Shorts

Nettie Asberry’s Lace Coat

By |
Print More

In a photograph dated 1941, Nettie Asberry poses with her back to the camera, her profile just visible. She gazes at a small sprig of leaves in her hand. This photograph, taken at a Rhodes Brothers Department Store, rests in the University of Washington’s special collections. It is a quiet document of Nettie Asberry’s suffrage politics: her championing of Black women’s labor and her wielding of femininity as a tool, all filtered through the delicate filaments of a Battenburg lace opera coat which takes up the bulk of the photograph.

University of Washington Libraries (Special Collections, POR381)

The coat is an argument. With that elegant coat, Asberry insists that we recognize the labor and skill required in women’s domestic textile work, the relevance of Black women to the history of the Pacific Northwest, and the compatibility between suffrage politics and performed femininity.

Nettie Asberry was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1865, the youngest of Violet Craig’s six children and the first to be born free.1 Asberry pursued education and political life avidly, embracing the opportunities newly available in Reconstruction-era Kansas. As a child she met Susan B. Anthony, and at age 13 she was the secretary for the local Susan B. Anthony Club. Though this was her last documented foray into organized suffrage politics, she remained a committed suffragist throughout her life; her own organizing focused on Black women’s work and political power. After receiving a doctorate in music from the Kansas Conservatory of Music and Elocution in 1883, she moved to Seattle with her husband Albert Jones. In 1893, after Jones’s death, she married Henry J. Asberry and settled in Tacoma.2 There she began her long career in the Black women’s club movement, enacting her sophisticated politics of remembrance, documentation, and display.

Asberry founded the Tacoma branch of the NAACP in 1913 (the organization’s first western chapter) and in 1917 helped found the Washington State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (WSFCWC).3 She was a dedicated clubwoman and organizer, helping to found three other NAACP branches and serving as an officer in the Women’s Council for Democracy.4 But it is in another, smaller club that we can find the seed of her developing politics. In 1908, Nettie Asberry formed the Clover Leaf Art Club. This club, centered on “needle art, hand-painting, and ceramics,” was created to valorize and display the handiwork of Black women in Tacoma.5 Asberry’s interest in crafts might seem ancillary to her more obviously political organizing, but the club became an important platform for and articulation of Asberry’s politics.

Asberry and a few other members of her community planned to submit their handicrafts to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (AYPE), a world’s fair held in Seattle in 1909. But they were informed that only members of existing clubs could enter the craft competition, and the Washington State General Federation of Women’s Clubs did not allow Black membership.6 So Asberry started the Clover Leaf Art Club to “mak[e] a display of the work of colored women of this community” and directly confront the racism of Washington’s club movement — and, by extension, the Exposition.7 Her words here are important: she wanted a “display of the work.” Asberry thought it essential that Black women’s labor, so often rendered invisible, be featured and celebrated on an international stage like the AYPE.

She and her sister, Martha Townsend, spent a year working on the Battenburg lace opera coat that was displayed in the AYPE’s Women’s Building and pictured in Asberry’s 1941 photograph. They received a silver medal for their work, while the club received a gold medal for the overall exhibit; Asberry wrote that they felt “a little ‘chesty’ for our share of awards.” The Battenburg lace coat, which was ultimately “valued at $1,500,” was worked from fine textile braids, shaped into complex patterns, and then sewn into place with delicate stitches.8 Battenburg lace had a complex meaning at that time, since it was a revival of 16th-century European lace techniques that also relied upon machine-made tapes and braids. It was elegant and sophisticated, but accessible to the home crafter. The coat announced Asberry and Townsend as refined, skilled women whose lacemaking fused the contemporary with the traditional. And it was inseparable from Asberry’s broader mission, which was to emphasize the skillfulness and refinement of Black women’s handiwork and to reject the cordoning off of “feminine” work from public and political space.

