The author also looks at finished textile goods that survive, sometimes with family stories of provenance attached. Textile production, mostly done by women and their daughters, was an important part of the family and community economy. Or cloth was sold to buy shoes or settle debts. One might warp another's loom in exchange for use of the loom, or trade spun yarn for woven cloth. Women might gather to spin together in good-natured contests, but they also traded freely: skills, tools, and finished goods. A chapter on a niddy-noddy (a hand tool for winding skeins of finished yarn) from 1769 discusses just how much the women and girls were spinning and reeling off. Handspinning was a means of production, but also a stand against English tyranny and taxation on spun and woven goods exported to the colony. The author looks at two, one for wool and one for linen and cotton. Ulrich does this by taking a dozen or so objects, all having to do with the production of textiles, and examining the history of that particular textile, tool, or implement against the contemporary setting when it was made and used.įor example, the spinning wheel. Like that book, this one delves into women's work and contributions to the economy of the times they lived in. Pulling these divergent threads together into a rich and revealing tapestry of -the age of homespun,-Ulrich demonstrates how ordinary objects reveal larger economic and social structures, and, in particular, how early Americans and their descendants made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert identities, shape relationships, and create history. We see how an English production system based on a clear division of labor-men doing the weaving and women the spinning-broke down in the colonial setting, becoming first marginalized, then feminized, then politicized, and how the new system both prepared the way for and was sustained by machine-powered spinning.
We discover how ideas about cloth and clothing affected relations between English settlers and their Algonkian neighbors.
Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods-Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings, silk embroidery, a pocketbook, a linen tablecloth, a coverlet and a rose blanket, and an unfinished stocking-provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America. Using objects that Americans have saved through the centuries and stories they have passed along, as well as histories teased from documents, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich chronicles the production of cloth-and of history-in early America.
0 kommentar(er)
