I Sit and Sew by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was a poet and suffragette. Her work reflected the Black female voice of her era and challenges to femineity. Notably, Dunbar-Nelson also utilized the book arts as a form of expression, creating scrapbooks chronicling her experience as a traveling speaker on suffrage. Like the act and labour of sewing, external perception is just as impactful as the meaning behind the act itself. “I Sit and Sew” is Dunbar-Nelson’s reflection on World War I, commenting on the fruitless task of a woman limited to merely sewing throughout the horrors of war. Melhorn-Boe was thus inspired to model I Sit and Sew on the physical structure of an early 20th-century soldier’s sewing kit, known as a huswif or "housewife." The term itself is reflective of society's attribution of sewing with feminity.