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

In The Age of Homespun, Laurel Ulrich masterfully examines the impact of technology on everyday life in the colonial and early national periods and analyzes the transmutation of that history into nostalgia during the nineteenth century. In her earlier work, Ulrich established her reputation as a historian with an extraordinary talent for making the most out of a modicum of evidence: A Midwife's Tale mined the little-used diary of an ordinary woman, Martha Ballard, to reconstruct the harsh reality of daily life on the Maine frontier. With The Age of Homespun, Ulrich builds a rich narrative around fourteen obscure museum objects, ranging from an Indian basket lined with wool to a half-finished silk stocking, to examine the gendered transformation of textile making in New England from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. In doing so, she links social history to cultural history by scrupulously detailing the origins of an imagined moment in the American past that was created, embraced, and preserved by nineteenth-century New Englanders who yearned for a pastoral heritage unspoiled by technology, of which the mill cities encroaching on their landscape were the emblems.

Ulrich's argument is far from simplistic. She takes a seemingly elementary concept, "the age of homespun," and shows how it was constructed to fill the romantic needs of a feminized Victorian culture, dominated by the ideal of separate spheres, for a useable colonial heritage that celebrated the contributions of women alongside those of men. New Englanders such as the Reverend Horace Bushnell, who helped to popularize the phrase in the 1850s, were compelled by the rising democracy of the era to integrate their grandmothers and great-grandmothers into colonial history. Ultimately, they did so in ways that sidestepped the participation of those women in market culture.

Anxious to preserve the colonial heritage in the face of industrialization, the architects of the homespun age envisioned a rural past that was self-sufficient and rigidly divided by gender. In this imagined world, men dominated politics, economics, and market relations, while women took charge of the material and domestic realms. Fervidly, New Englanders dug deep into their attics to find the hard evidence—the spinning wheels and the antique clothing—that testified to great-grandma's handicraft skills. Colonial women were celebrated for the objects they had used or made, for the baskets, stockings, bed coverings, tablecloths, and embroideries lovingly passed down through the ages. This focus on material life, buttressed by a passion for genealogy, further skewed the nineteenth-century vision of the colonial period. Cultural conflict, economic exigency, revolutionary politics, slavery, transatlantic trade, and industrialization were all downplayed in favor of a whitewashed heritage that served the gender dynamics of Victorian America.

While old-stock New Englanders documented their pedigrees and donated family relics to museums, few curators or historians possessed the desire or the know-how to unravel the real history behind those objects. Generations of scholars continued to reference the spinning wheel as a handy symbol of the way things had been in the halcyon days before the mills. Ulrich breaks away from this pattern by combining the judicious study of artifacts with in-depth documentary research. Building each chapter around one or two objects, she first details the myths that nineteenth-century preservationists constructed. She then digs deep into the documentary record, using letters, diaries, memoirs, probate inventories, and court records to tell richer tales that illuminate both the history of the object and likely reasons for the myth surrounding its creation.

In the course of telling these stories, Ulrich slowly and deliberately unravels the early history of textile making in New England, outlining the transference of skill from Europe to America; the transmutation of weaving from a manly occupation to women's work; the impact of the nonimportation...