The Life, Death and Resurrection of Sun Bonnet Sue

AMS 801 The Life, Death and Resurrection of Sunbonnet Sue Dr. Hart Carla Tilghman Dec 2012 Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. -- G. K. Chesterton, ipsissima vox Fig. 1 Sunbonnet Sue The Sunbonnet Sue quilt figure has proved to be not only an enduring image, but also an adaptable one, moving through several incarnations during her life. She started as a graphic image but was then adopted by quilters and became a folk image. Sue has embodied all the ideas against which feminists of the 1970s raged, only to do re-emerge in the 1990s as an anonymous stand-in for “bad girl” behaviour. When I first began work on this paper I had hoped to look at Sue in terms of folk imagery, to explore the ways in which Sue imagery has changed over the years. I discovered, however, that that approach was too limiting. There are times in Sue’s life where I do not think that she can be called a folk image. Instead, I have chosen to look at Sue from the perspective of images of children, images for children, and changing perceptions of childhood. This brings Sue into a wider context not only of imagery connected with children, but also of adult perceptions of children and childhood. It is from this vantage point that I propose to explore Sue’s origins, her history as a quilt image, and the variety of late twentieth century images of Sue. I will discuss Sue’s birth as a graphic design, and then concentrate on her use as a quilt image, intentionally excluding embroidered versions of the sunbonneted little girl in the interest of brevity. I will argue that Sunbonnet Sue has been used not merely as a quaint quilt figure, but as a stand-in for changing societal attitudes towards the place of girls and women in the twentieth century. It is generally agreed Sue’s origins stem from the illustrations of British artist Kate Greenaway. Ina Taylor, Art of Kate Greenaway, [New York: Pelican Publishing], 1991. While Greenaway did not draw the image that we think of as Sunbonnet Sue, her work influenced Bertha Corbett, the woman who originated the image with which we are familiar. Greenaway was an illustrator of children’s books and also a fashion illustrator whose work was published in America in the Ladies Home Journal as well as Harper’s in the 1880s and 1890s. Her illustrations of children have some particular qualities that are important in understanding Sue imagery, e. g. clothing, setting and the way in which childhood is portrayed. Fig. 2 Kate Greenaway book cover Greenaway intentionally drew children wearing eighteenth century clothing as opposed to late nineteenth century children’s clothes which she found to be too restrictive and frankly unattractive. Consequently, the girls were dressed in the Empire fashion of loose, flowing dresses and lightweight slipper-like shoes. Greenaway’s children are always seen in nice, peaceful English country settings, ‘pre-industrial’ scenes, given that they never include trains, or cities, or factories. They are middle-class children seemingly without cares. They can play and cavort, enjoy the country, and discover the wonders of nature all without the burden of adult cares or responsibilities. Fig 3 Children’s clothing 18th century 19th century Greenaway’s books were widely circulated in the United States and her illustrations were familiar to Bertha Corbett, an artist and illustrator from Denver Colorado, active at the turn of the century. Corbett studied with Douglas Volk - a figure painter, at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts and then worked as a sketch artist for the Minneapolis Journal. Betty Hagerman, A Meeting of the Sunbonnet Babies, Baldwin City, KS, Hagerman, 1979, p. 11. Around 1895 Bertha Corbett was contacted by Eulalie Osgood (a New Hampshire school teacher) who invited Corbett to illustrate a children’s primer that Osgood was writing. The collaboration was successful and the Sunbonnet Babies Primer was born. Like Greenaway, Corbett chose to clothe her children in out-dated fashion and to place them in predominately rural settings. While Corbett drew a few boys wearing large hats for the Primer, most of the illustrations are of little girls engaged in a variety of activities such as studying, having a tea party, working in the garden, playing with their dolls, washing doll clothes, and taking their dolls for walks. The large sunbonnets completely cover the little girls’ faces, a device that Corbett used intentionally. She wanted to convey emotion without using facial features, thinking that this would not only place emphasis on the figures and their actions but would also allow the reader to use their imagination when looking at the illustrations. Ibid. p. 12. Fig. 4 Berthe Corbett and a Sunbonnet Baby Corbett’s (and Greenaway’s) choices of setting, costume and activity in their illustrations are a direct reflection of late nineteenth century adult perceptions of childhood, which were an extension of ideas about childhood that developed in the eighteenth century. A brief discussion of the ways in which perceptions of childhood changed will be useful not only in understanding the development of Sunbonnet Sue, but also in understanding the ways in which the image was subverted and changed in the late twentieth century. Prior to the eighteenth century, children were not viewed as having a separate life from adults. They might not yet be able to take on the full responsibilities of an adult, but they were expected to participate