JANNEKEN SMUCKER. Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. 270. $22.00 (U.S.)
Published by the Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, with Donald L. Kraybill, as the series editor, this book sets itself up to be the official history of Amish quilting in America. And to a large extent it succeeds. Author Janneken Smucker has clearly done her research. In the acknowledgements chapter, she relates how this project began as an academic thesis (hence the long title with a colon), and with the help of a long list of historians, quilt dealers, and crafts experts, she has pieced together a fairly comprehensive volume. At 270 pages you might at first be taken back by its daunting size, but a quick scan reveals hundreds of large beautiful photographs that not only help tell the story but put into one volume some of the most important Amish quilts of the last half of the twentieth century.
If I had a complaint about the book, it is more about the “idea” of Amish quilts and less about the historical creation, development, or creative process of quilt making by Amish persons. If you are hoping to read about other Anabaptist groups and their quilting traditions, that book likely hasn’t been written yet. Mennonites are mentioned sparingly, and not altogether favorably. The book reads like a collection of short essays, arranged historically to tell this amazing narrative. I was glad it didn’t feel too much like an academic thesis, but there are several dozen pages of end notes with lots of sources and links to further reading on a variety of related fields.
Smucker generally uses a chronological approach to talk about the quilts, and the quilt makers. But to understand her book, one must first come to terms with the Amish Quilt “craze” of the late 1960s and 1970s. When treated as a proper noun in this way, “Amish Quilt” becomes a fetish of fashion, an art world “Label,” and a solid gold investment for the lucky person with one in his or her collection. An Amish Quilt is an ersatz brand, an icon, and even a political statement. Amish quilts in the trendiest art galleries in Manhattan, hung on clean white walls, their bold graphic colors declare something like, “I’m cool (and rich) enough to own one of these beautiful old bed coverings! I’m for empowering women. I value the good old days when things were simpler and cozier!”
The cultural landscape of the last quarter of the twentieth century was characterized by mass-produced everything, increasingly imported from other countries where cheap labor costs were still exploitable, and a sense of we-can-do-anything. America was all about mass-produced plastic everything, convenience foods, and a sense that women were taking on new roles. Women were working outside the home like no nation had ever seen, and the skies were the limit.
Paradoxically, at the same general time in the arts, there was a new push to appreciate the handmade. Traditional crafts resurged in popularity. Craft shows, craft festivals, and quilt auctions could be counted on to raise tens of thousands of dollars for the institutions that were hosting them. Our homes were decorated with colonial style furniture, antiques, and in demand were natural colors, and materials like wood, brick, and jute (remember those macramé plant hangings?).
Smucker pulls together these disparate threads of our common story to explain the unique place in this shared history that Amish quilts held in this cultural conversation. Just as women were entering the work force in huge numbers, the art world was screaming, “remember when women were stuck at home and making these beautiful household items for their families?” When we might buy new bedding at Sears in dozens of styles and colors, the fashionable celebrities and uber-rich would display a slightly tattered (antique) Amish color-block quilt in their Manhattan loft next to a Pop Art lithograph by Lichtenstein, and the sophisticate would see a shrewd investment and an almost prophetic cry for sanity. Quilting became the embodiment of the power of the female. Quilting was a woman’s art.
Meanwhile back in Lancaster County, word went around that rich people in big cities would pay big time for old quilts (which Smucker notes were not even in fashion for the Amish themselves at the time), and the real craze truly began to spread. Families scoured their hope chests for “gold,” quilters got busy finishing quilt tops that had sat unfinished for decades, and the less-than-scrupulous were putting together old scraps they found to create new “antique” quilts for the fancy city slickers who didn’t know the difference.
Smucker researched some of these quilt dealers extensively, uncovering their travel habits, the networks of Amish quilters they had cultivated. Some were trusted and invited into Amish homes to see their treasures. Some were barred from the community due to their shady dealings. It didn’t take long for the word to reach even separatist ears that the $25 given for an old quilt had fetched $1,500 in a reputable gallery.
Amish and Mennonite quilters were making new quilts too. There were new colors, patterns (Amish tended to go for solids), new trends in patchwork, appliqué and now sized for modern beds and bedrooms. Prices never reached the levels that Amish and antiques had brought, but a new industry sprang up all over the Anabaptist world. For 20 years or so tourists to Lancaster County could find dozens of quilt shops that sold new quilts to visitors from “outside” who wanted desperately to take a little of the “old-fashioned simpler life” home with them. Lancaster had found its place on the tourism map by branding itself as a place where you could see the Amish on their farms with their quirky anti-modern lifestyle. All this seemed to distill itself neatly and symbolically into the Amish quilt.
It all unraveled somewhere around the end of the twentieth century when Hmong immigrant labor (from Laos) in Lancaster County created a cottage industry that traditional Anabaptists just couldn’t compete with. Hmong women arrived in central Pennsylvania with a rich cultural heritage in sewing and stitching. It was a simple matter of learning quickly about American tastes, and they were making quilts that mirrored the best of Amish quilting. The other factor was a new wave of imports of “hand-made” quilts from Asia. Even retailer Lands End, in 1989, featured a limited edition “Amish quilt” on the cover of their Christmas catalog (in very non-Amish prints and calicoes) for just $250. It sold out quickly, but it was only possible because they were “hand-quilted” in China.
Almost overnight, the savvy consumer wouldn’t pay $1200 for a double bed quilt for a daughter’s wedding gift. They could order something stylistically similar for under $300 from a local department store and it was guaranteed washable (and not too precious to actually use).
If you have your own 1980s-era quilt dealer story—like I do—you will find parts of this book very intriguing. There’s sparse mention of anything Mennonite, and certainly nothing about the Brethren in Christ. But discovering how your own quilt story fits into its proper historical context can be both challenging and rewarding.