Emily Whitted is a PhD candidate in the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying textiles in Early America. Her dissertation, entitled “Darned, Patched, and Mended: Repairing Textiles in Early America,” asks what a darned stocking, a patched pair of breeches, or a mended foresail can tell us about early America? Through consistent wear or sudden damage, textiles regularly and repeatedly broke, and
required repair work for further use and preservation. Yet in material culture literature, the practice of making overshadows its companion process, mending. “Darned, Patched, and Mended: Repairing Textiles in Early America” is a medium-specific contribution at the nexus of material culture studies, early American history, and labor history that examines textile repair work as an integral, everyday practice completed with needles and thread to maintain fabric’s life cycles within homes, ships, and military camps. In examining the economic calculations, gendered labor, and material meanings of mending, this project recalibrates scholarly understanding of early American repair work within networks of labor and consumption, and uncovers historical motivations to care deeply for the things around us.