The Weaver's Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in Early Pennsylvania (review)

The Weaver's Craft is a nuanced book about textile production whose value lies in its holistic investigation of the craft. In addressing ideas about regional variation and technological evolution, Adrienne D. Hood presents an alternative to the historical record on New England textile manufacturing.

This book scrutinizes cloth manufacturing in a small eighteenth-century community: Chester County, Pennsylvania. A former curator of textiles and an accomplished weaver, Hood brings an unmistakable enthusiasm to this study, which seeks to explain varying paths toward industrialization by looking at regional differences in textile production. Through a meticulous study of probate and tax records, local account books and newspapers, diaries and correspondence, Hood pieces together an insightful story about the importance of cloth in British North America, the integration of home production, and how colonials went about acquiring the requisite fabric for clothes, household linens, and farming needs. Anyone who has worked in these kinds of records will appreciate the difficult and painstaking research that underpins Hood's arguments. As important, Hood's knowledge of textiles, the weaving process, and tools infuses her analysis with an insider's sensitivity. How else could one know that a weaver of fine linen could not also be an active farmer because rough hands would damage the yarn? This is a study that instructs as much in the significance that material evidence brings to the written record as it does in its conclusions.

In the first two chapters, Hood looks to England and Europe, from whence immigrants to the Pennsylvania region came, bringing with them traditional gendered practices that combined agriculture and skilled craft production within the same household economy. This coexistence thrived in the rich and bountiful community near Philadelphia, where farmers exported lucrative crops, such as flaxseed, that helped to fuel an international production/consumption exchange for finer textiles such as Irish linen. Flax plants used for linen manufacture are harvested before the plants produce seed, and so Chester County farmers exported flax grown for seed to Ulster so that the farmers there could grow the flax needed to harvest for linen production. This kind of symbiotic relationship immersed yeoman farmers in international trade and also enabled them to engage in a cash market for both necessary and luxury goods.

Hood successfully argues that southeastern Pennsylvania represents an alternative paradigm for understanding American industrialization, one that preserved a more traditional structure with male-dominated weaving at its core. Hood posits this against the New England model, wherein young women gradually took over outsourced weaving in the home and then moved into the new commercial mills being built in the New England countryside. Male weavers in Chester County, however, retained control over the looms and weaving. Drawing on and maintaining European traditions, farmers and weavers created a home-based textile industry that remained stable for most of the eighteenth century. They were able to do this because of the balanced mix between agriculture and craft production and the perseverance of skilled craftsmanship. At every stage of production—from the agricultural and husbandry practices that supplied fibers (flax and wool) through harvesting, fiber preparation, spinning, weaving, and cloth finishing—traditional gender roles and craft conventions prevailed. Thus, in the Philadelphia region, textile production developed in the city (rather than the countryside), produced more complex cloths (as opposed to cotton sheeting), and relied on hand (instead of mill) production through much of the nineteenth century. Philadelphia, then, became a center for fancy, rather than utilitarian, goods.

This in itself is a complicated argument, but there is much more to Hood's book. Hood contextualizes this story in the literature of early modern consumerism, gender theory, and political economy, all the while explaining how cloth is produced, what tools are used, and how they are acquired. She challenges accepted ideas regarding the pervasiveness of colonial barter economies, the ability of colonials to produce fine fabrics, and assumptions about self-sufficiency. In...