Ruthy Rogers's bewitching composition features a piquant wasp-waisted, floral-crowned figure amid giant blossoms and curious birds. Unfettered by instructive alphabets or pious maxims, it tends to suggest a happy schoolroom of little girls guided by a cheerful and imaginative schoolmistress. This sampler represents one of four fascinating forms that emerged in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but which eluded the recognition of collectors and scholars throughout most of the twentieth century, until an appealing piece by Betsy Gail appeared at auction in 1980. It featured a winsome figure in profile, much like another in a then-unpublished 1789 sampler by Hannah Stacy. Both the Gail and Stacy families have been traced to Marblehead, and the recognition of Marblehead's exceptional samplers grew quickly.

The Marblehead samplers are now attributed to schoolmistress Martha Tarr Barber (1734/35–1812), although few specific facts about her teaching have been found. She evidently commenced keeping school after becoming a widow for the second time, in 1780. Eventually the Barber school spanned the entire federal period, for Martha's youngest daughter, Miriam, born in 1775, became her mother's assistant and continued teaching until her death, in 1830.

Ruthy Rogers was the daughter of Marblehead tailor William Rogers (1747–1835) and Ruth Vickery (1751–?). She married shipmaster Benjamin Andrews Jr. (1775–1821) on June 28, 1799, and died of consumption on May 4, 1812, at age thirty-four. She was survived by three of their five children. Her husband married Mary L. Smith of Salem on November 25, 1812, and one of their three sons lived to adulthood. Captain Andrews drowned off Sumatra "by Overseting the Boat."

Betty Ring, "Ruthy Rogers Sampler," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 513.