A Historical Antidote to Today's Fast Fashion Culture

Content

There was a time, in the early days of this country, when personal textiles were highly valued and cared for. Clothing, bed sheets, handkerchiefs, and knapsacks were objects to be preserved and repaired when they became damaged—not discarded and replaced. Even the wealthiest man in America wore stockings that had been mended many times over.  

According to Emily Whitted, a PhD candidate in the history department at UMass Amherst, the story of textile repair in early America reveals a fascinating and understudied piece of this country’s history. Her dissertation project, “Darned, Patched, and Mended: Repairing Textiles in Early America,” explores the economics, gender dynamics, and material meanings of textile repair work in the U.S. between 1750 and 1850.

UMass PhD student Emily Whitted examines historical textiles at the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, one of several collections at which she conducted research for her dissertation.

“My project is committed to intimate glimpses into early Americans’ worlds and the choices they’re making about their personal belongings,” says Whitted. “This is very relevant today in thinking about how we care for the objects around us. We all have things in our lives that we’d go to great lengths to preserve, and this is really powerful in helping to counteract the broader global impulses to buy, buy, buy.”  

Whitted was recently named a UMass Amherst Groundbreaking Graduate Student in recognition of the exceptional quality and leadership of her research and scholarship. She has previously been awarded many major research fellowships in the Northeast, as well as the UMass history department’s Simon and Satenig Ermonian Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Her work has been featured in museum exhibitions, and she has presented at numerous conferences and symposia. She has also been an invited speaker at a variety of museums and historic institutions around the East Coast, sharing her research with diverse audiences.  

“Emily’s pathbreaking work on mending, together with her already-strong reputation in the fields of both textile curation and early American history, ensures that her research ... will find traction not only among historians but also in the nation’s museums,” says Whitted’s advisor, Marla R. Miller, distinguished professor of history in the UMass Amherst College of Humanities & Fine Arts.  

"I appreciate working with objects because of the proximity it gives you to people from the past."

Emily Whitted, PhD student

The Meaning Embedded in Objects

Whitted’s own personal history with textiles runs deep. She grew up on a sheep farm in southwestern Virginia. With her mother as a role model, Whitted learned to knit, crochet, and sew, and dabbled in hand-knitted pattern design. A lover of books, she majored in English at the University of Richmond, where her undergraduate thesis explored a set of novels by Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell. In these books, textiles played a prominent role in the lives of the female characters, and Whitted discovered she was interested not only in reading about textiles but in studying them up close. She went on to earn a master’s degree through the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, an interdisciplinary object-based program.

“I appreciate working with objects because of the proximity it gives you to people from the past,” says Whitted. “Objects can communicate much more powerfully than words on paper.”  

For her PhD, Whitted was drawn to UMass Amherst by the opportunity to work with Miller, who is renowned for her expertise in the history of American women and the history of textiles.

“More broadly, I was excited by the strength of UMass’s public history program and its ideal location in the Connecticut River Valley, which offers access to a wealth of museums and historical institutions,” Whitted explains. For her dissertation research, she visited more than a dozen such collections, large and small, along the East Coast, and viewed over 1,000 mended textiles.

"We can still choose acts of care rather than disposal, with all sorts of important implications for the climate."

Emily Whitted, PhD student

Each of the five chapters in Whitted’s dissertation examines a different object, unpacking themes and trends about the history of textile repair work in early America. For example, drawing on a pair of darning samplers from a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania, Whitted writes about textile education for girls and women. She explores the ubiquity of mending in relation to a pair of heavily mended stockings owned by Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, who was at one point the wealthiest man in America. A mended knapsack owned by a Continental Army soldier named Benjamin Warner provides a window into textile supply issues and the labor of maintenance during the Revolutionary War.  

“When we think about repair work today, it’s often assumed that only those who cannot afford to replace personal items would repair them. But that wasn’t the case in early America. The value of textiles was so high that they would always be repaired with intention. At the same time, textiles are really intimate, personal items, so early Americans were motivated to repair their textiles out of sentiment or care—to ensure the textiles live on,” says Whitted.

“That has such moving takeaways for us as modern Americans, at a time when textiles are very undervalued, extremely cheap, and yet are still objects we can have meaningful relationships with,” she adds. “We can still choose acts of care rather than disposal, with all sorts of important implications for the climate.” 

Transforming Evidence of Mending in Museum Collections

After earning her PhD, Whitted hopes to work at a historic or cultural institution, sharing histories of objects with the public.

Through her extensive work in collections for her dissertation, she found that mended textiles aren’t regularly surfaced or even catalogued comprehensively in museums and historic sites today.  

“Part of that is because museums historically prioritize pristine pieces—perfect examples of objects that haven’t been altered. But I think the pendulum is swinging and curators are growing more interested in interpreting this layered history,” she says.  

Adds her advisor, Miller, “Whitted’s work will almost certainly transform how evidence of mending is understood in museum collections.”

This piece was originally published on the UMass website.