in the working family unit. Paintings and sculpture show us that there were no distinctions made between children and adults in matters of dress. Portraits of Elizabeth I as a child show her squeezed into Tudor garb, just as later portraits of Edward VI show him in full male Tudor regalia. Both children are shown in their adult roles as inheritors of dynastic power without the sense of their ever having had a time when they were allowed to play without adult responsibilities or expectations. In general, children were portrayed as participating in adult activities: the continuation of dynastic rule, sexual plays, puns or morals. Even children shown at play as in Pieter Brugel’s Children’s Game, 1556 are wearing scaled down versions of adult clothing and ‘play’ at being adults. Fig. 5 Elizabeth I Edward IV But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the concept of activities appropriate for children changed as did ways of portraying them. In 1814, William Hazlett, in writing about pictures which included children, said: “The one is a sturdy young gentleman sitting in a doubtful posture without its swaddling clothes, and the other is an innocent little child, saying its prayers at the foot of its bed. They have nothing to do with Jupiter or Samuel, the heathen god or the Hebrew prophet.” Cited in Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, London, Thames and Hudson, 1998, p. 23. Hazlett (1795-1866) was a British writer and painter who wrote On the Principles of Human Action (pub. 1805), a study in metaphysics and philosophy. This suggests that children were being removed from the adult world and from participating in adult activities. Encouraged by writers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, the concept of childhood as a time of life separate from adulthood was emerging. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,[New York: Dover], 2004, 75-82. The notion of preserving and protecting the innocent child allows adults to deny or forget many aspects of adulthood or adult society. The construction of innocent children allows us to forget pain and debt, and the hardships of adult life. Ibid., p 43. Consequently, such a construction is as much for adults as it is about children. This idea is most important when we consider for whom the art is intended. Children are not purchasing images of innocent childhood, adults are. Both Greenaway’s and Corbett’s images of children are intended to appeal to adults purchasing books for children. In art, innocent children are no longer identified with the responsibilities of royalty (as in the Elizabeth and Edward portraits), nor are they identified with toil or misery, as they are in Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s seventeenth-century images of Spanish beggar children, or even as a working member of a family unit as they are in Bruegel’s paintings. Instead, the perfect childhood is one without want: a middle-class life that identifies itself discretely with affluent cleanliness. Fig. 6 Det. of Bruegel’s Children’s Games Murillo’s Beggar Boy It is also during the eighteenth century that we see distinctions being made in the clothing of adults and children. While adult fashions shift during the century, children’s clothes remain the same. Adult women’s clothing moves away from the loose fitting Empire dress (seen at the beginning of the century) to the tightly corseted waist and bell-shaped skirt of mid-century. The century ends with adult women still wearing shape altering corsets, but trading the bell-shaped skirt for smoothly fitting bask with a large bustle worn at the back. These fashion variations serve to change the silhouette of adult women, emphasizing breasts and hips (femininity and sexuality) despite the yards and yards of cloth involved. Fig. 7 1880 Afternoon Dress Children’s fashions did not change as rapidly. Throughout the nineteenth century, children continued to wear loose fitting garments and, until about age eight, there was little distinction made between what girls and boys wore. Girls were dressed in clothes that still resembled Empire fashion: loose, short sleeves, a sash above the waist and a loosely draping gown usually ending between knees and ankles. One of the earliest paintings of little girls thusly garbed is Sir Joshua Reynolds The Age of Innocence c 1788. It was echoed for almost a century in works like Thomas Lawrence’s Portrait of Mrs. John Angerstein and her son John Julius William 1799 and Emile Munier’s Girl with Kittens, c 1850-60 and John Everett Millais’s Cherry Ripe, 1879. Little boys wore loose fitting dress-type garments until they were allowed to put on their first pair of pants, thus taking the step from babyhood to young manhood and more importantly, leaving the realm of women to enter the world of men. Girls wore the same kinds of dresses until they were old enough to be presented to society, i.e. until they were of a marriageable age. Then they lengthened their skirts and put up their hair. The chronological distinctions made between boys and girls and their entry into the adult world imply that innocent childhood lasts longer for girls than for boys. Girls remain dressed as children longer, and do not alter their clothing until they are ready to marry and bear their own children. The obvious connection here is that girls remain little girls until menstruation begins, at which time they become women, capable of bearing children. Young boys enter the adult world much earlier, but without the