Patchwork Girl

Creating Woman

Patchwork Girl has lived through the whole history of women's suffrage and feminism.  
  Appropriately she attends a quilting-bee and hears Susan B. Anthony speak on women's suffrage.

From: Quilting

I was the featured attraction, the demon quilt, sprung from the hands of a demonic quilter, a woman who turned her feminine arts to a dark end, dealing in flesh and horror, puncturing the skin with her quilting needle. I see the needle forced through the robbed whorled skin of the palm of the hand, stitching it neatly to the wrist. Techniques of cut and stitchery come in handy for fiercer things too. Oh, don't suppose that a warm bed is all those quilting women thought about, while they frowned down at sharpened steel and shredded coats! (9)

 

  
  We women are all patchworks, our two XX chromosomes inherited from our distant grandmothers are ignited at random in all our cells.
   
 

Misconception


Now, I believed as one should in the principle of identity, of noncontradiction, of unity. All the people I caught myself being instead of me, my unnameables, my monsters, my hybrids, I exhorted them to silence. But the 'stubborn matter of the Foetus' assumed the literal shape of concealed passions. If mothers imprudently yearned for pears or grapes, then identical fantasies coursed through the tiny body; these poor babies became like the things [their mothers] too ardently desired: blurry, several, simultaneous, impure. A hideous monster with calf's head and hooves, or that other dreadful person-the girl who is all patches-emerge from unsuitable sights and mixed fantasies. Through art, one could even breed misfits and transform them into a new species." Mosaic" technique of the maternal imagination, mistress of errors; aren't you the very demon of multiplicity? (9)