My Working Proposal

The Journal of Madam Knight: A Transition Told Through Textiles

            Scholars note that Sarah Kemble Knight judges or—in the words of critic Scott Michaelson—“classifies” the people she encounters on her journey from Boston to New Haven.  In her journal, she comments on the habits of the people with whom she interacts, including their conversations, cooking, housekeeping, and clothing.  While critics have mentioned Knight’s judgments on clothing when describing her class distinctions, I intend to bring this aspect to the forefront of my analysis, focusing on clothes and the stories these clothes tell.[1]  In fact, historians have recently begun to focus on the evolution of textiles in America, particularly on the shift from homespun textiles to industrialization of clothing in the eighteenth century.  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a leading historian in this conversation, notes the tensions that arose during this time of transition, such as the view of clothing among geographic regions (country vs. towns), the role of wives in the home, and the warnings from the church to dress modestly.  In my paper, I position the conversation regarding class distinctions in Knight’s journal into the realm of textile history to suggest that the text marks a shift from Puritan to secular culture, and that her observations of clothing trace this transition.

I will examine sermons and conduct manuals from the eighteenth century with which Knight would have been familiar, including the first conduct manual, Richard Allestree’s The Lady’s Calling (1673), and the widely circulated Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion by Cotton Mather (1692 with reprints in 1694 and 1741), which both contain highly religious language and commands.  To demonstrate that her journal represents a transition into the secular treatment of clothes, I also will refer to an anonymous essay “The Miraculous Power of Clothes” (1772) and Horace Bushnell’s “secular sermon” (1851) called the “Age of Homespun” to demonstrate how Knight’s treatment of clothes contains traces of language and ideas similar to these later discourses.  Coming from a Puritan town which believed clothes should be worn with modesty, The Journal of Madam Knight demonstrates the she has one foot in the secular arena. When read together, her observations of the woman at Billinges Inn and the women in “The Cittie [sic] of New York” predate the idea from “The Miraculous Power” that one should dress according to his/her class, whereas the religious texts from her time encouraged everyone to dress in humility.

In other words, I aim to demonstrate how Sarah Kemble Knight’s travel narrative presents an “unruly woman”—one who steps outside the boundaries that Puritan sermons and religious manuals set for clothes—as she seems to anticipate future views of clothing and class.  Thus her journal is more than a record of her travels; it is a piece of female history that preserves transition—from homespun to industrialized textiles and from religious to secular mediation of clothing.

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[1] In the words of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “textiles tell stories too” (“Cloth, Clothing, and Early American Social History” 39).