expectation that they will immediately marry and take on the responsibilities of household head. Fig. 8 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Penelope Boothby, 1788 Millais Cherry Ripe, 1897 Remember that Greenaway and then Corbett intentionally chose to dress their imagined children in the loose-fitting Empire dresses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a fashion that is intended to evoke nostalgic memories of an idyllic childhood. But Empire fashions also serve to preserve the idea of innocent childhood, one without adult knowledge and, in this case, childhood without sexuality. Unlike Victorian and Edwardian fashions (which, by cinching in the waist emphasize the breast and hips) Empire dresses cover the body without outlining it. The Sunbonnet girls may be engaged in activities that pre-figure the adult roles that they would assume (were they ever to grow up), but their clothing helps to preserve their innocence as children, without reference to anticipated future sexual behaviour. They may learn the mechanics of child rearing by taking care of their dolls, but all with an air of purity. They are merely engaged in play, not the realities of adult life and responsibilities. Corbett’s illustrations were widely circulated. The Primer had sold over 1.3 million copies by 1910. Hagerman. p. 12. The Sunbonnet babies were reproduced on postcards, wallpaper, wrapping paper, and china. In 1904 Austin’s & Co. printed a series of pictures from oil paintings done by Corbett. The Sunbonnet girls were pictured as being clever, curious, industrious and even occasionally mischievous. But despite all this energy, they are images of a childhood that is timeless. These children do not exist in a world of reality. Instead, they tend their gardens and dollies outside of the world of the 1890s or the first decade of the twentieth century. The setting is rural rather than urban, and like Greenaway’s illustrations, pre-industrial. The dress and bonnets of Sunbonnet Sue are also often identified with the loose-fitting prairie dress and large schooner or polk bonnets of pioneer women. But even this association with the frontier retains the idea of childhood innocence. The sunbonnet children don’t appear until the West had been cleared of Indians and was a safe place for children to play. Certainly, children living in the rural mid-west were seen (still are seen) as living a life that is safer than urban life, and one that shelters children from the harsh realities of city life. Corbett and Greenaway are not the only ones to be portraying childhood in this way, and at this moment. Louisa May Alcott had published Little Women in 1868. Reginald Birch’s Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886. Goops and How not to be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants, by Gelett Burgess was published in 1892. All of these books, while emphasizing manners and teaching morals, were aimed at children who had not yet entered the adult world. The diminutives used in the titles distinguish children from adults, and imply that children do not yet have adult knowledge. Again, these books, like Corbett’s Sunbonnet babies, show children playing at being adults, but they remain separate from the adult world. Even though Alcott’s March sisters come to know the joys and sorrows of life as women, it is not until after they have reached puberty that they come to such knowledge. Interestingly, the sister (Beth) who is most engaged with the duties of the home and the womanly arts never leaves the home, remains the most innocent of adult knowledge, and dies a virgin. Corbett was not the only artist to paint bonneted little girls. In 1905, Bernhardt Wall illustrated a series of postcards for Ullman Mfg. Co. This first series showed a little girl in a red dress with a large white bonnet engaged in activities related to the days of the week. Thursday was shopping day, and Saturday was baking day. Later that same year, he produced a Months of the Year series for the same company. Hagerman. p. 17. Wall later claimed that he invented Sunbonnet Sue, but Corbett’s illustrations are clearly much earlier than his, and given how widely her work circulated, probably inspired his drawings. Fig. 9 Bernhardt Wall, Sunbonnet Sue The translation of the Sunbonnet girls into textile imagery took place during the 1890s and appears to be a distinctively American phenomenon. The first recorded cloth image was an embroidery pattern for a bonneted little girl in the 1888 February issue of Harper’s. The accompanying text used “hillbilly” jargon to explain that this image was suitable for embroidering on shoes. Ibid. p. 18. Early quilt patterns appeared in Godey’s Ladies Book in April of 1894. The earliest images of the little girl now being called “Sunbonnet Sue” are associated with ideas of country living. We do not see images of Sue in the city, and the advertisements are pitched to appeal to a stereotype of the simplicity of rural life. By the 1910s, Sunbonnet Sue is no longer produced as a graphic image, but instead is seen only in textile form. It is at this point that Sue makes the transition from graphic to folk image. Sunbonnet Sue was/is a quilt image that, unlike other quilt images, seems to have come exclusively from published patterns. Pieced patterns have a variety of different names, some of which describe the look of the pattern (bear-claw, pinwheel, or pineapple), some of which identify place (The Road to Kansas, or tornado), or which