Household Artifacts Inspire a Lively Spin on the Past

“Urban fantasies about rural life are as old as the Greek eclogues and as American as the L.L. Bean catalog,” writes Harvard historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in “The Age of Homespun,” a lively and captivating examination of life in 18th and 19th century rural New England. “Privileged people in many centuries,” she tells us, “have imagined the pleasure without the muck and labor of country living.”

Through the examination of handmade objects dating from before the Revolutionary War until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Ulrich pieces together the stories of real lives, and in so doing quilts a new narrative, one that both probes and explodes the myths surrounding the idealized era of “homespun.”

Venerated as a time when families made almost all the things they needed, relying on God and their own hands rather than distant markets, the stories surrounding the age of homespun, Ulrich explains, tend to be biased toward the positive. Traditionally, they include no tales of depressed classes, small evidence of poverty and scant vice, as well as little reflection on the damage wrought by white colonists on the Native Americans of the region. Rather, the era is celebrated as a time when the “revolutions of the spinning wheel and the thwack of the loom sustained the rugged virtues of hard work, neighborliness and unaffected piety.” But myths, as we know, seldom tell the full story, which is what Ulrich is after.

In close analysis of old baskets, embroidered bed rugs and blankets, cotton counterpanes, painted chests and cupboards, spinning wheels and ordinary stockings, Ulrich finds forgotten forms of work and what she terms the mnemonic power of goods.

“Objects like these bob up from the depths of the American past like bottles on a wave, reminding us of how many lives remain undocumented even in a region known for its record keeping,” she says. Reconstructing vivid lives of New Englanders, Ulrich pays attention to the wives and daughters who did the spinning, weaving, knitting and embroidering.

Imagine going to a museum featuring a ragtag assortment of objects from the age of homespun in the company of an expert storyteller and well-versed historian. As you look at each object (items that, as “movable property” would have been the only assets traditionally belonging to women), Ulrich spins fascinating, tenuously connected narratives. Beginning with the few known historical facts of the particular object--who made it, when and why--she tells us what the tablecloth or chimney piece says about the time period or how the craftswoman viewed her work as reflected in private journal entries, as well as how the object fits in the bigger picture of American development, politics and pre-industrial history. Happily for the reader, the discussion is not limited to these straightforward facets, but traipses pleasantly far afield.

Reading Ulrich is like listening to a great-aunt who begins telling you about your twice-removed cousin, only to segue to her favorite brother, then the young man she dated in the ‘20s before moving on to the letters she received from her father when he was away in military service. As story upon story accretes, the reader glimpses a panoramic view of the time.

“The rhetoric of the Revolution and the War of 1812 emphasized household production, not only because it was an essential component of the nation’s economy,” Ulrich explains, “but because images of industrious, self-sacrificing and patriotic women domesticated and softened the often harsh realities of political conflict, economic uncertainty, and war.” This uplifting self-appraisal is still operative in the American psyche. The age of homespun, Ulrich argues, continues to haunt public discourse in debates over family farms, anxieties about the deterioration of family values and invocations of lost community. “When AIDS activists organize a national quilting bee, evangelical writers celebrate home schooling, or the First Lady proclaims that it takes a village to raise a child, they are creating new versions of the American pastoral,” Ulrich writes. “The mythology of homespun persists not only because it is adaptable to so many political persuasions, but because it allows us to forget that greed and war were so much a part of the American past.”

“The Age of Homespun” provides a clear-eyed perspective of the formative years in New England, delineating and giving value to the contributions of women and their hardscrabble lives, without shying away from the violence, arrogance and entitlement of the European colonists. Ulrich allows us to see not only the power of a household-fed economy on the cusp of the dawning industrial age, but a legacy of frustrated female dreams and intellectual privation spun into bedcovers and coats, linen tablecloths and stockings.