Elizabeth Keckly
An interview with digital curator Dorothy Berry
Part One
One of my first tasks at the museum was writing a story about Elizabeth Keckly, who was the dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln, the First Lady with Abraham Lincoln. So I was excited to get an opportunity to work with this memoir of hers.
She was born into slavery and suffered, like many other people, during her enslavement for all sorts of abuses.
And then she began through learning from her mother and other women around her, to know how to sew and eventually supported both her enslavers, with her sewing skills, and eventually her own family when she was freed.
Part Two
By the time she got to Washington, D.C., she had a rich community of other African Americans, and eventually had her own dressmaking shop.
She became a favorite of Mary Todd Lincoln, and created so many custom dresses for her.
Part Three
Keckly and many other women of her time who wrote their own memoirs seem to have been writing in disappearing ink. Because even though they took the time and had the ability to reclaim their stories by telling their own narrative, that narrative doesn’t necessarily rise to the top when we’re looking in our historical sources.
We still don’t remember her, as well as others of the day. We still would look at a picture of Mary Todd Lincoln and think, “Well, it’s the president’s wife, yeah, she’s got a nice gown on.”
Part Four
When we think of pictures of women in the past, paintings, we often think of the upper-middle-class women who could afford to get portraits painted, or to get a really fine picture taken, and their beautiful gowns and things, and we associate those items with the buyer, not with the maker.