describe an action or activity (Daisy chain, Drunkard’s Path). Some quilters handed patterns down to the next generation while other quilters invented new patterns. Unlike other appliqué quilts, Sue seems to have generated little individual imagination and remained a relatively static image from the early 1900s until the 1970s. Floral motif appliqué quilts (like Grandmother’s Garden quilts) seem to have been quite individual. While the quilter might use published patterns for certain types of flowers, the arrangement and design of the quilt were up to the quilter, or quilting circle. She is most often portrayed in profile, sporting a large bonnet (which is frequently adorned with a ribbon around the crown), and wearing an enveloping pinafore dress. Her hands look like mittens, and her feet are usually just hinted at by an ovoid shape peeking out from underneath her dress. What little ‘skin’ we can see is distinctively ‘white’. There were a number of companies that produced variations of the Sue pattern. Ladies Art Patterns was founded in St. Louis in the 1880s (and was still in business as of the late 1970s). Sunbonnet Sue quilt appliqué patterns were first issued about 1900, but were not included in their catalogues after 1923. The patterns were available either as a stamped design on cloth (suitable for embroidered embellishment), or as cutout patterns for appliqué. McCall’s pattern company also issued a version of Sue, available from ca. 1900 through the 1930s. Hagerman, p 10-26. Other pattern companies which carried Sue were: Frank’s of St. Louis, Ordell’s, Mary Webster (Indiana), William Pinch and Rainbow Quilts (Ohio), Bess Bruce (Ohio), Standard Designer Needlework Book, Mrs. Danner’s Quilts (Missouri), and the list goes on. Patterns were also available through newspapers. The Kansas City Star published Sue patterns in their Sunday supplement section. Most of those patterns were designed by Ruby Short McKim and McKim Studios. Ruby McKim was a graduate of Parsons School of Fine Arts in New York, who became the director of the Art Education Program for the Kansas City, Missouri, school system at the age of nineteen. The syndicated column that carried McKim’s designs appeared in over 900 newspapers across the nation, spreading Ruby’s images throughout the Midwest. There are several Sunbonnet Sue quilts recently donated to the Wyandotte County Museum that appear to have been made from the McKim patterns. The McKim studio closed in the 1930s. Sunbonnet Sue was a popular image through the 1920s and 1930s. The majority of Sue quilts in most museum collections date to this period. My mother’s Sue quilt was intended for her dolls. It measures two feet by one foot and contains just two panels. Her grandmother in Bandera, Texas, made it, and mom cannot remember a time when she did not own the quilt. Marilyn Tilghman (mom) was born in 1931, and so the quilt was made some short time after that. Mom remembers both of her grandmothers quilting, and remembers the quilting frame that was set up on her paternal grandmother’s porch in the winter. On the other hand, my father’s mother came from an upper crust southern family before moving to St. Louis, Mo. My father has NO memories of his mother, or any of her female relatives quilting. Now considerably faded, the two panels were originally surrounded with a plain pink fabric. The two panels read like a pendant pair, with the male figure on the left, facing the female figure on the right. Both are made from calico fabrics. Marilyn Stokstad’s Sunbonnet Sue quilt was made by her aunt Ethel in Edgerton, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. Prof. Stokstad remembers walking to the local drygoods store to pick out fabrics for quilts that her aunt made from patterns she found in newspapers and magazines. Prof. Stokstad said that her aunt wouldn’t purchase all the fabric for a quilt at once, but instead would buy bits and pieces that would later be made into a quilt. Rags, and hand-me-down fabrics were used to make ragrugs, not quilts. Stokstad does not remember a quilting frame, or a quilting circle. Instead, the women would sit on the front porch of a summer’s evening each working on their own project. It was a time of female companionship, and was also where Prof. Stokstad learned to sew, embroider, knit, and quilt. The experience of these two women is similar to the other women whom I interviewed. In Sept., 2012, I contacted church groups and nursing homes to obtain the names of quilters who would be willing to be interviewed. All the women I spoke to (16 in all, including Tilghman and Stokstad) had either made or had made for them a Sunbonnet Sue quilt. The women’s ages ranged from 65-87, and all lived in the Midwest. See Bibliography for a listing of names and interview dates. There is of course individual variation -- Marilyn Tilghman’s female relatives participated in quilting as a group activity while Marilyn Stokstad’s did not [in the women’s memories] -- but there are also common threads related not just to quilting, but to quilting images of Sue. Of the sixteen women that I interviewed all had either received a Sue quilt as young girls (mostly during the ‘30s) or had made a Sue quilt for a young female relative. They agreed that Sue quilts were made for girls (not by them), that calicos were the preferred material, and that the patterns came from a published source. Sometimes they would chose a Sue pattern where she was doing something (watering the garden, holding a bouquet of