesses of blanket...Paint marguerites with good success. Do a bit on cards" She was crocheting a shawl and in the manner of someone focused on production rather than process she calculated, "It takes about 30 hours as I estimate it to make one of those shawls. I do five times across tonight, twenty minutes at a time." 

She may have cared about time because she was selling her crocheting too. Despite her sewing business, teaching art and selling card designs, she and her mother Mary Fitch Perkins were always on the edge of hunger. A pair of shoes was an elusive goal one winter. Father Frederick Beecher Perkins, related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, was remarkably indifferent to the family he abandoned, sending little money and paying little attention to his son and daughter.
Charlotte wrote in her diary of struggling with the whale, a Soapine theme,
as in this display poster 38" wide.

Charlotte managed to spend the academic year in evening classes at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1878-79. 


Her cousin Robert Brown, bookkeeper at the Kendall Soap Company, found a sideline profitable for him and Charlotte. With Robert designing and Charlotte doing the drawing Perkins & Company Designers earned $370 in the early 1880s.



Feb 7 1881. "Bah! A lazy wasted miserable mispent day....Paint less than one card." (She'd spent her day reading.) The following day: "Work on Archery cards with some application and finish 'em.... R(obert) isn't satisfied of course so I needs lug my poor little cards back again."


Walter Stetson painted flowers in Charlotte's copy of Keats's poetry.
The Schlesinger Library at Harvard has her papers.

In 1884 she quit her freelance work after she married artist Charles Walter Stetson and gave birth to daughter Kate a year later. 

Katherine Beecher Stetson (1885-1979) with her mother in 1893.
Is that a quilt behind them?

Some blame an unhappy marriage for Charlotte's depression after childbirth but it is most likely post-partum depression aggravating her life-long bipolar disorder, which terminated only with her suicide when she was 65 and ill with cancer. She and Walter Stetson separated in 1888 at her request and she moved to California with Kate.

From Hometown Pasadena

Charlotte and Kate rented a “little wood-and-paper four-room house,” at the corner of Orange Grove and Arroyo Terrace in Pasadena for four years, where she taught art and began her writing career in earnest. She then moved to Oakland and San Francisco. 


She went on to a very different life with a particular interest in the economic injustices women faced but her youthful career as a commercial artist gives us some insight into the free-lancers behind those thousands of advertising cards.


Read more about Charlotte Perkins Gilman here:
http://schlesinger.radcliffe.harvard.edu/onlinecollections/gilman/learnmore

https://www.abaa.org/member-articles/charlotte-perkins-gilmans-trade-card-designs

Denise D. Knight, The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1994.