America 250: The Web They Wove - Women & Their Wardrobes During New England’s Revolution

Please join Wilton Library for a special America 250 event from the Dirty Blue Shirts, who provide living history programming to New England and beyond. Underpinning the sensationalism of battle reports and broadsides is the often silent steadiness of women’s work with textiles. The choices they made every day about fashion and fabric consumption and creation drove the course of Revolution just as determinedly as any congress. As southern New England commemorates the 250th anniversary (semiquincentennial) of the War for Independence, it is these local lives dressed in fulled wool or spun silk that continue to inspire creativity, resilience, and empathy in us today. From the mythology of homespun to legends of midnight rides in red cloaks and calashes, the Dirty Blue Shirts share stories of women who waged war on multiple fronts as well as a look at what they wore as their worlds turn’d upside down.

This program is presented by costumed historians and includes reproduction clothing pieces & fabric samples as well as a PowerPoint presentation with images of extant originals.

“What did they do, our grandmothers, as they sat spinning all the day? Are we not ourselves the web they wove?” - Anonymous toast, Mary Floyd Talmage Chapter DAR, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1910, as quoted in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun: Objects & Stories in the Creation of an American Myth.

Registration required. Walk ins welcome as space allows.