flowers, reading a book), but often they chose a pattern where Sue was simply standing, without action or attributes. Despite the pervasiveness of this type of quilt among quilters, the extensive quilt literature available today contains little information on Sunbonnet Sue. Even Carrie Hall, the quintessential meticulous quilter, produced a Sunbonnet Sue quilt. Of course, it is far and away above the standards of most Sue quilts, being quite intricately appliquéd and decorated. For example, Robert Shaw’s American Quilts: The Democratic Art, 1780-2007 contains only one reference to Sunbonnet Sue while Richard Kiracofe’s The American Quilt: A History of Cloth and Comfort, 1750-1950 does not include Sue at all. Books that discuss appliqué deal almost exclusively with the intricate patterns used in garden or floral bouquet quilts. Robert Shaw, American Quilts, The Democratic Art, 1780-2007 [New York: Sterling], 2009. Richard Kiracofe and Mary Elizabeth Johnson, The American Quilt: A History of Cloth and Comfort, 1750-1950 [New York: Clarkson Potter], 2004. The fact that Sunbonnet Sue quilts were commonly made, but rarely included in quilt literature seems to point to two conclusions about the image. One, the quilts were made for little girls, not for adults. Two, the quilts were not meant to be a demonstration of quilting skill. Instead, they are a simple appliqué pattern that can be made quickly and easily. The intended audiences for such quilts were not going to be looking at the quilt to see if it was exquisitely sewn. Despite the lack of literature, during the twentieth century, Sunbonnet Sue has been one of the most enduring quilt images. Other patterns have gone in and out of fashion. Crazy quilts, Baltimore album quilts, bearclaw and Irish chain patterns have all been the rage for a time, but have suffered the fate of most fads and are no longer popular patterns. Sue has endured. Even during the 1940s and ‘50s, when quilting in general was not a prevalent pastime for women, quilters were still making Sue quilts for little girls. John Forrest and Deborah Blincoe, The Natural History of the Traditional Quilt (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995) p. 103. Which returns us to the idea of an ideal childhood. The concepts that the Sunbonnet girls represented as graphic images translated into quilt imagery. Sue may have become a static image when translated into fabric, but the themes of the rural setting, children at play without adult responsibilities (or adult knowledge of the world), and the fact that these quilts were meant for little girls or their dollies are all still part of those original eighteenth and nineteenth-century notions of the perfect childhood. In 1979, two events took place that were each to have significant impact on the ways in which Sunbonnet Sue would be portrayed from then on. As a result of renewed interest in quilts after the Whitney Museum’s 1971 Quilt Exhibition, Betty Hagerman published a book called A Meeting of the Sunbonnet Children. Hagerman’s slender volume covers the origins of quilted Sue imagery as well as the plethora of Sue pattern variations. It also includes names and addresses of companies that in 1979 still carried Sue patterns and instructions for how to create a Sunbonnet Sue quilt. The frontispiece of the book is a picture of Hagerman’s Sunbonnet Sue quilt that was composed of 86 different variations on the Sue design. Hagerman was a long time Baldwin City, Kansas, resident and quilter. I spoke with two women who had quilted with Hagerman, and they both credited her with a Sue revival in the area (Baldwin City and Lawrence, Kansas). Hagerman died in 1980, but family members remember her as an avid quilter, who produced quilts for all the children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Interlibrary loan information located 32 copies of Hagerman’s book in libraries throughout the Midwest. I was unable to find the number of the publishing run, but suffice it so say that her book was fairly widely distributed. I also found that McCall’s and Simplicity both began to carry Sunbonnet Sue patterns in their pattern books after 1980. Frederick Warren Turner, Pattern Making [Cambridge, MA: Biblio Life], 2004. I do not mean to imply that Hagerman’s book was solely responsible for this revival; however, I find the timing not entirely coincidental. The second event in 1979 to have an impact on Sue imagery was a quilt produced by a group of Lawrence, Kansas women calling themselves “Seamsters Local No. 500.” Sick of what they termed “that nauseating little girl”, the group of women created a twenty panel quilt titled The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue. The following people made the blocks of the Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue quilt: Cathy Dwigans, Bryan Anderson, Nadra Dangerfield, Carol Gilham, Betty Kelley, Patty Boyer, Bonnie Dill, Georgann Eglinski, Chickie Hood, Barbara Brackman, Laurie Schwarm, and Nancy Metzinger. Each panel shows Sue dying in some horrible way. She’s eaten by a shark, struck by lightning, swallowed by a snake, run over by a train, killed in a nuclear accident, and poisoned with purple Koolaid, (a la Jonestown, Guyana), to mention only some of the panels. The Lawrence women were specific in saying that they were interested in killing Sue off “as a means of contesting female images of passivity, conformity, and propriety.” Linda Pershing, “ ‘She Really Wanted to be Her Own Woman’: Scandalous Sunbonnet