The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth

by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America–ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock–relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history. In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Material Culture, Feminism, Crafts, Grad School

683 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750 (1982) and A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990) which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 and became the basis of a PBS documentary. In The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth (2001), she has incorporated museum-based research as well as more traditional archival work. Her most recent book is Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007). Her major fields of interest are early American social history, women's history, and material culture. Professor Ulrich's work is featured on the web at www.dohistory.org and www.randomhouse.com.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~amciv/fac...

Reviews

[Charles Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took some effort - it's a work of genuine history, making an argument based on diaries, statistics, etc - but it was more than worth it. I learned about six thousand new words about clothes making and I feel as if I understand colonial and precolonial America, before the industrial age, in a wholly new way. Full of funny, tender moments. And impeccably written.

[Lynne · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has a lot of good information, but it's very slow going. Ulrich ties the existence of various handmade/homespun objects into regional and national history, but sometimes gets carried away with tangents. I found her explanations of what women could own vs what men could own in colonial times very interesting, but some of her explanations of the laws got to be a bit much. I'm glad I read it, but it's not as good as her midwife book. I did learn a lot about early cloth manufacturing and fiber arts, which was very interesting for someone who embroiders and crochets.

[Colleen O'Neill Conlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read—and loved—A Midwife's Tale. Like that book, this one delves into women's work and contributions to the economy of the times they lived in. 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.

For example, the spinning wheel. The author looks at two, one for wool and one for linen and cotton. Handspinning was a means of production, but also a stand against English tyranny and taxation on spun and woven goods exported to the colony. 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. Women might gather to spin together in good-natured contests, but they also traded freely: skills, tools, and finished goods. One might warp another's loom in exchange for use of the loom, or trade spun yarn for woven cloth. Or cloth was sold to buy shoes or settle debts. Textile production, mostly done by women and their daughters, was an important part of the family and community economy.

The author also looks at finished textile goods that survive, sometimes with family stories of provenance attached. One article is a pocketbook made in 1785 by a Pigwacket Indian woman called Molly Ocket/Mollocket/Marie Agathe. She made it for a man whose family built a town at the site of an old Pigwacket village, the kind of European and colonial encroachment that happened throughout this country's early history. Ulrich discusses the structure of the pocketbook, woven and twined from moose hair in a design that combines elements of Abenaki technique and French Canadian embroidery tradition. In that one object, Ulrich unspools "a story about cultural exchange as well as conquest."

In a chapter about an exquisite cupboard for storing textiles, we learn that sons inherited land and houses, or "real property," while daughters inherited cabinets, textiles , and cattle, "moveable property" meant to travel with the daughter as she moved from one household (her father's) to another (her husband's). But this moveable property was considered valuable. The author shares many wills and probate notices where stockings and napkins, counted out, are part of the bequest. In most cases, the linens (produced by women) were valued at more than the fine wooden cupboard (produced by a man) that held them.

The subtitle—Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth—is a theme Ulrich carries throughout the book. The cover shows a detail of a "chimneypiece" worked in fine embroidery. It's a pastoral setting: maidens with gathering baskets, or fishing, or spinning, men on horseback or trying to woo the maidens, all kinds of trees and ponds and farm animals and wildlife. The work reflects ease and idealizes colonial life, but ignores the poverty and slavery lurking off the canvas. Another embroidered piece, from 1775, serves as a self-portrait for the maker, Prudence Punderson. Called "The First, Second, and Last Scenes of Mortality," it shows a woman with a cradle on one side of her and a casket, marked with her own initials, on the other. It also displays her wealth: curtains (rare at the time), a carved mirror, and bent over the cradle, her young black slave, as much a possession as the furnishings in the scene.

There is so much in this book, about colonial history, Native American lifeways, and cultural exchanges that went on between New England, New France, and the various native tribes. It's perhaps not for the general reader, but for anyone with an interest in colonial history, women's history, or anything to do with textiles, this is your book.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laurel Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of An American Myth analyzes the “female economy.” The historiography of early New England traditionally put women outside of market activity until the Revolutionary era. Ulrich responds to earlier views by arguing that long before the Revolution rural New England families, specifically women, began to grapple with a changing market economy. Ulrich uses objects, primarily textiles, to shed light on women’s lives and, perhaps more importantly, highlight their work as important not only to their families but central to the greater New England and Atlantic economies.

[Eve Schaub · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ulrich movingly brings us through a history of the handmade and homespun through a series of carefully chosen, utterly fascinating historic objects and the written words that swirled around them that remain with us today. A recurring and essential theme is the differences between the mythology of the "inherited ideals of rural life," and the realities which are much more complicated. A favorite quote:

"(P)eople make history not only in the work they do and the choices they make, but in the things they choose to remember."

Packed to the gills with information and insight, this is not only a wholly terrific book, but one that would surely reward additional readings.

[Marilyn Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting to study people, history and culture through their material culture.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding meaty volume that tells mini-histories of home-made objects that are the basis for explaining the history of women's economic contribution to the development of America, as well as the general history of the relevant time period. I found it absorbing and delightful.

