“My hand-pieced quilts and many pairs of gifted mittens and socks reinforced both my connection to generations of talented women before me and the post-1970s second-wave feminism I longed to represent in my daily life and actions.”

I bought it in my early twenties—a bright red cotton T-shirt with the emblem “Women’s Radical Sewing Society.” I had taken up quilting and knitting when I stumbled into the tail end of the back-to-the-land movement in rural Maine in the early 1980s. I learned to sew, garden, bake bread, can, contra dance, and cook for a crowd on a wood stove. (My Jewish mother was “concerned,” to say the least.) I loved the T-shirt’s message: “Do not underestimate my power or my domestic skills.” My hand-pieced quilts and many pairs of gifted mittens and socks reinforced both my connection to generations of talented women before me and the post-1970s second-wave feminism I longed to represent in my daily life and actions.