What They Keep

One of the small white squares shows a teacher, her embroidered arm writing on a blackboard. Abolitionist Harriet Tubman is in the top right square, drawn in marker. Some of the other squares, 25 in all, show an ice cream cone, the words "Seneca Falls," and a tiny one-room schoolhouse. Lecturer Sally Schwager, Ed.M.'76, C.A.S.'78, Ed.D.'82, knows the images well -- she has been looking at the squares, which are part of a quilt that hangs in her office, for more than two decades now. Made, in secret, by the students in one of the American History: New Scholarship on Women programs that she ran from 1986 through 1998 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the quilt was a thank-you gift from the students, middle and high school teachers who were attending the intensive four-week summer program, which was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The idea for the quilt started during a class trip to a quilting show in Lowell, Mass., a former mill town about 30 miles north of Cambridge. The students had learned about the importance of needlepoint and quilting in women's lives, particularly during the abolitionist, suffrage, and temperance movements, and the legitimate historical documentation that these handiworks have provided over the years. Looking at a family quilt and admiring the group component of the piece that still allowed for individual expression, one of the students suggested to the others that they make a quilt and give it to the staff. Already armed with massive amounts of reading to do each night, the students, living in the Chronkhite dorm, had no idea how they could possibly take on another project. Spurred by Nancy Sizer, a student in the class and herself a master quilter, the students decided to give it a shot. "They would meet during lunch breaks and at night, and one person would read the homework assignment while the others worked on the quilt," Schwager says. "They said they really felt like 19th-century quilters."

What They Keep is an occasional feature that looks at something found in a faculty member's office and the story behind it.