Yours Sincerely I lay awake searching far and wide for a topic for this month’s letter. Bad move: This is our women’s issue, and the topic was under my very nose, or, to be literal, fast asleep beside me. One of the many wonderful things about my marriage is that Lisa comes from a long line of strong, characterful women. Take Ottilie Meiner, her mother’s mother, for instance: Besides being one of the earliest female science teachers, she bought her own car at the age of 22 – a very forward thing to do -and then, to crown it all, was thrown off Jones Beach on Long Island for refusing to wear stockings under her bathing dress. Just a tad ornery: I like women like that. Now, there’s a special thing about Lisa’s line of don’t-tread-on-me women - they are indelibly stitched into a family coverlet. There they are, with their birth dates, white on blue, for all to see: Fanny Hallock, Nov 18, 1828 (not her birth date, probably when the coverlet was made); W Lavinia Mapes, July 19, 1840; Fannie Moorhouse, July 16, 1877; Ottilie B. Meiner, June 16, 1906; Virginia E. Fogel, Nov 3, 1930; Elizabeth Anne Freeman, June 30, 1958; and the latest of the line, Lisa’s niece, Alexandra L. Freeman, Feb 28, 1997 -- and at 13, she’s already no pushover. The coverlet is a family heirloom, which puts it into a special category of antiques – one that often corrects an unfair balance in our society. In our culture, like most others, we have to say, lines of descent are through the men. But there are certain types of antiques that sidestep this masculine lineage, and descend through women. Like this coverlet, many of them are textiles, or the furniture to store them in. They’re matrilineal antiques, and as such, they’re powerful and much-needed markers of women’s role in our history. Many of the Pilgrim Century “Hadley” chests, for example, are carved with initials that research has shown to be women’s, and the few, documented examples typically descended from mother to daughter. The Massachusetts chest of drawers that we showed in our January issue (p. 38) had been made in 1793 by the cabinetmaker John Smith for his wife. Since then, it passed through the female members of the family down to the present day, when Old Sturbridge Village acquired it. Heirloom antiques can serve as the female equivalent of the family name. One of the most significant things about Lisa’s family’s coverlet is that all the different family names are there, but the line joining the women is far more important than the differences of their married names. Their fathers’ names are merely echoes of marriages past: what the coverlet asserts is that the line of women is still alive today and is headed confidently into the future with Alexandra. Whatever family name Alexandra may acquire, if she does, it will always take second place to the fact that she is the newest in a continuous line of women upon whom thou shalt not dare to tread. Page 82 ■ Antiques Journal ■ March 2010