"Homespun" Success

When it comes to early American history, very rarely does it get better than Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. A short list of her credentials says it all: MacArthur Fellow, director of Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, James Duncan Professor of Early American History, recent Harvard College Professor designate. Being a hell of a writer doesn’t hurt, either.

Ulrich’s books, including Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 and A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, have set a standard of readability as well as scholarship. A Midwife’s Tale earned a Pulitzer Prize in history and was crafted into a documentary. With The Age of Homsepun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, Ulrich is back with another study of life in colonial New England that is destined to become a classic as well.

In The Age of Homespun, Ulrich studies what 11 objects from colonial everyday life have to say not only about their owners but also about the development of an American icon—the home-based rural economy in which virtuous women spun clothes and household linens while virtuous men tilled the soil. Each object—from an Indian basket dating from 1676 to an unfinished stocking of 1837—was specially chosen for its particular ability to flesh out the romanticized notion of “the age of homespun” that Horace Bushnell coined during the centennial celebration of Litchfield, Conn. in August, 1841.

“I looked at hundreds of objects in the course of my research for the book,” Ulrich said in an e-mail. “The ones I chose all raised larger questions central to my project—usually questions about boundaries, boundaries between Indians and colonists, rural and urban, plain work and fancy work, or commercial and homemade.”

Ulrich’s gifts as a writer become evident as she delves into the shapes, textures and stories of her 11 objects. Her clean, crisp prose and scholarly bent do not obscure, but rather enhance her delight in her subjects. We delight as well. Part history lesson, part jigsaw puzzle, The Age of Homespun spins yarns about colonial life and the people who lived it from the most ordinary of jumping-off points. For example, the Indian basket demonstrates new contact between English settlers and Algonkians in what is now Providence, R.I. and the subsequent blending of the cultures’ fabrics. Hannah Barnard’s cupboard and Betty Foot’s bed rug indicate the importance that was placed on maintaining gentility even on the new American frontier.

These homespun pieces are not just nostalgic reminders of a simpler time, long replaced by factories and Gap.com; they have a lot more to say about where we have been. Women occupy a special place in Ulrich’s research; they often appear as both the creators and preservers of these everyday objects. Their place at the foundation of the home-based economy indicates that even though “women’s liberation” as we understand it is an innovation of the twentieth century, colonial women, too, found ways to assert themselves.

“The ability to create fabrics gave some women an outlet for artistic sensibilities or a space on which to inscribe ownership of moveable property,” wrote Ulrich in the e-mail.

For most of us, home-production of clothing and linens has gone the way of the Dodo. It makes one wonder whether this machine era will leave a similarly rich legacy for the Laurel Thatcher Ulriches of the twenty-fourth century.

For her part, Ulrich is hopeful. “Material things will still be important, which is why curators at places like the Smithsonian are busy collecting contemporary objects. I recently saw in storage there a set of pacemakers in various sizes showing the evolution of that technology—and similar collections of birth-control pills, tampons, and soap!,” she wrote.

Here’s hoping future historians of this century follow Ulrich’s example in The Age of Homespun.

Published by Knopf, 418pp.; $35