“There are a thousand different ways to use our voices to keep democracy alive,” BYU political science professor Jessica Preece said. In early February, she found herself distressed over recent news and began asking herself what she could do. “This is my country. This is my Constitution. This is my sweet land of liberty. This is my republic, if I can keep it. So what do I do?”
She thought about joining protests, but they were in Salt Lake City during normal business hours and she had a job. She started thinking about what she could do to hold her own peaceful protest and knew it had to be one that felt inspiring, uplifting and rooted in joy.
On a Thursday afternoon, she knew what she wanted to do on Saturday morning, less than two days away: Quilting for the Constitution.
Preece, who is herself a quilter, was inspired by a long history of women using quilts as a form of political activism. In a speech last month, she pointed to Maria Child, who crafted the first known fundraising quilt: a crib quilt embroidered with a poem honoring enslaved mothers whose children were torn from them. She talked about how women involved in the Temperance movement created the “Drunkard’s Path” quilt pattern as a statement of their values. During World War I, a popular women’s magazine published the Red Cross quilt pattern, and women stitched white and red quilts embroidered with people’s names to raise money for the Red Cross. In 1966, she said, impoverished Black women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, started the Freedom Quilting Bee to raise money to combat evictions and job loss stemming from their efforts to register to vote. In the 1980s, the Boise Peace Quilt Project was inspired by stories from Utah women suffering from the “downwind” effects of nuclear testing.
In short order, Preece pulled together an outdoor event where some 120 women came together to create quilts for Utah’s two senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis. Each quilt was comprised of 10-by-10-inch squares with messages from the women in attendance: “Protect democracy,” “Remember everyone’s humanity as you make decisions,” and “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brothers, ye have done it unto me.”
In the cold of a February Saturday, a movement was born.
Peace by piece
For Preece, the Quilting for the Constitution event was meant to be just a one-time event. But it caught on and now, Women Building Peace has picked up the the pattern and is stitching together a national movement. Women Building Peace, along with multiple partner organizations that include Mormon Women for Ethical Government, A More Perfect Union: The Jewish Partnership for Democracy and Living Room Conversations have begun hosting “quilt-ins” across multiple states. In early May, quilts and quilt squares will be in the nation’s Capitol to be assembled and then delivered to members of Congress.
At a recent quilt-in held in Provo, Utah, a dozen-and-a-half women and a handful of children gathered in the home of Alexis Bradley, director of communities for MWEG. More messages on quilt squares, more sewing of the squares together and lots of talking, just like the quilting bees of yesteryear.
Chanté Stutznegger, consultant, motivational speaker and sister to Alexis, was also at the quilt-in. In an interview with the Deseret News, she said that while she was not herself a quilter (yet), she was drawn to this passion project because of the long history of using quilts as forms of activism. In addition to some of the quilts mentioned by Preece, Stutznegger pointed to oral traditions descended from Black enslaved people, who used specific quilt patterns to send coded messages about the Underground Railroad.
There was nothing coded about the messages on the new quilt squares. “Liberty and due process for all,” “Checks and balances are there for a reason,” and “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses ...”
“We love our country,” Stutznegger said. “We love our Constitution and we have so much respect for (it) and the safety it provides us. We are coming together to defend it.” This peaceful form of protest “isn’t about one side or the other,” she said. “This is about women coming together because we love our country and we truly want to defend the Constitution.”
Hope for the future
Preece pointed out that one of the purposes of getting together to quilt — or do any other form of political activism — is that taking action together builds community and gives people hope.
“One of the things that is really powerful and the most beautiful to me is the way collective works work. When we work together, we don’t have to have huge capacity. We can bring our little piece to the table and we can stitch it together in a way that is bigger than any one of us can do on our own,” she said.
Will these quilts change legislators’ hearts, minds and policy approaches? Preece said she didn’t know, but it does make a difference to those making the quilts. Quoting activist and writer Mariame Kaba, Preece wrote in 2022 that “hope is a discipline” and a principle of action.
“Hope requires us to use our agency in whatever ways we can to promote a world filled with love and charity,” she said.
She says she finds inspiration from the words of Rebecca Solnit:
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.
It doesn’t have to be quilting. Again, there “are a thousand different ways to use our voices,” our talents and our creative abilities to advocate for change. As we all bring our pieces to the table, whatever they are, and however large or small, we will create something beautiful that we can add to the patchwork of democracy. In choosing action over apathy and cynicism, we stitch hope into the fabric of our country, reinforcing its strength for future generations.