Skip to main content

Some Domestic Thoughts

My youngest helped me put away all of the Passover dishes. It was a big job, not as big as getting ready for Passover but still-- a job. It is definately easier getting it done with one big kid rather than doing it with a bunch of toddlers underfoot.

The flurry of cooking over  Passover has gotten me thinking about some of the larger issues of domesticity. that and reading the truly excellent The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of the American Myth, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.  In the book, Ulrich explores several different objects created anywhere from the mid 1600's to the early period of the industrial revolution and sets them into their historical context.

I hadn't really thought about how the labor of women producing fiber helped the cause of the American Revolution. Apparently, early in the Revolution, women spun in public, in Boston Common to show their support for the Revolution. These displays were followed by militias marching. Both were differnet versions of the same act.

Women during colonial times and into the early 1800's used to keep tabs of  retail value of their labors and exchange their labors with neighbors based on these values. Funny, this global understanding of the value of fiber work seems to be lost these days. A constant complaint in my sewing discussion groups is when friends ask for sewing favors  not understanding that the labor has an actual monetary value. Women's work was an active part of the economic life of families.

The focus of this book is New England.  I grew up just south of Boston and have vacationed in New Hampshire, Maine and in Western Massachusetts. So while my base was just outside of Boston, I have close ties so many other areas in New England. I would have assumed that this is due to the fact that I live in the age of easy car travel. But even in the 1600's much to my suprise there was lots of movement throughout the region. A woman's story, might take her from five miles from where I grew up  to just south of Montreal.

I also just loved to learn the names of the people and families who give their names to the towns and mountains and streets that I know so well.

A thought provoking read, for those of you, who like me are love the history of textiles.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
2 comments
Read more