Before Your Time is a podcast about Vermont history. Every episode, we go inside the stacks at the Vermont Historical Society to look at an object from their permanent collection that tells us something unique about our state. Then, we take a closer look at the people, the events, and the ideas that surround each artifact.
[V]ermont today has no shortage of knitters, crocheters, rug hookers, silkers, sewers and felters. Some are avid hobbyists, and some make a living from their craft. But all are part of a long history of fiber arts in Vermont.
Household production across New England spiked in the late 18th century. In Vermont, a state-sponsored silk production initiative brought women into a new trade. In the years since, innovative artisans like Elizabeth Fisk and Patty Yoder have reinvented traditional crafts — and in the process, redefined what’s sometimes been dismissed as “women’s work.”
“We often talk about textiles in gendered terms,” says Katie Wood Kirchhoff, the associate curator at the Shelburne Museum. “It’s actually one of the big challenges of working with textile collections, because often the funding is not great for research in these fields. Often there’s not as much interest in coming to a show about women’s work.”
When Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich became a historian, she realized women’s voices were similarly underrepresented in archival texts.
“There was just a hunger to know, where were the women? Where were all of the women? What were they doing?”
Those questions led Ulrich to devote her career to exploring women’s roles in early America.
On this episode, Kirchoff and Ulrich discuss New England textile artisans who blurred the lines between art and business. The weekly knitting group at Montpelier’s Yarn store talk about finding community through fiber arts. Plus, Amanda Gustin and Mary Rogstad explore an exhibit at the Vermont History Museum that reveals the psychology of silk production.
Subscribe to Before Your Time on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play. See more images, complete music credits, and a transcript of this episode at beforeyourtime.org.
Produced in partnership with the Vermont Historical Society and the Vermont Humanities Council. Theme music by Michael Chapman and the Woodpiles.
