"Objects marked with a woman's maiden name or initials perpetuated female legacies in a society that gave married women little claim to property."

A Bed Sheet in Beinecke
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Part I | II | III

The artifacts nineteenth-century Americans saved open up many themes in early American social history. The bed sheet in Beinecke suggests two of them--the link between household production and gentility, and the centrality of textiles to the inheritance patterns of women. The initials on the bed sheet signify both themes. In the colonial era, embroidery was an elite accomplishment. The alphabets that embellished schoolgirl samplers signified both a girl's literacy and her future role as keeper of household textiles, which before industrialization were far more valuable than furniture. Very few women had either the blue silk thread or the skill needed to produce cross-stitched initials like those on Esther Edwards's sheet.

That a sheet marked in Edwards's lifetime (if not at her wedding in 1694) survived to become a monument to the age of homespun tells us that the family was wealthy and continued to be so. In most households, sheets were used until they wore into rags and then were recycled into other uses. Those that survived their first owners were passed on to daughters, and if they lasted long enough and the daughters' themselves had a surplus, might become genealogical relics. Like silver, these "relic sheets" were sometimes marked by more than one generation. Although this sheet bears the joined initials of a couple, probate inventories and other marked objects from the region (including the chests and cupboards that contained textiles) suggest that it was far more common to use the woman's initials alone. Objects marked with a woman's maiden name or initials perpetuated female legacies in a society that gave married women little claim to property. By the early nineteenth century a few women became quite bold in marking the bedding they produced. A particularly self-conscious inscription fills the center of a hand-woven coverlet made from factory spun cotton: "The Property of Abigail Bailey, Fletcher, Vermont." To study household textiles, therefore, is to explore a little known arena for female expression.

The silk shoes and the crewel panel at the Connecticut Historical Society enlarge the meaning of the bed sheet in the Beinecke. Hannah Whittlesey was wrong in her claim that the Edwards girls spun and dyed the thread in their fancy embroidery, but in a larger sense she was correct in attributing both common linen and ornamental fabrics to the "age of homespun." New England's female-centered production system developed in tandem with the aspiration to refinement. When Boston diarist Samuel Sewall visited Northampton, Massachusetts in 1716, he spent several hours with Solomon Stoddard at his parsonage, noting that old "Madam Stoddard, who is lame of the Sciatica . . . yet spins at the Linen-wheel." Esther Stoddard was Esther Edwards's mother. Like her descendants, Esther Stoddard was a woman of impeccable piety and genteel accomplishments. Her husband's probate inventory, taken in 1731, listed both a spinning wheel and "Needle Wrought Cushions." That combination was common among elite families from the late seventeenth-century through the Revolution. Large households not only had the raw materials and the labor necessary for household production, they had the need. They typically produced common linens, servants' clothing, aprons, and blankets from their own flax and wool, but relied on imported cloth or artisan-produced fabrics for more refined uses. Esther Edwards--or her servants--might well have spun that linen sheet.

Household production spread beyond elite households in the early eighteenth century. By the eve of the Revolution, eighty to ninety percent of rural households owned spinning wheels, and almost half owned looms. As young men turned their energies to market production--herding, tanning, barrel making, cordwainery, lumbering, cabinetry, and other crafts based on the mixed agriculture, fishing, and timber--women increasingly devoted themselves to spinning and weaving fabrics for household use. As cloth production lost its craft status, it gained in mythic power.

The Revolutionary crisis and the struggle for economic independence during renewed conflict with England before the War of 1812 accentuated the political significance of household production, but neither conflict created the system that sustained it. For ordinary people, the production of cloth was never dissociated from a desire for refinement. Surviving fabrics, taken together with written documents, show the integration of homemade and store-bought fabrics in New England households from the late seventeenth century to the 1830s. The Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont has an everyday shift, pieced and patched out of homemade linen by a skilled weaver who craved store-bought clothes and once confided in a letter to her son, "my father never bought me but one frock--and yours never but one--I have to worry thro' thick and thin to get all my clothes, crockery chairs clock, and so on." The fragmentary diaries and account books of Sarah Weeks Sheldon show that she clothed herself and children through a combination of household manufacturing and local exchange, trading handspun stockings for calico and butter for cloth. She was driven as much by a desire for middle-class refinements as by pure need. Unlike Molly and Hannah Edwards, the rural embroiderers of the early republic did spin and dye their own embroidery thread. Their productions were simple but their vision was clear. They wanted to be both producers and ladies.

Figure 5: Sarah Sheldon's shift. Henry Sheldon Museum.

Figure 6: Embroidered blanket. Private collection.

The Revolutionary crisis and the struggle for economic independence during renewed conflict with England before the War of 1812 accentuated the political significance of household production, but neither conflict created the system that sustained it. For ordinary people, the production of cloth was never dissociated from a desire for refinement. Unlike Molly and Hannah Edwards, the rural embroiderers of the early republic did spin and dye their own embroidery thread. Their productions were simple but their vision was clear. They wanted to be both producers and ladies. Letters and diaries show the yearning for respectability that glossed even the homeliest of labor. The Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont has an everyday shift, pieced and patched out of homemade linen by a skilled weaver who craved store-bought clothes and once confided in a letter to her son, "my father never bought me but one frock--and yours never but one--I have to worry thro' thick and thin to get all my clothes, crockery chairs clock, and so on." Sarah Sheldon's diaries and accounts show that she clothed herself and children through a combination of household manufacturing and local exchange, trading handspun stockings and homemade cloth for calico and silk. Her spinning wheel was driven as much by a desire for middle-class refinements as by pure need.

Further Reading:

Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992); Horace Bushnell, The Age of Homespun, in Work and Play (London, 1864); Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986 (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1988); Kenneth P. Minkema, "Hannah and Her Sisters: Sisterhood, Courtship, and Marriage in the Edwards Family in the Early Eighteenth Century," New England Historical and Genealogical Register 146 (January 1992): 35-56; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New England," William & Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., 55 (1998): 37-38; The history of the Women's Suffrage Pageant can be traced in The Woman's Journal XIX (1888): 180; XX (1889): 100, 240, 276, 284, 292, 301, 316, 332, 416. More information on the Edwards Collection is available from from Yale University Library. Further information about The Age of Homespun can be found on the publisher's Website.