History of Women Stitching- More About Thread Podcast, Ep. 2
Happy first of August! I actually wrote this second episode the first of July was about to put it up on my podcast and got hit with covid. So that was one week of feeling miserable, then one week of feeling like I had a nasty cold, to another week of no energy and no voice. I still sound weird but here we go. And it is hot. So hot in Southwest Colorado. Not the time to be having fevers and chills.
But thank you for tuning into my second ever podcast, or reading it on my moonflowerstudio.biz blog if you are. Which if you want to get the links or see the amazing artwork through the ages I found mostly on wikipediacommons, go look at that. Am an artist at heart, stories need pictures.
I do need to send out a thank you to Sweetwater.com where I got my podcast equipment- my mic and my headphones and who has a fantastic and non judgmental customer service- Thank you Richie Clemens for answering all my beginner questions!
If you have not listened to the first podcast do go back to that one to get the prehistoric lowdown on the invention of continuous fiber chording. Trusting me it is riveting. We talk about wooly mammoth and naughty Venus stone figures, the prehistoric roots of the decorative arts and the division of labor between men and women that up until recently has been rather logically.
But the most important idea I want to emphasize with that first podcast is the sheer amount of time it took to spin any kind of fiber into fine thread and how along with all the other task we women were responsible for- we were mostly the ones - spinning- at first all social economic levels and all the time-except for a few cultures…
Like I said on my art website, moonflower studio-there are wonderful pictures attached to this blog post. I’m looking at a great black and white of a Navajo Family somewhere on their reservation in the Four Corners, near me- they are posing in front of their traditional round dwelling called a hogan, displaying a wonderfully geometric woven rug…
Multi generational, but the oldest grandmother in the picture is still busy at roving, combing the clean wool so it goes the same way before it is spun, even posing she is still at the spinning of yarn…
While I was writing this second episode an interesting archeological article came up on my news feed reinforcing that it is the opinion of some that the artifact that is found the most in dig sights or at least so much so to be considered the most found artifact is the spindle weight, that weight rock that allowed the rod to spin as the women spun.
But what did we women spin? Well there is four big fibers spread across the globe. Linen-Wool-Cotton and Silk.
Interestingly the oldest fiber still used widely today is Linen, centered in the first areas of recorded history. Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Made from flax linen is actually the hardest to process.
Sven Beckert breaking the timeline down in his book - Empire of Cotton, A Global History, puts Linen in the Neolithic Era, 12,000 years ago. Mentioned in the Bible, it is the most labor intensive, having to be beaten just enough, left to rot just enough before it can be spun. Valued for its cooling properties linen has long been favored by the Egyptians, who not only lived in it but buried their dead in the long strips of cloth.
Here I should give credit where credit is due- but my facts are somewhat blending together because I have read….let me count- over four books, two more in the queue centered on the first history of fabric and women’s work and well its all blending together. So do go back and look at the notes from the first episode of The History of Women Stitching- to get links to all that great content but for this episode just know that much of this info is repeated in all those books and actually Wikipedia covers the history of the big four fibers pretty well too. And dating is a pain- for my dyslexic artistic brain, not knocking myself, I actually do have dyslexia- went to special class for it - but for my sanity dates will be a little loosey goosey- the timelines are well established in all the fabric history books and they are all great and all on audible if you like to listen like I do, so just pick whichever cover you like the best and you’ll be golden. For my purposes here I’m more interested in what seems to have come first, second and so on.
Back to linen. Interesting side note- In the late 1700’s after Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt drew attention to the treasures buried in the desert, Europe developed a macabre fascination with mummies turn, too many and too gross to list here, but one was mummy unwrapping parties. Yup, if you were a Edwardian or Victorian of a certain class and had a friend that did their grand tour in Egypt you just might be invited to a mummy unwrapping party when they got back. It is exactly how it sounds. And there were party favors, often wrapped in the approx. 150 meters of linen. Let us pause and think about who it was that was spinning and then weaving that linen.
In Egypt- there were commercial run weaving studios pretty soon, but the spinning? Like most ancient cultures, probably done by women. But, Interestingly, up until recently, not much attention had been paid to the linen the mummies were wrapped in, even in the most scientific of settings. Now it appears there is also writing and images written to the gods on the different folds. Something they should have been paying attention to in the first unwrapping.
A bit after linen was in use, during the Bronze Age, about seven thousand years ago, give or take a few thousand years people started to spin and weave wool…
But apparently the idea of using sheep’s wool to make cloth was a slow one. Evidenced by when the sheep were domesticated and the very later discovery of castrated male sheep bones in dig sites - indicating their use for wool production. One of the few reason to keep a castrated male around. The wool fibers were first plucked from the sheep, much like we comb our dogs today. Only after a long bit of selected breeding did we seem to start sheering the fleece instead of combing it.
