From the Collection

Abstract

In 1851, Sarah Williams received a friendship quilt on the occasion of her wedding to Samuel Emlen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sarah, Samuel, and their families were Quakers, or members of the Religious Society of Friends. The pieced silk quilt was signed by ninety‐one of Sarah’s friends and family members, illustrating a young nineteenth‐century Quaker woman’s family circle and social networks. It also shows the effects of the Orthodox‐Hicksite split on Quaker women’s social networks over twenty years after that theological dispute divided the Quaker community.