Sue”, Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Radner, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1993 p. 114. Fig. 9 The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue, 1979 If Sunbonnet Sue had in any way become an icon for traditional quilters, then the Lawrence women were iconoclasts, trying to do away entirely with the image and everything that she represented. To these women, Sue was the embodiment of stereotypes about proper womanly activities and behaviors that were both limiting and demeaning to women. The idea of girls who do nothing but play in gardens with their dolls until the onset of their menstrual cycle heralds their physical readiness to take on the role of woman and mother was exactly the image of women that feminists of the 1970s were working hard to eradicate. Sue was no longer viewed as a quaint quilt image, but instead as a saccharine one that was not representative of women’s diversity. She was too firmly connected to ideas of limited female agency. The phenomenon of killing Sue was not unique to Lawrence, Kansas. Another group of women in Missouri produced Death Becomes Her, a quilt which consisted of sixteen panels of gruesome Sue deaths. Ibid. p 128 Other quilters produced individual panels of dead Sues that they would circulate among their friends. While these quilts delighted many of the women who either worked on them, or saw them, they did not meet with universal approval. When shown at the 1980 Kansas State Fair, The Sun Sets quilt caused such a stir that it was finally displayed facing the wall. One woman produced a quilt block of Sunbonnet Sue praying for the souls of the dead Sues. Ibid. Barbara Brackman (one of the instigators of the Sun Sets quilt, and author of two of the blocks) was confronted at a quilt show in Columbia, Missouri, by an angry woman who accused her of supporting child abuse. Ibid. p. 124. Emblematic of the confusions and divided loyalties that women in the 1970s felt with the feminist movement, Sunbonnet Sue seems to have inspired diametrically opposed reactions: quilters who despised her, and those who cherished and defended her. Fig. 10 Block by Patty Boyer “Suestown”, Laurie Schwarm Metzinger In addition to feminist perception of the traditional (and reprehensible) values that Sue embodied, there are two other main reasons for her unacceptability in feminist camps. First, despite a revived interest in quilting, quilt imagery, and women’s handwork (as exemplified by the Pattern and Decoration movement), Sue was not an image that seemed to fit with new interpretations of quilt patterns. Most of the P & D artists were more drawn to geometric patterns, than to figurative ones. Joyce Kozloff’s work is entirely geometric, as is Ned Smyth’s. Though there is no evidence that they ever considered using Sue, her traditionally intimate image would have been inconsistent with the large scale, and public spaces of their work. And while both artists were inspired by quilt patterns, neither actually worked in fabric. Miriam Schapiro’s work does, on occasion, incorporate fabric and some quilting techniques but she is most interested in claiming and valuing women’s work, rather than criticizing traditional female roles. Artists connected with the Pattern and Decoration movement wanted to create images of healing that would revitalize society and unite humanity, bridging the divide between women’s and men’s work, making it whole again. Sunbonnet Sue, despite having been such a popular image made by women for girls, was too quaint an image to fulfill the ambitious mission of P & D artists. Sue was too ringed with little girl associations to be a monumental image able to carry the weight of healing the world. Fig. 11 Miriam Schapiro Anonymous was a Woman The second reason for Sue’s demise as a popular quilt image comes from another camp of early feminist artists such as Judy Chicago who were interested in body imagery and “core” imagery. Some of the early work by feminist artists included an exploration of the ways in which men and women are different. By exploring and valuing those differences, women believed that they could learn about themselves as women, find strength and wisdom as women without paternal dominance. Consequently, artists such as Ana Mendieta produced works including her Silhouette series that not only explored women’s biological distinctions, but also claimed a close connection between women and nature. Mendieta’s Tree of Life not only referred to her cultural background, but also to the idea of women as earth mothers or goddesses of the land, Demeter reincarnated. While early feminist literature frequently refers to earth Goddesses and to Demeter as connected with the land, the image of a strong women, capable of birthing crops and life with male help…I find it curious that she was also the Goddess of Marriage. Fig. 12 Judy Chicago Childhood Rejection, 1974 Ana Mendieta, Tree of Life, 1976 Women were exploring their own bodies (remember the scene from Fried Green Tomatoes where the women’s group are all going to look at their vaginas?) to find their inner being, the source of their strength and power as women. