Homespun Wisdom

**This transcript comes from a previous broadcast. There may be small changes between the audio you hear above and the text.**

PETER: But first, we’re going to spend a few minutes in the colonial era. For well over a 100 years American colonists imported their textiles and their styles from mother England. But by the 1760s talk of Independence was in the air, and suddenly it mattered a lot where your clothes were made. If Americans could produce their own fabric at home, so the thinking went, then they could become that much less reliant on European imports.

ED: This new, highly politicized, style of wearing made in America clothing, became known as homespun. It was a simple, unadorned look in keeping with what many of the time considered to be the “small r” republican principles. Homespun textiles would prove that clothes could be equalizers, rather than marks of status and wealth. Who was supposed to actually make this homemade fabric? Well, that would be the job of women. Consider this quote from a Massachusetts newspaper in 1769.

MALE SPEAKER 1: It was early conceived by the most sagacious and knowing nations, that a number of females had always determine the condition of men, By means of their spinning wheels. I presume there never was a time when the spinning wheel could more influence the affairs of men, than at present.

KATE HAULMAN: I don’t want to say that it’s entirely a myth, a total fabrication, but it wasn’t as broad, or deep as we have thought.

PETER: This is Kate Haulman, a historian at American University. She points out that while the image of women at their spinning wheels was a potent symbol for advocates of independence, most of those advocates were men. And so this whole homespun thing may have been more rhetoric, than reality.

KATE HAULMAN: Certainly some women would come together in a very social fashion and have spinning bees, but if you go back to some of the earlier women’s history of the ’70s and ’80s, what you see in the evidence there is that women really couldn’t stand spinning. It’s not how they would choose to spend their time. So it was limited, and it maybe didn’t have the kind of breadth and depth that we have wanted to imagine for this period. We like to think of our founding era as kind of pure and marked by sacrifice and coming together. And the reality is much more complicated than that. People had their own positions and things that they wanted to express, and were apt to feel somewhat, perhaps coerced.

PETER: Yeah, so this homespun thing was really a pseudo-demorcatic look. It was imposed for ideological reasons on the people. It wasn’t as if it sprang naturally out of the style sense of the people or anything.

KATE HAULMAN: No, No. In fact, my findings are that it’s a very top down vision, very enforced by a certain set of– not necessarily elite men, some elite men, some middling men– but the leaders of the resistance movement, generate the homespun revolution.

PETER: Well do have evidence that patriotic women who otherwise sympathized with the revolutionary cause, resisted this particular form of patriotism? The idea that they should produce this cloth and then wear it.

KATE HAULMAN: Well I don’t have a lot of smoking gun evidence of that. I don’t have a lot of women saying, God I really just– who needs homespun, I don’t want to wear that. But what you do see is the persistence of certain styles, of imported styles and imported cloth, sometimes even in the face of non-consumption. Broad skirts, the hoops get really wide, and that’s very much about taking up space and drawing attention and displaying fabrics. And then heads get very high, so you get very high, elaborately produced hairstyle made of actual real hair and wigs and often festooned with pearls or flowers– and so women in the 1770’s, so this is right on the eve of the war for independence, and you see it in Philadelphia you see in places like Boston, and in Charleston– Women’s fashions get very big. So that if you look at practices, next to proclamations, if you will, you do see what is unspoken about adherence or lack thereof to the homespun movement.

PETER: But Kate, you’ve suggested that the homespun look was patriotic, that it would mark a commitment to the republican revolution. It was a republican aesthetic. We don’t care about luxury and all that kind of stuff. But when you take a longer look at the history of fashion, do you think a republican fashion aesthetic ever really took hold?

KATE HAULMAN: I would say that it did. By the 1790s, or maybe the first decade of the 19th century you have some reconciliation, If you will, stylistically between a look of republicanism, “small r”, and the demands of high style. And that arrives it’s a kind of French revolutionary era style. The high waisted Grecian gown, white or light colored fabrics, imported usually, right, still, but that look of the Greek statuary, right, is at that point by the 1790s, or the first decade of the 19th century, both high-style and comes under attack as such, but it also is a look of republicanism.

PETER: Yeah, so that was the en pierre look as it was known, diving bodices and all that.

KATE HAULMAN: Right.

PETER: And here you can combine republicanism with high style. Who would’ve ever thought that was possible?

KATE HAULMAN: Well interestingly enough most men don’t find that that’s very possible. But I think women can embrace it as both, and it seems to solve this problem, but, because it is still a high fashion, and it is an imported style, this time French, with all sorts of those associations. And then you layer onto that, all of this critique about the style being too diaphanous, revealing of the body transparent, bespeaking libertinism, then it’s really a problem.

PETER: So Kate you’re suggesting that fashion has broad ideological and political associations, It’s contested. People are concerned about fashion, and particularly the way women dress themselves.

KATE HAULMAN: Yes. I think that throughout this period women and women’s bodies become this litmus test and a site for projecting a certain vision of the nation of legitimacy, and that can run a couple of different ways. On the one hand, the women need to be displaying, a la’ homespun or something like it, republican virtue. On the other hand, for a long time in the British empire, women, not just women, men too, but women have been the symbols of and the arbiters of refinement, and gentility, and cosmopolitanism. And this is a moment of some uncertainty, this is a brand new experiment, a new nation, yes republican, “small r”, but also a nation, and how does the nation need to look? And so therein lies the tension, the conflict.

PETER: So were a lot of women seeing therapists at this time becasue of this cognitive dissonance?

KATE HAULMAN: Oh it’s that late. But men should have been, certainly.

PETER: Kate Haulman is a history professor at American University. Her book is called The Politics of Fashion in 18th Century America.

ED: It’s time for a short break, but don’t go away. When we get back, a group of anthropologists try to make their mark on the New York fashion scene.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be right back.