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

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The Age ofHomespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Knopf, 2001. 501 pages. $35.00 cloth. Any old thing will work, really—a quilt, a shawl, a tablecloth, a pie safe, a wooden thimble. Every home-made, hand-made object from the past will have a story to tell, if we look closely enough and listen hard enough. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has done all this and more in her new book. She focuses each chapter on a single artifact (an Indianbasket, an embroidered chimney piece) or a group of related objects (spinning wheels, counterpanes and blankets). Then, through a detailed examination of who made and used these things, and how and why, she spins out a whole new way of looking at cultural, social, economic and political developments in American history. Ulrich's territory is New England from 1676 to 1851, but the homespun textiles and tools of Appalachia tell similar tales. One of the great pleasures of this book is its ability to awaken us to the meaning— and beauty—of our own heirlooms and hand-me-downs, be they from New Hampshire or Kentucky, and to invite us to find our own stories in the old things. Take yarn, for example, and the "spinning meetings" or "frolics" or "bees" that became something of the rage all over New England in the pre-Revolutionary period. Groups of women would gather for a day in the home of the local clergyman to spin prodigious amounts of thread and yarn. On the surface, their work was merely a kind of charity. The yarn produced was for the use ofthe pastor's family or for distribution to the poor. But these spinsters were more than do-gooders. They were political protesters, colonial versions of bra-burners. In a demonstration of patriotic solidarity, instead of destroying the symbols of oppression, as their male counterparts destroyed the English tea, the women were making the things they now refused to buy—the imported and highly taxed textiles from England. Even high-toned matrons who had never had to spin took up spindles and thereby entered politics. Their cotton, linen, and wool threads were the basis of cloth, to be sure, but also, in the skilled hands of an exceptional social 94 historian, the material by which we gain a deeper understanding of how women made history. Then there are the tools themselves, the spinning wheels, looms, and reels, called niddy-noddies, or willie-nillies, around which justspun yarn was wound and measured. A close examination of these things suggests, as Ulrich writes, "the paradox of female autonomy" (191). Ownership and inheritance practices divided strictly along male/female lines. "Real property" in the form of land and buildings—permanent and solid—was man's realm, passed, if at all possible, from father to son. Women's possessions were, in contrast, the "moveables," the things that could be transported from household to household and thus, somehow, free-floating, insubstantial, not owned by anyone in particular and, thus, less rooted in or representative of family identities. But what did it mean when a woman carved or embroidered or otherwise stamped her initials or name on these moveables? The initials PW, for one Polly Woodwell, on a humble niddynoddy , for example, transform the object to "personal rather than family property" (191) and mark a subtle but significant shift from "familial to individual enterprise" (196). Such enterprise, moreover, allowed Polly Woodwell a measure of independence. When she could earn a little extra money from her work, she moved beyond strictly domestic to at least partially commercial production and was, thus, part of the widespread transition from a self-sufficient agriculture to a market-based economy. The phenomenon has long been attributed to such things as the growing numbers of skilled craftsmen and merchants. What has been overlooked is the importance of the household production systems run by women like Polly. Even if she couldn't see the significance of marking one of her tools with her own initials, we can. Just as her predecessors were making political statements when they took up spindle and loom...