Pocketbook

Description

Mary Alsop was left a wealthy widow with a large family when her husband died in 1776. As Dr. Marla Miller states in The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, “…steady production of sophisticated ornamental work is inseparable from the family’s access to slave labor. Before Richard’s death, the Alsop household included at least two enslaved men, Acra and Quash, and a woman, Catherine Barrett. By 1790, five slaves helped care for Mary’s large family. Catherine Barrett would be freed in 1794, while Mary’s 1795 will instructed her children to continue to provide for an ‘aged Negro’ named Jenny” (Miller 101). A skilled needlewoman, in later life Mary knit and embroidered pocketbooks and reticules (drawstring bags) as gifts for her children and grandchildren. On many she inscribed her name, her age at the time of making, and the name of the recipient. Clearly her grandchildren did not visit as often as she would have liked, as she wrote to one grandson: "I send you a Purse which I knit for you sometime ago, hoping to have the satisfaction of giving it to you myself. Receive it as a small testimony of my affection."