No surprise wool was not valued in hot places like Egypt, but the Vikings used wool to make the sail of their long boats that probably brought them to the New World, where back in the homeland, individual villages were responsible for the care and storage of the “King’s” sails often stored in churches. Long after they did not have to- they kept making their ships sails out of wool into the 20th century according to St. Clair who authored The Golden Thread How Fabric Changed History.
About the same time, Silk is rumored to have been discovered when a cocoon fell into a Chinese princess’s tea cup and started to unravel. Which just makes we wonder when tea cups were invented?
But the luscious thread comes from the cocoons of many varieties of silkworms and was a seriously guarded secret in China like many coveted goods that funded the Silk and Spice Roads, but we’ll talk about that in a bit . There can be 500 meters to a strand or one third a mile. So thin, upwards of twenty sticky strands are brought together, the diameter of a human hair and then plied or twisted with other bundles of the twenty strands to make silk thread of the highest quality called filament silk. What remains of the cocoon is spun and called spun silk. Whole villages were devoted to the care and feeding of silkworms and when woven into cloth was considered tithing or currency for taxes for hundreds of years.
Though cotton is much easier to process, its first documented existence in anything like a cord or a thread is 6,000 BCE in Peru, with other places of interest being West Africa and India…
With its similarity to the fleece of sheep, travels upon first seeing it called it “tree wool”. Like the sheep, it took many generations of selection and cross breeding between continents to get the white fluff balls we have today.
So now, I think we are actually ready to move on to weaving. Though we are not going to spend much time on the process of weaving because our focus is on stitching and specifically stitching for decorative arts more then for clothing production. But here is just an overview….
Across the world and through time there were so many different kinds of looms. Some that stand upright, looms that lay on the ground, looms that were tied to trees and attached to belts around the weavers waist. Looms worked on tables. Today we are still discovering how ancient people wove with researchers going back in archeology records of digs and reexamining, often by female archeologist that themselves have weaving experience and gaining insight into what was overlooked the first time. Like a row of weighted stones in the remains of a prehistoric round house. Now concluded they were weights for an upright loom.
Our very history, is so permeated with cloth production we overlook it for what is more novel and interesting. In the Odyssey, Penelope holds off her unwanted suitors for over three years, claiming to be weaving a burial shroud for her father in law and will decide on a suitor when she is finished. It took several years for anyone to questions that she should be finished and discovers she was actually taking some of the weave out every night.
Of course there were inventions, just like the first discovery of rolling fiber against itself creates continuous thread or yarn or the invention of the spinning wheel discussed in Episode one to speed up production and there were many developments in improving raw material.
Plus in many regionals around the world, evidences of a more commercial bent and certain areas were known for certain kinds of cloth, but pretty much until the Industrial Revolution which started in about the 1760's, thread and cloth production was a cottage industry… literally out of the cottage.
done by families who also probably farmed. Everyone tended to the sheep in northern cooler countries, the cotton fields in the Americas, India, West Africa, fed the silkworms in China or harvested the flax in Egypt to make linen.
Mostly the women spun and the men wove the thread into cloth in England, India and probably dyed it, other places the women wove- South America, Afghanistan. Middle men would come and transport the raw material to areas of weaving, then come back and transport it to areas of trade or in the family women would stay home and produce the cloth and men would take it to areas of trade- like ancient Syria hundred and hundred of miles away. Cloth because it is measurable, repeatable and its quality could be judged was a form of currency for a long time.
It is one thing to make the goods, the food, the shelters to provide for you and your family. Or even to take what you produce to the local market and trade with what someone else has produced or yearly by foot or by hoof take your goods to a market within your culture. World Trade is a whole different nut to crack. And what is so important to keep in mind is that trade, commerce, whatever you want to call it, is what really opened up most of the world…
Here is a dramatic pause….
Because most of that trade was unnecessary. The Spice Roads, the Silk Roads, Columbus discovery of the Americas, were mostly for luxury goods and all of those imports were to be consumed by a very, very, very small percentage of the world’s population and mostly consumed to show off.
The Tudors, was a English dynasty or House, beginning in in 1465 most famously ruled by Henry the 8th, i.e, the King who had six wives, but was started by his dad and reigned at the same time as the opening up of the Orient and the discovery of the New World and they showed off all the bounty coming back into the kingdom including exotic spices….
