The Age of Homespun

The Age of Homespun is more than a book about early New England women and their domestic labors. Through skillful weaving of story, original sources, and narrative text, Ulrich transforms individual threads of ordinary household goods and past events into a tapestry of understanding about cultural encounters between whites and Indians, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and the early industrialization of America. Ulrich devotes a chapter each to Indian baskets, spinning wheels, chimney pieces, niddy-noddies, bed coverings, silk embroidery, wooden cupboards, linen tablecloths, pocketbooks, coverlets, and stockings. She describes specific examples and places them in their historical contexts by woman producer, location, time period, and cultural setting.

In the 17th century weaving was a male occupation, but by the late 18th century, cloth-making was ubiquitous and the foundation for local New England barter before the rise of a cash economy that replaced trade as a means of exchange. English weavers had been apprentice-trained artisans. Their colonial counterparts had no such system through which to educate craftsmen. Spinning and weaving first became marginalized occupations, then they devolved into women's work before becoming politicized activities.

Rather than manufacturing items for sale, colonial women produced goods primarily for household use and for trade amongst their neighbors for other goods and services. In the early decades of colonization, home production of cloth complemented rather than replaced foreign imports. This would change as women supported their men's calls for nonimportation of English goods on the eve of the American Revolution. Home production became vitally important to the colonists in general and a vital way in which women could specifically express their political support.

Considered second-class citizens with no right to vote, own property, or speak for themselves in court, women were relegated by law and tradition to the private sphere of the home and its immediate environs. Consequently, women's histories are often hard to gather into coherent narratives. How does one trace a woman who loses her family surname upon marriage and takes on that of her husband's? Court and land transaction records provide a wealth of information on the men involved, but rarely women. Sales, credits, and debits - even in a bartering society - were often recorded in ledgers; men entered the public sphere of business where such records were kept while women (many of them illiterate) relied on informal, unrecorded trade between neighbors.

Ulrich shows how initialed embroideries, weaving patterns, diarists recording spinning output, and the willing of "movables" from mother to daughter can reveal to us today how America's women of the past asserted their identity and shaped relationships within the wider history of a young colonial society.

Other books also provide a focus on women in America’s early history:

Providence: 1630-1800—Women Are Part Of Its History by Barbara Mills. A true history of Providence, Rhode Island, cannot be written without acknowledging that women, as well as men, carved this new city out of the wilderness, shaped it, and gave it a permanence of which to be proud.

The Pioneer Women of the West by Mrs. Elizabeth F. Ellet. This large volume contains biographical sketches of 58 women who moved across the Appalachian Mountains, after the Revolution, to settle in the vast country between Tennessee and Michigan that we now call the mid-west. A good deal of genealogical data is provided, as well as a woman’s viewpoint into that interesting era in our history.