Samplers, social capital, and the formation of feminine identities: the embroidery work of Leah Galligher and her students, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1798-1802
Date
2002
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This thesis investigates the role women's material culture played in the formation of eighteenth-centurv class identity using a group of ten samplers produced under Leah Galligher's direction in Lancaster. Pennsylvania. Samplers, a genre of objects that have received scholarly attention since the early nineteenth century, have been studied primarily as domestic products. I consider them as a form o f work that allowed members of the middling sort to define their social status. First I show that the heads of household who patronized Galligher's school all cam e from the middling rank. Then, through visual analysis. I demonstrate Leah Galligher's instruction constituted a form of apprenticeship that built human capital (skills and knowledge) and social capital (the formation of social identities). Because the students' education generated embroideries, skills, and status, sampler making must be understood as a form of work, or productive labor crucial to the household. Thus the samplers force us to broaden our concept of work to include labor executed with the intent of generating social capital. The idea of social capital allow s me to examine how the samplers built their makers' reputations by forming a community of sensibility that adapted gentility for bourgeois class definition. Finally. I consider how the samplers functioned in Leah Galligher's presentation of self, placing them against the tumultuous events of her life, a divorce due to her husband's impotency and the public scandal that ensued. As a whole, the thesis reveals the ways in which objects can and should inform our understanding of the past.