Putting so much spices from the East into their food along with the new refined sugar was basically gross. But tasting good or highlighting the deep flavors of a few spices at a time was not the point. The point was showing off how rich they were by what they could consume and that all so translated to the luscious fabric and adornment they wore, the grand houses they lived in and the art on the walls painted, woven or stitched, often which main purpose was to show off the families wealth as in the painting of William Brooke’s families wealth which you can view on my moonflowerstudio.biz blog post, but main purpose was to shout from the wall look at our fine clothes, look at our exotic pets and exotic food with spices from across the world.
This was also the time of pirates or privateers depending if one had the blessing of his kingdom to go out and well, pillage. We will get more in to piracy when we talk about all the glorious color dyes that also were brought back to civilization, and I’m air quoting that word, “civilization”. but we will talk about that later as well.
For now, it is important to remember that the world explorers and conquers were not after necessities to live, but were after luxury goods- Cinnamon, silks, chocolate, cotton, dye stuffs, pepper, gold are not necessary to live, to survive. Except for the Vikings, Most of us had the land and the resources to grow food, cloth ourselves, build places to live with the goods we have in our environment. It’s just since we were kicked out of the garden, those basic necessities have not been good enough for our appetites. It goes back to our human nature for well pretty things.
Victoria Finlay in her book Fabric, The Hidden History of the Material World…
points out the ravage of place, culture and the natural world a popular trendy luxury good like fabric can have. The desire for cashmere scarfs has literally changed the landscape, the livelihood of the people and almost the demise of species like the snow leopard…
who found tasty and easy prey in the goats that graze the hill between the Great Himalayan mountains.
I know that is a lot of unpack, a lot! To do a better job than I can I would recommend reading Charles C Mann’s book 1491 which focuses on the great changes to two continents we have seen in just over 600 years…
In it he lays out the vast and advanced cultures of the America, the Incas, the Mayan, the cultures in the Mississippi Valley that existed before Eurpopean diseases and populations got to them. 75% genocide is the low number- 90% is the high number of souls that were wiped out when we came to these continent in search of luxury goods.
His next book, 1493 talks about well reaping the bounty from a depopulated land and where all those goods from the Americas spread out too.
This summer my youngest daughter went to Greece on a celebration tour after getting her masters degree and was sending my pic of her travels… and food
How did the very native to the Americas potatoes become an established side dish in Athens Greece? The Colombia Exchange…
It’s also why apparently Mexicans love Chinese. I was in Mexico City on a mission trip in my youth and baffled at the oddity to my eyes in a Chinese restaurant, where broken English was switched with broken Spanish into Chinese for the waitress to take our orders. Colombia Exchange. Corn in China? Tomatoes in Italy?
But to get back to - the history of women stitching- across the world - women did most of the spinning along with the child rearing because they were confined to the hut- while men were off hunting, warring or trading.
Looking around my studio I know I have thread and needles from both the UK and Japan. On the shelves behind me I know I have some cloth woven and dyed in India. Possibly some batiks from Thailand. On my daughters trip after high school she brought me lace from Ireland. This trip I asked her to keep an eye out for fabric from Athens, Rome or possibility of Venice where there is a wonderful weaving tradition of velvet. If we have the money, the currency we have always desired what we did not have and reached far across the worlds to gain it. That is not a new thing. Either is the division of the “haves” and the “have nots”.
It was a very small proportion of the world’s population that went out searching and then consumed the worldly goods that were being discovered. Most of the worlds population lives hand to mouth. There has always been less of the “haves” then “Have nots” And there have always been taxes and what are called Sumptuary Laws, basically laws on what people by class structure were allowed to wear, consume, reside, etc.
aimed at keeping the main population ”in” to their "station" or “place”
Because what we wear and what our homes look like are the first indication of our status.
After the fall of Rome-approx. 475 BCE, there was a dark age, or the medieval age and mostly European and unfortunately by that time Christian countries were under what is called the feudal system made up of three parts.
Third Estate- the working class. made up of like 90% of the population had no power, no say and lived or died hand to mouth with no chance of bettering their lives or their descendants lives.
The second estate- the Nobles , the ruling class, their relatives and their “friends” group who came in and out of power depending on the whims and desires on who directly above them had power up to the King, Queen or Emperor.
The first estate- the Church
That all changes with the plaques. There were many -but the Black Death starting in 1346 CE, killed about 30% of Europe’s population...
For a great listen or a lot of great listening- Rick Steves Travel Talk on Youtube has a lot of videos on the history of Art and does a great job explaining the feudal system and the social unrest of the middle ages as does John Green, author of The Fault of our Stars, has a fantastic history series on Youtube called Crash Course with cool animation and graphics that explains the feudal system and the affect of the plaques, that changed eveything.