For example, Ulrich tells about standing wheels and spinning wheels, how they were different and similar, how their use changed over time, and how those changes reflected the history of the New England region and women's participation in the economy. Spinning came to be seen as a patriotic act and moved from a skilled trade of mostly men to a more home-based skill of women.

One thing I loved about Ulrich's history is that she includes some Indigenous objects and how they came to be part of New England culture: one object she includes is an Algonquian pouch or pocketbook made of twined moosehair, another is an exquisite wall decoration covered with more than 50 tiny individualized baskets. Through these objects she describes the history of Native people's before and after White contact. She also includes some African-American objects, like a woven basket hat made by an imprisoned Black man.

I didn't get to finish this big volume which I read through inter-library loan, but I certainly look forward to finishing it. The only complaint I had about this book was the poor quality of the photographs -- even with a magnifying glass, I couldn't make out some of the details Ulrich describes.

As a big fan of her (life changing) A Midwife's Tale, I love how Ulrich teases out the deeper meaning behind everyday objects and, from them, illuminates an entire vanished way of life.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Age of Homespun displays Laurel Thatcher Ulrich doing the thing she does best: extrapolating entire stories out of seemingly mute objects. By examining the history of a handful of woven objects from colonial and early republic New England, she provides a vivid picture of women's domestic lives during that time and of the influence those lives had on the social and economic well-being of their society as a whole. The research is sound and formidable and the writing engaging.

For a more detailed meditation on this book and new England history, please visit The Celery Museum.

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some reviewers have given this 3 stars or lower reviews and often include the comments "repetitive" or "boring". Of course a book can be excellent but just not to the reader's interest or taste. If you are interested in weaving, women's textile work, the life of early American women and the like, take a look at this book. You may not want to read every chapter--despite my interests it took me some time to finish the book--but pick and choose a couple and you will find it enlightening as to the inconveniences, gender prejudices, and patriarchy that these women had to negotiate.

This book covers the time period of the late 1600s through approximately 1840. During these centuries there were changes in work that women faced and to a small degree some amelioration of their life and labor. But we must remember that they faced, during their fertile years, constant pregnancies, births, and miscarriages (which quite often resulted in relief and even rejoicing--imagine being pregnant every 13 or so months and still nursing the previous one/s and having to go through childbirth and its dangers (death was always a possibility) without the help of skilled midwives or anesthesia.

Among the themes is the constant work women did--and so, of course, did the men. We have so much leisure now even with 40 or 40+ work weeks, and for a good number of us it is not backbreaking , hard physical labor. Pace the aristocrats like the Washington's and Jeffersons, most Americans had to farm, make their tools and clothing, etc. themselves.

In the 1600s into the 1700s women owned no property and legally were not "people". Upon a father's death a daughter did not necessarily inherit anything, even the tools of her textile labor. That did change in time. Depending upon whether they lived in urban or rural homes, and very much depending upon the income of their father women were occupied with making textile necessities or at least sometimes more artistic work such as samplers. Working with textiles (or failing to do so) was a sign of feminine virtue or vice respectively. Mass spinning "happenings" were symbols of civic virtue. Just about anything that women did had a political and civic dimension and would be known to their wider community.

I love books like this one that take an object and place it in its historical and cultural significance. This is a book published some time ago, but it is akin to the book genre now published such as (History of X in 100 objects". Fortunately we do have many sources for Ulrich's objects and their makers and users, but her ability to use these sources to create a vivid explanation of women's lives is her own forte.

[Margaret Harris · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made it to page 20 of this book before my eyes rolled back into my head with boredom. In an effort to be fair, I then skimmed every chapter, tried to look at every photographic illustration, and read every word of the final six-page Afterword. It wasn't enough to figure out what exactly is the "myth" that obsesses the author. I have been a seamstress and needle worker since childhood, and I am an avid student of American history. I certainly admire the work of weavers and sewing craftsmen (and craftswomen) of ages past. Where is the secret—or mythology—that craftsmanship in the home was not hard work? Yes, there was a need for it in happy times or in the trying times of war, prior to the industrial age. And a craftsman naturally inclines to artistry as he or she is able. It adds joy to a task. What is mysterious about the cultures of the English transplants to America and the native peoples borrowing ideas from each other as each produced domestic goods? What is "brilliant"---as the jacket cover asserts---about noticing that artifacts from a past era help describe the history of said era? Isn't that called archeology?

The book offers a rather strange assertion that just because tributes have been made to industrious people (rural or otherwise) who worked to survive, that the approbations overlooked that those same people were not perfect saints. Why, anyway, does the author condemn them for "fripperies of commerce" and taking a break from long days of work to socialize in the taverns? Does it negate the artistry that the homespun cloths began as "slave-grown cotton" at a time when that was all the cotton that was available? In her politically correct ideas of today, is the history professor suggesting that the American Revolution and War of 1812, let alone European settlement of the American continent, were bad events? The "history of textiles," she says, is a story of "exploitation," "social disruption," and "violence," besides being about "international commerce in goods and ideas." Good grief.

[Kris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the premise of the book...looking at surviving physical objects and linking them to their place, time and people. When the chapter focused on history directly linked to the object, I loved it. It linked the then and the now, the physical with the intangible part of history. It reminded me of what museums were doing when this book came out.

