"European institutions boast dazzling textiles left by nobles and the rich, but they offer very little to document ordinary clothing or homemade bedding and linen. New Englanders, in contrast, saved fabrics so humbly homemade that under magnification bits of unprocessed flax still cling to the thread."

A Bed Sheet in Beinecke
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Part I | II | III

The spinning wheel was as deeply entrenched in the American imagination as the Liberty Bell. Spinning entranced academic painters like Thomas Eakins as well as popular writers like Louisa May Alcott, who in Silver Pitchers, published in 1888, imagined a modern-day John beguiled by a costumed spinner at the Philadelphia centennial. Antique wheels salvaged from grandmothers' attics appeared in undergraduate sitting rooms at Yale, in the mansion of a Montana mining magnate, and in hundreds of civic parades. Jane Addams organized spinning demonstrations at Hull House in Chicago and the Daughters of the American Revolution planted a stylized flax wheel on their insignia.

The spinning wheel was an attractive emblem because it was so malleable. For patriots it symbolized women's contributions to the American Revolution, while for sentimentalists it conjured up a timeless domesticity. Craft revivalists saw in it the harmony of labor and art, feminists women's untapped productive power, and antimodernists the virtues of a bygone age. For Elizabeth Barney Buel, the wheel captured all of these ideals, and more. In The Tale of the Spinning-Wheel, published in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1903, she attributed the success of the colonial experiment to female industry. "The plough and the axe are not more symbolic of the winning of this country from the wilderness, nor the musket of the winning of its freedom, than is the spinning-wheel in woman's hands the symbol of both," she wrote. Colonial wives "spun into thread and yarn the flax and wool that was raised on the farm, and then knitted every pair of stockings and mittens, wove every inch of linen and woolen cloth, and cut and made every stitch of clothing worn by a family which generally numbered ten or a dozen Johns and Hezekiahs and Josiahs and Hepzibahs and Mehitable Anns. No wonder a man could go to the war for his country's independence, when he left Independence herself at home in the person of his wife." Although she did not claim to be a feminist, her prose radiated a conviction that women mattered in the past, and that they had not been given their due.

For Buel, the spinning wheel united women across space and time. She laid out her evidence point by point, dropping learned allusions to archaeology, art history, folklore, mythology, opera, and the Bible. "No written page of history, no musty parchment or sculptured stone, is so old that we cannot find upon it some traces of the spindle and distaff with their tale of joys and sorrows spun into the thread by the fingers of patient women whose hearts beat as our own to-day, in tune with the common throb of humanity." New York artist and Litchfield summer resident Emily Noyes Vanderpoel added authority to the argument with delicate drawings of mummy cloth, Stone Age fishing nets, and medieval distaffs as well as colonial flax wheels. Her frontispiece for the book captures Buel's notion of a "woman's sphere" centered in the home. A youthful spinner, dressed in the gauzy costume of the early republic stands in a vine-covered doorway, looking outward but securely planted within. Her enormous wheel, with its hub centered just beneath her slender waist, measures the reach of her arms and the power of her sexuality. She is both productive and potentially reproductive, fitted to her setting yet visible beyond it. "And the home still centres in the woman; the country still centres in the home, and no mere change of womanly occupation can alter God's fundamental law of human society," Buel wrote.

Figure 4: Emily Vanderpoel. Frontispiece to The Tale of The Spinning Wheel, 1903.

Suffragists among Buel's contemporaries developed a more dynamic sense of women's place in history without abandoning the wheel. In 1889, the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association mounted a historical pageant in Boston that surveyed women's history from the landing of the Pilgrims to the present. Organized as a series of "living, moving, speaking tableaux," it opened with Priscilla Mullins at her wheel, and then moved on to the banishment of Anne Hutchinson in 1638, the hanging of witches, and Hannah Duston's scalping of Indians in 1692. After a "Home Scene in the Life of Abigail and John Adams" and a demonstration of the minuet, a woman dressed as the Goddess of Liberty watched suffragist orator Mary Livermore read the Declaration of Independence. The nineteenth-century tableaux featured "Garrison printing the Liberator," followed by a portrayal of a "Women's Anti-Slavery Meeting Broken Up by [the] Mayor of Boston." A depiction of the relief work of the Women's Sanitary Commission during the Civil War preceded Frederick Douglass's reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Finally, in the last scene, contemporary female writers and reformers portrayed themselves in "Woman's Sphere, 1889."

Where Buel used the spinning wheel to circumscribe a female sphere, the suffragist leaders of the 1889 Historical Pageant integrated it into an explicitly feminist history. In such a context, Priscilla Mullin's choice of John Alden over Miles Standish represented the ascendancy of youth over age, love over power, New World freedom of choice over Old World convenience. "Was there a spice of feminine coquetry in her famous speech to John Alden?" one writer asked. "Or was it that she understood the dignity and worth of womanhood, and was the first in this new land to take her stand upon it?" For more than a decade, The Woman's Journal had been criticizing male-centered ceremonials. The men who gathered to celebrate "Forefather's Day" in April of 1879, wrote a New York correspondent, had forgotten the brave wives of Plymouth colony in a festival limited to male descendants of the Pilgrims. "Only as a sideshow was a handful of well-dressed ladies permitted to look on, while men ate and drank and lauded their male ancestors' virtues. Thus did 'the sons of New England honor Forefathers' Day,' in the very name of the feast insulting the daughters of New England and the memory of their foremothers." No festival that included Priscilla and her wheel would be guilty of such an affront.

