Introduction

The creation of an embroidered sampler was an integral part of female education in Puritan New England between 1700 and 1840.  Daughters of colonial landowners would receive private instruction in needlework and these new skills would be demonstrated through alphanumeric and pictorial designs on a rectangle of cloth. 

Samplers are the primary surviving records of many of these colonial women’s personhood (Parmal 7). While church and municipal records may hold evidence of their existence, samplers are symbols of the unique creative identities of the people who created them. As such, each sampler is unique and the loss of a sampler often represents the loss of its creator from the historical record. 

During the height of their popularity in the American cultural tradition and zeitgeist, samplers were valued as text objects that conveyed and enabled important learning about moral principles and practical skills for colonial girls. While there has been a push in the last 100 years to dissolve the (gendered) division between ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’ (Langa 707), samplers still are currently most often categorized as art objects and the writings on them are not seen as worthy of study because of the immaturity of their content and form (Goggin 311, Stinebeck 1183 - 84). As such, these texts are further endangered by the limited interest academic and general audiences have in preserving and understanding the complicated expressions of selfhood embedded in sampler making.