Born: 19 July 1859, United States
Died: 29 August 1956
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Marie Daugherty
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
In the long history of things being disregarded as “women’s work,” there are many functional artistic media that in recent decades have been reclassified as the hierarchy between “art” and “craft.” Previously, something that gets hung on a wall or posed on a shelf gathering dust was “art,” while anything that is actually used was relegated to “craft.” While other types, such as ceramics, certainly fall into this category, textiles are arguably the most gendered medium. But women like Marie Webster have always recognized the skill and effort that goes into the creation of a quilt. She wrote, “The work of the old-time quilters possesses artistic merit to a very high degree.”
Born in 1859, Webster honed her skills, first learned from her mother Minerva, over decades as an Indiana homemaker. Her public debut came in the January 1, 1911 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which brought four of her floral appliqué quilts to around 1.5 million readers. Her designs were so popular that a dozen more were published over the next three years, as well as nine pillow designs. When she published her own book, Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them, in 1915, the country’s first book dedicated to quilt history became a bestseller. It also helped legitimize quilting as an art and as an important topic of scholarly research.
Despite having no formal education past high school, Webster was an avid reader, as shown by the research and writing demonstrated in her book. She also proved to be an astute businesswoman. She began giving lectures and managing a booming mail-order business from her home, selling pattern packets for 50 cents apiece (around $16 today) and later expanded her offerings to kits, basted quilts, and finished quilts. Eventually she founded the Practical Patchwork Company in 1921, expanding the mail-order business and contracting with major retailers of the time. The company operated for more than 20 years until her retirement in 1942, when she was well into her 80s. Webster’s designs would go on to be exhibited in museums internationally for decades after her death. Her family home would later become the headquarters for the Quilters Hall of Fame, which she was inducted into in 1991.