At an event in Holladay, Utah, nearly 20 women gathered in Kristen Winmill Southwick’s living room. Surrounded by tall, white walls with the whir of sewing machines in the background, they carried on lighthearted conversations about their personal lives, with a bit of politics mixed in. They were helping create protest quilts for Utah’s congressional delegation. Some wrote on colored cloth squares while others helped sew finished squares together.
Southwick has a long history with quilting. In her craft room, she keeps quilts her grandmother made by hand.
“I love looking at it up close, because you see each individual stitch, and I think about her and what that process was like for her,” Southwick said. “Gathering with other women, sharing their experiences and problems together, and then solving the problems.”
That’s a family legacy Southwick is leaning into. She is on the Board of Directors for Mormon Women for Ethical Government. The organization has been making protest quilts for several months.
“Sometimes in the news you get discouraged, but I feel like what this does is it brings people together and makes something that's hard positive, because I feel like we're coming together and we're acting and we are using our voices,” Southwick said.
Many of the women at the quilt-in said they were part of the project for one reason: to protect the Constitution. Concerned about the recent political climate, many felt like calls or emails to their Utah representatives weren’t doing anything.
So, they turned to something more tangible.
The effort to create protest quilts started in Utah. Now, at least 20 other states have followed suit. In May, the Women Building Peace project brought around 60 quilts to Washington, D.C.
Over 200 volunteers from different states traveled to the U.S. Capitol to hand deliver them to members of Congress.
For volunteer Liz Blanton, a teacher from Alabama, the project is bigger than just talking to lawmakers.
“I think the most important thing about activism is the community building,” Blanton said. “I don't know that anyone's going to change their policy because they got a quilt from us, but we're building communities, and communities are fractured currently.”
Before the delivery, the groups set up shop in Senate Park, which lies just north of the U.S. Capitol building. There they put together the quilts, inviting passersby to look, ask questions and even contribute if they wanted.
Community building has been a big goal of the project, with quilt-ins across the country focused on just that. Events have happened in places like Nebraska, Colorado, Florida and Utah.
The project was the brainchild of Jessica Preece, a member of Mormon Women for Ethical Government who teaches political science at Brigham Young University. She said that it provides a way for those who have jobs or simply can’t attend a protest to contribute on their own time.
“I kept thinking, ‘Why isn't anybody organizing anything on a Saturday when normal people can participate, right?’” Preece said. “Whenever you start asking, ‘Why isn't anybody else doing this thing?’ you have to start thinking, ‘Well, maybe anybody else should be me.’”
This isn’t the first time women have used quilting to peacefully protest.
“Women have been using quilts as part of their political activism for generations, right during the anti-slavery abolitionist movement, during the women's temperance movement, during suffrage, during the Civil Rights Movement and on through more modern times,” Preece said.
It’s known as craftivism. This form of protesting isn’t just more accessible: it’s also less intimidating than others, which is why Aminta Quintero-Jackson and her group of friends got involved. Quintero-Jackson is a Ph.D. student in Florida. She only started to be politically active after the last election, and said her group was drawn to the quilt project because of how easy it was for those new to activism to get involved.
“Craftivism is such a great way to kind of have a token of what you think in a low-risk way, a low-risk environment where you have time to think, you have time to discuss, and then you can create something based on that,” Quintero-Jackson said.
Jillaire McMillan, a project manager with Mormon Women for Ethical Government, attended the very first quilt event in Provo. She loved the idea so much that she brought it back home with her to Longmont, Colorado, and hosted her own quilt-in at a local library.
“It was a real cross-partisan event with people who come from different political backgrounds, but they are invested in the principles laid out in the Constitution and are concerned about how those principles are not being honored by the government right now, and want to ask their representatives to speak up,” McMillan said.
The designs delivered to Utah’s lawmakers resembled the American flag. Other representatives received quilts that looked like the Colorado flag, the North Carolina flag and an array of other patterns. One was double the size of other quilts, and had the word “peace” made out of multi-colored squares.
Preece was part of the group in D.C. that delivered the finished quilts. She had appointments with Utah Sens. John Curtis and Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy.
“They've been very generous and gracious, and I think they recognize the amount of time and effort that goes into something like making a quilt, and I think that's meaningful to them,” Preece said. “It's given us an opportunity to share a few messages.”
For Preece, the project is a way for women to share their voices together. But it also means supporting those in Congress in a tense political moment.
“I hope that our senators and our representatives know that we have their back when they need to make hard choices and hard decisions about constitutional government.”
