18th Century Gender Roles

Ruth Rogers - Embroidered Sampler - Embroidered silk on linen - 18 1/4 x 9 in. (46.4 x 22.9 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)

“In eighteenth-century America, a girl was expected to grow up, get married, have children, and take care of a home. Because of the limits of her sphere, a girl received a very different education from that available to a boy. Indeed, before the advent of public education in the mid-nineteenth century, in order to receive any education at all a boy or a girl had to be born into the middle or upper classes and have parents who valued education enough to pay for it. Usually, a boy would be taught traditional academic subjects, while a girl might be tutored in the barest rudiments of reading and arithmetic. Instead of academic studies, girls were usually sent to schools that taught an assortment of skills considered “female accomplishments”—music, watercolor painting, comportment, manners, and sewing.

As part of her preparation for the responsibility of sewing clothes and linens for her future family, most girls completed at least two samplers. The first, which might be undertaken when a girl was as young as five or six, was called a marking sampler.” (Met Museum)

Ruth Rogers produced the work featured here, at age 8, featuring Adam and Eve. It was made in Boston, Massachusetts.