ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is a cotton quilt made by Betsy Adams Dodge (1829-1911) during last quarter of the nineteenth century in Mainsville, Ontario, which features 20 pieced maple leaves with applique stems. While Dodge’s quilt anticipates the Canadian flag and might be understood simply as an early example of Canadiana, there is reason to believe that she used the maple leaf block pattern to express her personal and political identification with the sugar maple and its environment, which spans Canada’s southeast, New England, and the Great Lakes states. The maple leaf block pattern figures in quilts and quilt histories produced by both Canadian and American women living within this region, suggesting that the maple leaf emblem has an ecological meaning as well as an iconographic one. This would have been particularly true in late nineteenth-century Ontario, where conservationist sentiment mounted in response to deforestation. It may be that Dodge’s quilt corresponds to the shift in attitude towards Ontario’s trees and forests that led to the establishment of provincial parks in the early 1890s. Rather than reinforcing the problematic association of women with nature, this case study suggests that the homecrafts made by Victorian Canadian women represent the complex and often contradictory views of the natural world that were typical of the time.
