During the Great Depression, the New Deal era Farm Security Administration (FSA) dispatched photographers to document the plight of impoverished rural Americans. Repeatedly, photographers posed women with their quilts or in the midst of quiltmaking, suggesting that quiltmaking was an appropriate and common activity for those suffering during the Depression.

This quiltmaker, identified only as the wife of a FSA borrower, is pictured in an interior reminiscent of many documented by FSA photographers, with products of consumer culture—like the cigarette box—repurposed within the domestic space. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division