By embracing Priscilla Alden the mythical colonial spinner, women had found a place, if a circumscribed one, in history. Even Charles Andrews, who had little to say about women in the text of his magisterial history of colonial America, acknowledged their presence by selecting as the frontispiece for his final volume a photograph of a reconstructed "New England Kitchen" from the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts.

All of which helps to explain why a bed sheet was among the Edwards family papers when they came to Yale University in 1900. The surprising thing is that it remained with them. For in the middle of the twentieth-century, the reputation of so-called "pots and pans" history fell as the fortunes of once-forgotten clerics like Jonathan Edwards rose. For those interested in "the New England mind," it was the letters and sermons of the male Edwardses, not the productions of their wives and sisters, that mattered. Nor did the "new social history" of the 1960s and 1970s show any interest in homespun. Historical demographers and students of sexuality were intensely interested in what went on between bed sheets, but it is safe to say that none of them traveled to Beinecke to study one.

When historians did turn their attention to household production, it was primarily to debunk the colonial revival notion that early American families spun and wove most of their own bedding and clothing. In Good Wives, published in 1982, I explained that between 1670 and 1730 fewer than half of households in northern New England owned spinning wheels and that the few weavers in the region were male. I argued for a new icon for women's history. "Spinning wheels are such intriguing and picturesque objects, so resonant with antiquity, that they tend to obscure rather than clarify the nature of female economic life, making home production the essential element in early American huswifery and the era of industrialization the period of crucial change." By then, I knew that Priscilla Mullin's spinning wheel was a figment of Longfellow's imagination, that early Plymouth colonists were too busy building farms and cutting timber to engage in household manufacturing, and that even if they had wanted to produce cloth there was little flax or wool to work with. But it wasn't just a concern for historical accuracy that caused me to question the symbolism of the wheel. I wanted to break apart the nineteenth-century notion of an unchanging and universal "woman's sphere."

Nobody was more surprised than I when ten years later I began a serious study of New England's age of homespun. My research for A Midwife's Tale (published in 1990) told me that women in late eighteenth-century Maine were not only spinning but weaving, and that cloth making was at the center of a system of barter and exchange that I called a "female economy." I wanted to know if the world of Martha Ballard was unique, or if similar things were happening elsewhere, and I wanted to know when and why women began to weave. So I began a massive study of household inventories that survive in large numbers for the entire colonial period. For my purposes, the key variable turned out to be the ratio of spinning wheels to looms. In commercial cloth making areas of England and the continent and in Pennsylvania, where continuous immigration perpetuated artisan weaving, there were eight to ten households with spinning wheels for every one with a loom. That makes sense, since spinning is more labor intensive than weaving, and it typically took several families to keep one weaver in work. In New England, however, the ratio of looms to wheels began to drop dramatically in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, until in some places there was one household with a loom for every two households with a wheel. The reason was simple. Weaving had become a part-time household task for women and girls. This dispersed system of manufacturing persisted into the nineteenth century, providing a base for an early putting-out system and eventually a labor force for New England's famous mills.

This discovery turned everything upside down. Spinning wheels turned out to be markers, not of stasis, but of change. The key problem was not when hand production ended but how and why it began. Instead of the familiar evolution from subsistence to market production, I needed to understand how a highly commercial cloth making system in seventeenth-century England became the household production system Horace Bushnell and his contemporaries memorialized as "the age of homespun." Suddenly, the collecting habits of the nineteenth century became important. If weaving was widely dispersed, then few weavers had much experience or training. What did their cloth look like? Did traditional fabrics change as women took over production? Those questions took me into museums and historical societies looking for surviving fabrics. I was amazed at what I found.

Motivated by a desire to include ordinary people--including women--in history, nineteenth-century antiquarians created what is arguably the world's largest collection of ordinary household furnishings and fabrics from the preindustrial era. European institutions boast dazzling textiles left by nobles and the rich, but they offer very little to document ordinary clothing or homemade bedding and linen. New Englanders, in contrast, saved fabrics so humbly homemade that under magnification bits of unprocessed flax still cling to the thread. They saved ragged towels, warped bed blankets, cocoons left over from failed experiments in silk culture, and unfinished stockings still looped onto rusted needles. A curator at the Maine Historical Society in Portland recently opened an old trunk and found the bottom two-thirds of a woman's linen shift with a penciled notation "old Linen for sore rags." New Englanders saved weaving drafts written on the back of old letters, handmade dye books, and yarn reels carved in some farmer's dooryard. They saved silk shoes, quilted petticoats, and crewel-work bed hangings, but they also saved stained and faded aprons and the ragged corners of old coverlets.