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills questioned, challenged, and played with constructed female roles and identity. All of these women were promoting the idea that women were strong, that they could choose their roles in life. The diminutive, static image of Sue did not fit this new image of women. Sue’s activities were limited; she lived in an idyllic world of flowers and dolls. Sue didn’t even have a body that she could explore. Instead she was covered up by a sunbonnet that rendered her faceless, and a dress that rendered her bodiless. At a time when women wanted to have knowledge of the world, and wanted their girls to have much the same knowledge, Sue’s representation of protected female innocence was suspect and offensive. And so, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Sunbonnet Sue died. And yet, in the late 1980s, the faceless little girl is resurrected. Starting around 1988, women began producing quilt blocks that are referred to as “Bad Sue” blocks. As feminists began to move away from body imagery and biology (finding it too reductive), they began to explore the concept of “female” and “feminine behavior.” Why do we think of pink as a feminine color, and blue as a masculine color? Why is it that girls who smoke are ‘bad girls’, and boys who smoke are ‘tough’? While examining the ways in which society has constructed our perceptions of gender, women began to question intentionally those perceptions by subverting them. Cindy Sherman continued her photographic work about constructed identities. Annie Sprinkle questions societal conventions about the roles of women and our concepts of good and bad behaviors, specifically related to sexual roles. Sprinkle’s work challenges the idea that women who have sex when and where they want (including those who are paid for sex) are bad women, women who have fallen from grace, women who live their lives outside of “normal” female roles. http://www.heck.com/annie/index.html Some of Lynda Benglis’ work poses questions about power based gender (just as in the photograph where she poses, sporting an enormous phallus). Fig. 13 Annie Sprinkle Lynda Benglis Art Forum ad Anatomy of a 1980s Pinup Numerous women have chosen to use the image of Sunbonnet Sue to subvert traditional perceptions of women and their place in society. Instead of tending a garden, or taking care of her dolls, the Bad Sue blocks show Sue reading Playgirl, burning her bra, dancing a striptease, smoking, or mooning the boys next door. These images are intended to be a humorous way to question perceptions of appropriate behaviour related to traditional gender roles. These blocks invert/subvert the recognizable images of ‘good girl’ behavior while the quilters take joy in being bad. By acting out, by questioning the distinctions between good and bad behavior as a way of defining gender roles, these women hoped to breakdown such barriers. It should not matter that the belch you heard from the table next to you came from a woman or a man. Men should not be the only ones allowed to read racy magazines. If women want to be strippers, or turn tricks, let ‘em. These quilt blocks represent the idea that women are not just interested in becoming doctors and lawyers and CEO’s (traditional male jobs), they want to be able to do ANYTHING. Using Sunbonnet Sue (a recognizable ‘good girl’ image) acting out has been a way for women to challenge perceptions with humor and irreverence. Fig. 14 Sue as an Ax Murderer Sue as a Peeker Sue as an Exotic Dancer Sunbonnet Sue remains alive and vital. Interestingly enough, in the 1990’s Sunbonnet Sue returns to graphic imagery by way of logos. Betty Hagerman used a Sunbonnet logo for the column that she wrote for the Baldwin City Ledger; Enola Gish, Joyce Aufderheide and Cathy Banks all use Sunbonnet images for their stores (all of which sell quilting supplies). A more in-depth study of logo imagery is, sadly, beyond the scope of this paper. There are numerous websites devoted to publishing Sue patterns and displaying Sue quilts. Today, both Good and Bad Sue quilts flourish, and they are found side by side on the same websites. It seems that Sue is a flexible enough image to accommodate being used to represent traditional concepts of feminine behavior, or to subvert them. Contemporary Good Sue quilts are intended to be affirmative images, portraying Sue in a wide range of roles, and engaged in many different activities. While some of these quilts are made for shows or competitions, most of the Good Sue quilts are still made for young girls, frequently relatives of the quilter. The Bad Sue images are mostly commonly produced as single blocks to be scanned onto websites, or circulated among friends. A few groups produce whole quilts, but these seem to be only given as gifts to adult women friends (such as the Scandalous Sunbonnet Sue quilt made by the Bee There quilting circle of Austin, Texas, for circle member Karen Horvath). One hundred years after her birth as a textile image, the sunbonneted little girl has proved herself to be an enormously adaptable image: moving from graphics, to textiles, from being a didactic text illustration to a folk image. Sue has represented traditional female roles and concepts of constructed childhood. She has survived multiple murder attempts. Rolling with the punches of the late twentieth century, Sue continues to be used by women both to subvert perceptions of gender roles and to perpetuate the idea of a childhood where children (especially little girls) are protected from full knowledge of the adult world. By returning to my original premise of looking at Sue within the context of how childhood has been constructed and perceived, we can see that for most of her life, Sue has represented the original idea of childhood put forth in the eighteenth century. By looking at the ways in which