The film chronicles the lives of ordinary women as well as individuals such as Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Willard and Abigail Scott Duniway through the great 19th century events: industrialization, abolition, the Civil War, westward movement, temperance and suffrage. For nineteenth century women, quilts were the podium, the pulpit and the judges' gavel, which their society denied them. Their quilts speak the language of abolition, patriotism, politics, social justice and westward expansion.