Because so much of the population died and there was so much social and economic unrest that at the end of the 14th century, the first two estates- had no choice but to pay attention to and include the third estate or a least some of them who were savvy enough to have what the Nobles.
And tread and cloth production was at the front of it all. Guilds, the first unions were formed of skilled labors, including wool producers and cloth producers and those formations gave them lobbying power. Royals, who were not exactly responsible with their money formed relationships with non royals in Banking to fund their grand ideas and those commoner banking investors became richer. Since it was very uncouth to work, it was often the poor relations or second sons who had no hopes of the family titles that went off and became explorers, colonizers, inventors or entrepreneurs.
And that was the start of the middle class.
Not going to go into it much but about at the same time this was happening… a lot was changing, a Lot!
An upstart monk in Germany named Martin Luther nailed Ninety-five Theses, 1517 on a church door challenging the status quo
Advancements in printing presses with moveable type 1440 to print cheaply like oh a Bible that many could afford to purchase.
and others like Luther again decided to translate that Bible into common language 1522 and other decided to, well teach a whole lot of young’uns how to read that Bible, letting go of the need for the commoners to get their understanding of God from the priests alone.
Oh and same time as that Columbus 1492 and then the Spanish discovered and claimed a whole new world. Luther’s ideas and Henry the 8th in England 1534 and others in Europe left the control of the Church- the second estate and well, made a lot of Royals and nobles nervous.
This “New” estate or class…
From wikipedia.com
between peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education,[1][2] as well as their access to and control of cultural, social, and financial capital.
And they wanted respectability and status and were going to show it in how they dressed, how their children were educated and their homes. So they were going to “emulate” defined by Google as…
match or surpass (a person or achievement), typically by imitation. As in “lesser men trying to emulate his greatness"
This was the class, these were the family run business, trying to better themselves that were probably up to their elbows in banking, exploration, trade and commerce.
And the division of labor were still active in the teamwork of the marriage.
This was the class where the husband’s job was to build fortunes, new money and the wives' job to build respectability and status by gaining opportunity to mingle with those higher in the social circles. AKA Jane Austin’s Mrs. Bennett
We will get in to this more later but as the middle class and upper class was bettering themselves, the lower working class was still mending their clothes, passing down clothes, and making quilts out of too worn rags. Not only that but in an era of no electric lights, no washing machines, no dishwashers, cooking at a hearth, most women spent much of their days doing house hold chores and spinning, if not weaving. Jane Austen’s era of women sitting in parlors working on their accomplishments in search of husbands meant someone else was in the milk houses, the kitchens and over the laundry tubs. A insightful read on that is…
Longbourn by Jo Baker, a romance novel between two of the servants not much highlighted in Jane Austen’s novels. Even in the 2005 movie version of Pride and Prejudice, my favorite, starring Keira Knightley/ Matthew Macfadyen, there is always a humming maid in the background of the Bennet’s house. Is she Sarah?
But what decorated the walls, the furnishings, what got most daughters ready to marry in the Regency period, starting in 1811, the setting of Pride and Prejudice? That would be the stitching arts, along with other accomplishments- Music, Drawing, Painting. This not only was the era of the Napolean’s campaign in Egypt (1798) making mummy unwrapping a craze but everyone who could -wanted to decorate themselves and their grand homes or their lesser grand homes in the Egyptian style. Or the French style.
This was an era of FOMO or the fear of missing out. which is not a new idea- Silks from China and regional Cotton fabrics like Chintz and Muslins from India and Iraq became a craze in Europe.
But this mismatch of wealth eventually brought on great changes in the middle of the 1700. War in the Americas broke off from England and then also in France.
We could still spend an entire episode on how Britain and other countries destroyed and brought India and many of its neighboring regions to their knees economically then well just took over ruling them in colonization all together for the pursuit of…. not gold, not silver, not natural resources to survive, but beautiful printed cottons and other desired fabrics. Don’t’ get mad at India for outsourcing, we did it first to them.
To learn about India’s rich cotton fabric history connect with Pritha Dasmahapatra Instagram Page HERE
called @tiptopped on Instagram…
But The Industrial Revolution, which started about the same time, started in England and started with water mill cloth production. Yup, what is considered one of the most pivotal times of world history, the automation of mass produced goods started with the commercial graze in providing fabric across the world, not only responsible for destroying the cloth economy of India, but feeding the slave trade that brought millions of Africans to the Americas.
But we get into that next time? Ep. 3? The Industrial Revolution and the cotton slave trade triangle that covered the entire world.
