Looking to Change the World, One Stitch at a Time
by Molly Booker
The South Lonsdale Quilter’s Guild, established shortly after the start of the Civil War, has been a staple of South Lonsdale social life for over a century. Since 1987, the Guild has met once a week at the home of Myrtle Shaw to quilt, teach, and socialize.
“I inherited the Guild from my mother’s next-door neighbor, Edna Black, back in 1987,” says Mrs. Shaw. “When Edna passed, her only daughter Marlee lived way out ’round Woonsocket. ‘Myrtle,’ she said to me, ‘seeing as how there were nothing else but boys on our street excepting you and my Marlee, it looks like you’re the closest thing to a daughter I got left around here. This Guild has been in South Lonsdale since 1863 and I ain’t about to pass until I know there’s someone ’round here that’s going to carry it on.’ At that point, I’d never quilted in my life, but seeing as how Edna has been near death with pneumonia a half a dozen times in the last year, I figured taking over the Guild was the Christian thing to do so that Edna could finally pass in peace.”
The activities of the Guild continued on much as they had for over a century until the spring of 1994. “That’s when Edna’s granddaughter, Sheri, came back to live with her father after finishing up at URI,” recounts Mrs. Shaw. “As a legacy, we of course had to admit her.”
“I have to confess, I wasn’t sure Sheri Coggeshall was quite the right fit for the Guild when she first arrived,” confesses long-time member Elizabeth Cole. “Her hair was shorter than my grandson William’s, she had one of those rings in her nose, and she would come to the meetings without benefit of a brassiere, even when she was wearing light-colored cotton.
“But, she was a legacy, and she did twelve stitches to an inch—the evenest things you ever saw. We figured we could overlook a few smaller flaws for the sake of the common good, and work with her on a few of the more genteel arts at the same time.”
But while the women of the Guild endeavored to educate their newest member, Sheri was also sharing her education with them. “I talked an awful lot about my Women’s Studies groups at first,” recalls Ms. Coggeshall. “They seemed particularly interested in the late 19th Century women activists and the reclaiming of voice by segments of society that were disenfranchised, marginalized, then silenced by societal norms that encoded a particular form of behavior as being ‘hysterical.’ The women of the Guild really seemed to hone in to the idea that once a society becomes stratified, that the activities of the lowest members are deemed immoral or perverted, to the point that often even mentioning those members is politicized.”
“It was during one of these discussions that the idea of the Unmentionables Project came to me,” continues Mrs. Shaw. “I recall I had just begun my spring cleaning, and like every year, I was wishing that there was something useful I could do with mine and Marvin’s old underthings beyond rags or fire starters. That Wednesday, Sheri off-handedly mentioned the caste system of India as an example of an institutionalized form of hegemonic stratification.” Mrs. Shaw leans forwarded in her chair and continues, “When I heard the name ‘Untouchables,’ something just clicked and I set to thinking.”
The following week, Mrs. Shaw outlined her vision to the rest of the Guild. “What I tried to point out to the ladies was that—just as there are articles of clothing that we wear every day but often feel uncomfortable even naming in company, and even try to hide or disguise when they’ve outlived their usefulness—that there were members of our community that we don’t talk about, and even try to hide when they pass on, as well.
“It seemed like a natural fit to me—finally, there could be a truly useful purpose to these clothes after they’d outlived their original use, we could make charitable use of the quilts we were sewing, plus we could actually be encouraging social change by mentioning the unmentionables of our community, as well.”
“Three birds with one stone,” says Ms. Coggeshall with a smile. “I thought it was a great idea.”
What started as a Wednesday night social gathering quickly became a cause for education and philanthropy. “We didn’t want to see an end to the Guild itself, but we felt that devoting all of our time to the Unmentionables Project would be a breech of its charter. So, we added alternating Thursdays to the schedule to work exclusively on the new quilts.”
Currently, the Unmentionables Project donates hand-made quilts to local drug rehabilitation clinics, teenage pregnancy centers, an AIDS care center in Malaysia, and a Thai-based center that does outreach to sex workers. “There are so many that need our help, but we really tried to keep to our idiom of underwear-level unmentionables to create our target group,” says Mrs. Shaw.
The Guild’s philanthropic project has not been enthusiastically embraced by all members of the community, however. “There is certainly still some resistance to what we’re doing,” admits Mrs. Shaw. “My own Marvin, for example, has informed me that he refuses to allow anything that has touched his item to be used for our quilts. Of course it makes me sad, but I’m hoping that some day soon he’ll be able to see that everyone deserves the love and comfort that a hand-made quilt represents—even the arbitrarily-designated lowest of our society.”
And the members of the Guild admit that they didn’t fully comprehend what they were getting into. One of the hardest parts was accepting donations from neighbors. “It was really difficult at first to discover what kinds of underwear my neighbors wore,” states Mrs. Shaw. “That first year, I couldn’t make eye contact with any of my neighbors without imagining them in very particular skivvies. Of course, at this point, I don’t even notice.”
The Guild has set up an anonymous donation box, as well.
But Mrs. Shaw is hopeful that the box will some day be unnecessary. “The meta-level message of the Unmentionables Project is to state that no part of our society should be ‘unmentionable.’ I have to confess to a small sense of accomplishment whenever someone from the community marches up to me after church, unwaveringly hands me a small bag and proclaims, ‘Myrtle, here’s my underwear.’ It’s then that I feel like I’ve really made a difference in this community.”
All underwear are triple-washed and disinfected before being pieced for quilts. “We spent a few weeks touring the diaper service plants in Salem, learning their trade secrets and finding out who their chemical suppliers were,” states Mrs. Shaw. “Sheri then took a number of finished quilts to a microbiology professor at her college to have the finished products tested for cleanliness. I can proudly state that these quilts are far cleaner than sheets you’ll find in most hotel rooms.”
“Mentioning the Unmentionables” is an on-going project of the South Lonsdale Quilter’s Guild. An exhibit of the Guild’s Unmentionables quilts can be viewed at Gallery Agniel from now until April 31.
