The Roosevelt Administration created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to employ out-of-work Americans, giving them a paycheck while lifting morale and doing work for the benefit of society. Famously, the WPA created community centers, roads, dams, and school buildings.

The WPA’s Women’s and Professional Division consisted of a variety of projects intended to hire women who did not have a father or husband to provide for them, with WPA sewing rooms employing the most women. Most of the work projects involved sewing or weaving in some capacity; as a WPA administrator observed, “for unskilled women we have only the needle.”

These were the two primary goals of WPA-funded quilting projects: jobs and vocational skills for women in need and quilts for families on relief as a means of bringing warmth and beauty to their homes.

The New Deal sewing initiatives also had a third goal, summed up by a Richmond, Virginia, journalist: the “development of a pride in skill and useful work, a delight in artistry of making beautiful things from common and homely products—in short, a contribution to those human satisfactions that make happiness.”

Although garments were sewing rooms’ primary output, many also made quilts. Needy families then received the resulting clothing, quilts, and other household products. These federally funded quiltmaking initiatives encouraged women to view quiltmaking as a marketable skill rather than merely a leisure activity or old-fashioned craft, despite the reality that few jobs in the private sector existed that could take advantage of these skills. As such, it is difficult to assess the success of the New Deal in meeting this outcome of providing meaningful skills. Sewing rooms did however provide mutual aid, moral support, and an essential community in the face of the challenges of the Great Depression.