BA2 CLASS READING - TEXTILES IN SOCIETY -THE FEMALE TRADITION OF TEXTILES GROUP SEMINAR PRESENTATION - this reading is extracts (...) from the set text.

A TRADITION WITH A REASON. ELIZABETH WAYLAND BARBER. 1994.

For millennia women have sat together spinning, weaving, and sewing. Why should textiles have become their craft par excellence, rather than the work of men? Was it always thus, and if so, why?


Twenty years ago Judith Brown wrote ... 'Note on the Division of Labor by Sex' that holds a simple key to these questions. She was interested in how much women contributed to obtaining the food for a preindustrial community. But in answering that question, she came upon a model of much wider applicability. She found that the issue of whether or not the community relies upon women as the chief providers of a given type of labour depends upon 'the compatibility of this pursuit with the demands of child care.' If only because of the exigencies of breast feeding (which until recently was typically continued for two or three years per child), 'nowhere in the world is the rearing of children primarily the responsibility of men ... ' Thus, if the productive labor of women is not to be lost to the society during the childbearing hers, the jobs regularly assigned to women must be carefully chosen to be 'compatible with simultaneous child watching.' From empirical observation Brown gleans that 'such activities have the following characteristics: they do not require rapt concentration and are relatively dull and repetitive; they are easily interruptible [I see a rueful smile on every care giver's face!] and easily resumed once interrupted; they do not place the child in potential danger; and they do not require the participant to range very far from home.'


Just such are the crafts of spinning, weaving, and sewing: repetitive, easy to pick up at any point, reasonably child-safe, and easily done at home. (Contrast the idea of swinging a pick in a dark, cramped, and dusty mine shaft with a baby on one's back or being interrupted by a child's crisis while trying to pour molten meal into a set of molds.) The only other occupation that fits the criteria half so well is that of preparing the daily food. Food and clothing: These are what societies worldwide have come to see as the core of women's work (although other tasks may be added to the load, depending upon the circumstances of the particular society).


Readers of this book live in a different world. The Industrial Revolution has moved basic textile work out of the home and into large (inherently dangerous) factories; we buy our clothing ready-made. It is a rare person in our cities who has ever spun a thread or woven cloth, although a quick look into a fabric store will show that many women still sew. As a result, most of us are unaware how time-consuming the task of making the cloth for a family used to be.


In Denmark fifty years ago young women bought their yarns ready-made but still excepted to weave the basic cloth for their households. If they went to weaving school rather than being taught at home, they began with a dozen plain cotton dish towels. ...


Thirty years ago in rural Greece, much had changed but not all. People wore store-bought, factory-made clothing of cotton for daily wear, at least in summer. But traditional festive outfits and all the household woollens were still made from scratch. It takes several hours to spin with a hand spindle the amount of yarn one can weave up in an hour, so women spun as they watched the children, girls spun as they watched the sheep, both spun as they trudged or rode mule back from one village to another on errands ... 


'So why is it, if women were so enslaved by textile work for all those centuries, that the spinning jenny  and power loom were invented by a man and not a woman?' A young woman accosted me with this question after a lecture recently.


'The reason,' to quote George Foster, writing about problems in pottery making, 'lies in the nature of the productive process itself which places a premium on strict adherence to tried and proven ways as a means of avoiding economic catastrophe.' Put another way, women of all but the top social and economic classes were so busy just trying to get through what had to be done each day they they didn't have excess time or materials to experiment with new ways of doing things. ... The rich women, on the other hand, didn't have the incentive to invent laboursaving machinery since the work was done for them.


And so for millennia women devoted their lives to making the cloth and clothing while they tended the children and the cooking pot. ...


The Industrial Revolution was a time of steam engines. Along with the locomotives to solve transportation problems, the first major applications of the new engines were mechanizations of the making of cloth: the power loom, the spinning jenny, the cotton gin. The consequences of yanking women and children out of the home to tend these huge, dangerous, and implacable machines in the mills caused the devastating social problems which writers like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell (all of whom knew each other) portrayed so vividly. Such a factory is the antithesis of being 'compatible with child rearing' on every point in Judith Brown's list. ...


We are looking forward into a new age, when women who so desire can rear their children quietly at home while they pursue a career on their child-safe, relatively interruptible-and-resumable home computers, linked to the world not by mule back or the steam locomotive, or even a car, but by telephone and the modem. For their part, the hand loom, the needle, and the other fiber crafts can still form satisfying hobbies, as they, too, remain compatible with child watching. (Wayland Barber, 2012, pp.321-323).

REFERENCE

Wayland Barber, E. in Hemmings, J. (ed.) (2012) The textile reader. London: Berg.