Sue imagery is used after the 1970s we can see that a shift has taken place in some perceptions of childhood. Many people, particularly women, are no longer interested in completely protecting children from adult knowledge. As a matter of fact, most feminists regard that kind of protection not as an attempt to allow little girls a period of innocence in their lives, but instead as a patriarchal construction that keeps women ignorant of a larger sphere of social activity and responsibility. The change in Sunbonnet Sue imagery goes hand in hand with the idea that women (and little) girls should NOT be protected from knowledge of the world. Both the good and bad Sue images now include Sue engaged in a plethora of activities, very few of which have her playing with dolls. While there are still some quilters who want to preserve Sue’s traditional attributes and place within the quilting lexicon, there are more quilters who seem willing to let Sue expand her knowledge of the world, to become a more knowing child. Higonnet, p. 124. Higonnet does not use this phrase in terms of quilt imagery, but I have found it useful in trying to understand the shifts in Sue quilts. The knowing child is one who has knowledge of the adult world, and it shines out through their eyes. They are still children, but they’ve seen pictures of death, and they know where babies come from. The story of Sue is not at an end. Her resurrection in the 1980s has breathed new life into the image, and given her proven adaptability. Who knows what her next incarnation will be? Bibliography 150 Years of American Quilts. Lawrence, KS: The University of Kansas Museum of Art. 1973. Atkins, Jacqueline Marx. Shared Threads: Quilting Together – Past and Present. New York: Viking Studio Books in assoc. with Museum of American Folk Art. 1994. Carter, David. E., ed. Evolution of Design: 100 Step-by-Step Case Studies of Logo Designs and How they Came to Be. New York City: Art Direction Book Company. 1983. Forrest, John, Deborah Blincoe. The Natural History of the Traditional Quilt. Austin, TX; University of Texas Press. 1995. Gear, Josephine. “ Baby is King.” In The Preserve of Childhood: Adult Artifice and Construction: Images of Late-Nineteenth Century American Childhood. Binghamton, NY: University Art Gallery (State University of New York). 1985. Georgel, Chantal. L’enfant et l’image au XIXe. Paris: Musée D’Orsay. 1988. Gouma-Peterson, Thalia. Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1999. Hagerman, Betty. A Meeting of the Sunbonnet Children. Baldwin City, KS; By the author. 1979. Higonnet, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London; Thames and Hudson. 1998. Holme, Bryan. The Kate Greenaway Book. New York: The Viking Press. 1976. Humm, Rosamond Olmsted. Children in America: A Study of Images and Attitudes. Exhib. cat. Atlanta, GA: The High Museum of Art. Ibou, Paul, ed. Art Symbols: International Collection of Symbols and Logos. Zandhoven, Belgium; Interecho Press. 1992. James, Liz. Light and Colour in Byzantine Art. Oxford; Clarendon Press. 1996. Johnson, Bruce. A Child’s comfort: baby and Doll Quilts in American Folk Art. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1977. Marsh, Jean. The Illuminated Language of Flowers. Illustrations by Kate Greenaway. London: Macdonald and Jane’s. 1978. Mills, Susan Winter. Illustrated Index to Traditional American Quilt Patterns. New York: Arco Publishing, Inc. 1980. Miriam Schapiro: I’m Dancin’ as Fast as I Can. Exhib. cat. New York: Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. 1986. Mosey, Caron L. Contemporary Quilts from Traditional Designs. New York: E. P. Dutton. 1988 Nochlin, Linda. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity. London; Thames and Hudson. 1994. Peck, Amelia. American Quilts & Coverlets in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art & Dutton Studio Books. 1990. Pershing, Linda. “ ‘She Really Wanted to Be Her Own Woman’: Scandalous Sunbonnet Sue.” In Feminist Messages: Coding in women’s Folk Culture. Ed. Joan Newlon Radner. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1993. Rosenblum, Robert. The Romantic Child: From Runge to Sendak. London: Thames and Hudson. 1989. Saunders, Doreen Lynn. Amish Quilt Designs. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1990. Sedgwick, Kate and Rebecca Frischkorn. Children in Art. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1978. Spielmann, M. H. and G. S. Layard. The Life and Work of Kate Greenaway. London: Bracken Books. 1986. Zibawi, Mahmoud. The Icon: Its Meaning and History. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. 1993. http://etechlib.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/my-little-pony-as-an-agent-of-culture-shift-in-gender-identity/ Interviews Hagerman, Evelyn (daughter of Betty). 11 Oct 2012. By phone Stokstad, Marilyn. 30 Oct 2012. Tilghman, Marilyn. 30 Sept 2012. The following women were interviewed on 12 Oct 2012: Judith Corwin, Jean Castle, Mabel Hodges, Mary Crane, Bertha Fish, and Marla Johnson. The following women were interviewed on 15 Oct 2012: Gertrude Gresham, Gretchen Steinbach, Marilyn Thompson, Nancy Gibson, Mary Rogers, Mary Anne Craig. (Cherry Ripe is an English song with words by poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674) and music by Charles Edward Horn (1786–1849) which contains the refrain, Cherry ripe, cherry ripe, Ripe I cry, Full and fair ones Come and buy. Cherry ripe, cherry ripe, Ripe I cry, Full and fair ones Come and buy) 1 1