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Material Culture · Chapter 03, 1760–1789

The Spinning Bee as Political Theater

A domestic chore staged as a public act.

"A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina"-a London satirist's mocking view of the fifty-one women who pledged on October 25, 1774 to refuse British tea and "any Manufacture from England." The caricature is itself evidence of how seriously Britain took the colonial boycott of its cloth.
"A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina"-a London satirist's mocking view of the fifty-one women who pledged on October 25, 1774 to refuse British tea and "any Manufacture from England." The caricature is itself evidence of how seriously Britain took the colonial boycott of its cloth.Attributed to Philip Dawe, "A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina," mezzotint published by R. Sayer and J. Bennett, London, March 25, 1775. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain.

The spinning meeting was a performance as much as a work session. Women brought their wheels to the minister's house, spun from dawn until dusk, and were often treated to a sermon on industry and virtue; townspeople came to watch. Local newspapers tallied the day's output—skeins of yarn, yards of cloth—as if reporting a victory. Historians stress that many such gatherings were also charitable, with the yarn given to the minister's family, and that their political meaning was amplified by the printers who publicized them. Even so, the bee transformed an invisible household labor into a public ritual of citizenship and gave colonial women a rare, sanctioned political voice in a polity that would deny them formal political rights.

Sources

  1. ScholarshipLaurel Thatcher Ulrich. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
  2. ScholarshipT. H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford University Press, 2004.

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