This reflected a larger shift in suffrage politics. Many earlier suffragists had rejected needlework for its associations with domestic femininity; Elizabeth Cady Stanton even referred to the needle as “the one-eyed demon of destruction … the evil genius of our sex,” dismissing it as a frivolous occupation that demonstrated the subjugation of women’s minds and efforts throughout her life.9 But by the early 20th century, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was tentatively celebrating needlework. NAWSA even began to feature decorative textiles at suffrage bazaars, working to represent the compatibility of suffrage politics with stitchcraft, the union between femininity and the franchise.10 Still, NAWSA’s embrace of needlework often fell short of valorizing the material labor involved in this craft. Mainstream suffrage publications would wax poetic about the luxurious embroidery featured at a wealthy suffragist’s summer home, but offhandedly equate the right to vote with the sewing machine—an efficient, labor-saving technology for the modern, young woman.11 They would bemoan the exploited textile labors of a working class woman unprotected by the franchise, but they rarely celebrated the labor involved in textile production — certainly not the labor of Black women. Asberry’s coat, which she claimed to have worked on “24 hours at a time,” was an obstinate assertion of its makers’ time, labor, and skill.12

To maintain their presence in the Exposition, the Clover Leaf Art Club’s labors extended beyond ceramics and lace. After entering the handicraft competition in the Women’s Building, Asberry wrote that members of the club had to “secure sufficient space for our exhibit.” She continued, “This may seem to have been easy. But Oh my! We had a lot of trouble in getting and keeping the space needed. Yes, it was so hard some of us felt it necessary to visit the Exposition—The Woman’s Building—to keep our display in proper setting every week.”13 Displayed within the Woman’s Building, the Clover Leaf Art Club’s needlework and other domestic crafts asserted both the value of Black women’s handiwork and the simple (though labored) fact of their presence. 

Display and documentation continued to be central to Asberry’s work; she later became the historian for the State Association of Colored Women in Washington and, as president of the WSFCWC, she organized and institutionalized “Negro History Week” for local schools.14 She also insisted upon her own inclusion in history, photographing herself in her lace coat in 1941 and donating the coat itself to the Washington State Historical Society in 1950. It rests in the archive as a quiet testament to Asberry’s politics, which refused to separate public organizing from domestic craft, politics from femininity, or artfulness from labor, and which insisted upon centering Black women’s labors and stewarding their history.

  1. Lorraine Rath, “Here Lies a Suffragist: Nettie Asberry,” Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History 34 (2021): 2. Nettie Asberry’s father was Violet Craig’s enslaver, William Wallingford. Violet Craig later married Taylor Turner. See Antoinette Broussard Farmer, “Asberry, Nettie J.,” African American National Biography, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 182–83.
  2. Lynn Bragg, More than Petticoats: Remarkable Washington Women, 2nd ed. (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2011), 92, 94.
  3. The NAACP even named her one of the “First Ladies of Colored America” in 1943, honoring her years of organizing. Turkiya L. Lowe, “The Washington State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs: Social Activism in Washington State’s African American Women’s Club Movement, 1917 to 1951” (PhD. diss., University of Washington, 2010), 77, 108.
  4. “Personalities: Mrs. Nettie J. (Craig) Asberry,” National Notes 40 (1951): 14.
  5. Nettie Asberry, “Saga of the Clover Leaf Art Club,” National Notes 37 (April 1947): 12.
  6. Asberry, “Saga of the Clover Leaf Art Club,” 12; Lowe, “Washington State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs,” 35.
  7. Karla Kelling, “Nettie J. Asberry: African American Club Woman in the Pacific Northwest,” in African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000, ed. Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 178–79.
  8. Asberry, “Saga of the Clover Leaf Art Club,” 12.
  9. The proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Akron, Ohio, May 28 and 29 (Cincinnati: Ben Franklin Book and Job Office, 1851), 34–35.
  10. Alice Stone Blackwell, “The National Bazar,” The Woman’s Column, Dec. 15, 1900, p. 2.
  11. Mary Holland Kinkaid, “The Feminine Charms of the Woman Militant,” Good Housekeeping 54 (Feb. 1912): 146; Florence L. C. Kitchelt, Do You Use a Sewing Machine?, (New York: National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., Inc., 1917).
  12. Curator’s notes, Nettie Asberry’s evening coat, 1908-1909, 1950.55.1, Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma, WA.
  13. Asberry, “Saga of the Clover Leaf Art Club,” 12.
  14. Personalities: Mrs. Nettie J. (Craig) Asberry,” 14.
Mariah Gruner is a PhD candidate in American studies at Boston University. Her research examines the "first wave" of American women's cultural and political activism through the lens of textiles.

Comments are closed.