A couple of years ago, somebody sent Maria a vintage handkerchief called “How To Keep Y our Husband,” offering different levels of subservient advice meant to keep women submissive and pleasing to men. (All I can say on a personal level, is wow, times have truly changed!)

One of the bits of advice was “If he likes  music, you must like it, too..” The wife in the advice box is sitting in deference to her husband and playing the harp. She is playing the violin.”

Well, that’s not exactly how life is around here. A man could get hurt saying stuff like that to his wife.

Maris took  her time, but has responded in a classic, and I might say,  remarkable way. she is patching together her own response, more than half-a-century later, she is making a “How To Keep Your Husband Quilt,” but the message is quite different.

Maria has scoured books and songs and Google for quotes from feminists to the advice on her 1950’s vintage hanky: To the music advice, she added a quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”

Maria is making four or five different panels in response to the quotes on the handkerchief.” I am not unbiased when it comes to Maria’s work, but this piece comes pretty close to genius.

She is finishing it up today and over the weekend and will offer it for sale next week. She wrote about it on her blog yesterday.

I see that keeping a husband has evolved. Maria keeps hers by never being exiled from herself, by being independent and honest and equal and by demanding so much better things from the man in her life. I can testify that strong women are very good for men, a Godsend in fact.

I love this quilt.