Orgins:
"One controversial aspect of the history of technology in North India concerns spinning wheel. Because cotton textiles originated in India, it has long been assumed that the spinning wheel, as used with cotton, must also have been invented in the subcontinent, perhaps between AD 500 and 1000. However, early references to cotton spinning are so vague that none clearly identifies a wheel, according to Irfan Habib. The references could equally indicate earlier methods of hand-spinning. The earliest unambiguous reference is in a document dating from about 1350 which mentions women using spinning wheels in the previous century. Habib also points out that the most usual word in India for a spinning wheel is charkha, and this derives from the Persian language. He therefore thinks that the spinning wheel was introduced into India from Iran in the thirteenth century.
If the spinning wheel is not an Indian invention, where did it originate? The earliest clear illustrations of this machine come from Baghdad (drawn in 1237), China (c. 1270) and Europe (c. 1280)...There is some evidence that spinning wheels of some sort may have already come into use in both China and the Islamic world during the eleventh century."
-Encyclopedia
Women spinning through the ages.....
"The spinning wheel was an attractive emblem because it was so malleable. For patriots it symbolized women's contributions to the American Revolution, while for sentimentalists it conjured up a timeless domesticity. Craft revivalists saw in it the harmony of labor and art, feminists women's untapped productive power, and antimodernists the virtues of a bygone age. For Elizabeth Barney Buel, the wheel captured all of these ideals, and more. In The Tale of the Spinning-Wheel, published in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1903, she attributed the success of the colonial experiment to female industry. "The plough and the axe are not more symbolic of the winning of this country from the wilderness, nor the musket of the winning of its freedom, than is the spinning-wheel in woman's hands the symbol of both," she wrote. Colonial wives "spun into thread and yarn the flax and wool that was raised on the farm, and then knitted every pair of stockings and mittens, wove every inch of linen and woolen cloth, and cut and made every stitch of clothing worn by a family which generally numbered ten or a dozen Johns and Hezekiahs and Josiahs and Hepzibahs and Mehitable Anns. No wonder a man could go to the war for his country's independence, when he left Independence herself at home in the person of his wife." Although she did not claim to be a feminist, her prose radiated a conviction that women mattered in the past, and that they had not been given their due.
For Buel, the spinning wheel united women across space and time. She laid out her evidence point by point, dropping learned allusions to archaeology, art history, folklore, mythology, opera, and the Bible. "No written page of history, no musty parchment or sculptured stone, is so old that we cannot find upon it some traces of the spindle and distaff with their tale of joys and sorrows spun into the thread by the fingers of patient women whose hearts beat as our own to-day, in tune with the common throb of humanity." New York artist and Litchfield summer resident Emily Noyes Vanderpoel added authority to the argument with delicate drawings of mummy cloth, Stone Age fishing nets, and medieval distaffs as well as colonial flax wheels. Her frontispiece for the book captures Buel's notion of a "woman's sphere" centered in the home. A youthful spinner, dressed in the gauzy costume of the early republic stands in a vine-covered doorway, looking outward but securely planted within. Her enormous wheel, with its hub centered just beneath her slender waist, measures the reach of her arms and the power of her sexuality. She is both productive and potentially reproductive, fitted to her setting yet visible beyond it. "
-A Bed Sheet in Beinecke
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
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flirty
cheerful
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