Quilting Women's Lives.

While books, paintings, and almanacs often portrayed the West as a realm of masculine adventure, a contest between men and nature or between white men and Indians, women, of course, played vital roles in the migration to and settling of the West. The demands of frontier life, however, as well as cultural norms, limited opportunities for artistic expression by women; but recently scholars have discovered that the important contributions of n in the West did not go undocumented. Aside from diaries and journals, Western women also recorded their daily lives in their quilts. Quilts were the most popular form of needlework produced in the nineteenth century; on the westward trail or the frontier settlements, quilts were a means of both physical and emotional comfort. Thick quilts lined and covered wagons, padded fragile china, or became window covers or...