However, many chapters did not stay with the object. I felt that we would veer off the path into a neighboring field that we didn't need to be in. For example...the chapter with the hand-knitted silk stocking somehow morphed into a section on milling factories, early Republic work ethics and early attempts at workers organizing before unions were common. That is all good stuff...but none of it, even the factories themselves felt like they directly linked to a silk stocking.

If the book's premise was about events or the people who made lasting home goods or something other than 10 specific artifacts then this would be a 4 or 5 star review. The research is top notch, the information good, but I just felt like some of it was filler to make the book bigger instead of focusing on how artifacts link us to specific people, places and times.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summer book bingo-About fiber or craft
I've had this book on my shelf for twenty years and in that time I've only read a few select chapters. I'm glad that I finally took the time to read the entire book. This book is a history of women-both white and indigenous- and their role in the development of the economy of our nation during the colonial period and the early years of the republic. This history is told through the story of specific handmade objects and their makers. Because women during this time had few rights, I found it fascinating to read about their role in the building of our nation through their handiwork skills.

[Rosemary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A history of ponderous weight, this book is so captivating that, as soon as I finished, The Afterword, I turned to The Preface to start the book again. As a fibre arts practitioner, I was drawn to he extraordinary parallels between the work I produce in 2021 and that which has been described beginning is 17th century New England. The gift of this book has elevated the worth of work for domestic purposes from the dusty depths of museum collections to a level of celebration. I am inspired to see more in my surroundings and to explore the lives of those, many of whom lived in my city, whose work is cited by this important historian.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a big name historian and I’ve read several of her other books. The Age of Homespun only came to my attention after reading Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried, which cites Ulrich frequently and uses a similar approach to historical analysis. Both authors use physical objects left behind (fabric, baskets, embroidery) to tell a story about specific people and places in history. I really enjoyed Ulrich’s examination of 1600s-1830s New England, especially in the context of shifting roles and tasks of women as things progressed from homemade to manufactured goods.

[Chels · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m taking a star off because there were several parts I felt were speculative, and other times when some of the details seemed like they were distracting from the overall message of the book; BUT the details were interesting! The book is an awesome dive into early colonial America, covering many aspects of life (women’s lives especially) that traditional school textbooks never even graze the surface of. I love how much of a contribution this book is to women’s history.

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writer takes early American crafts, researches the objects, the time the were made and tells the reader a story that will keep historians interested. So many stories kept me reading through the book, interested, but skimming towards the end of the 500 page book. Now when I walk through history museums, my mind will think of the possible back stories. Thank you, Laurel!

[Allegra Goodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book tremendously, but it didn't grip me with the narrative power of "A Midwife's Tale." This is partly a structural issue. Ulrich structures this book as a series of readings of objects. She is a wonderful and knowledgeable interpreter of samplers and cradles, but as a reader (and a novelist) I missed following a protagonist.

[Betty Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gives an intertwined history of politely, economic, and artistic history of Mew England. The author includes many personal histories that add color and supports the various assumptions presented in the historical accounts. A well written textbook of Early American history

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit dry, but overall, fascinating.

[Kiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit long-winded at times, but overall very well written and enlightening.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absolutely magical in the beginning and then an absolute drag through the rest.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Women !!

[Judy Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this fascinating tale of material culture told through a series of interesting artifacts that show the progression of weaving throughout American History.

[Emma Bock · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could write half as well as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, I will die a happy woman. Beautiful, stunning, magnificent

[Tara]

Super boring. If you're interested in the history of textiles you might enjoy it.

[Selena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This not something I think average people will like, but if you are into New England Colonial History or museum studies- this is a must.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at everyday life in New England (17th-19th centuries) through the lens of textiles. Each chapter is centered on an artifact, such as a spinning wheel, basket, tablecloth, embroidered blanket, and branches out from there to topics such as relations between Indians and whites, exchanging labor between households, cultivating silk, knitted stockings, and many more. A scholarly book but since I'm interested in the topic, easy to read. Lots of information on how textile production changed over time.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read that focuses on specific items from early American history and then digs in as deeply as possible - an unfinished stocking, an embroidered hanging, a spinning wheel - what can these items tell us about women and their work, their lives? Thatcher is one of my heroes - a great thinker who helped create the modern study of marginalized groups like native peoples and women, who are not represented equally in texts. By turning to physical artifacts she created a new method of trying to piece together the experience of people hundreds of years ago.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an absolutely fascinating book. It's a history of objects but also a story about the people who made them, a history of the people who don't usually show up in the history books. It gave me a completely new understanding of the early American economy, as well as a bit of a guilt complex about how much easier my life is compared to my 13th great grandmother's. It's slow, dense reading, but well worth the effort.

[Laura Kilpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book because it tells more of the history of women through the items that women made and valued. Most history is written though men's eyes and therefore consists of wars and triumphs.

I also liked reading about early american indians and how they were absorbed into society and/or wiped out. I hope that they were absorbed and became our ancestors.

I like to knit and crochet and make my own yarn so I could relate to this book.