This is the fourth thread of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers, who make up a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. We’re thus probing here was has been, in effect, the modal human experience. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at this question through the lens of agricultural productivity and labor. What we’ve found is that under ideal conditions, peasant households might subsist themselves while using only a relatively small part of their labor, but that conditions were never ideal: land scarcity in an absolute sense (too many hands for too few acres) made it possible for elites who owned the land there was to extract – through rents, taxes, corvée labor and more – nearly all of the surplus labor and production our farmers had, with the result that they worked quite a lot more than modern workers did, while still having almost no chance at achieving their ‘respectability’ needs fully.
In short, the peasant farmer often had to work as much as he could. When he wasn’t working, because there was no more land to work, he was hardly thrilled by that because it meant a shortfall in the material needs of his household.
But of course man cannot live on bread alone: the household has a lot more needs than agriculture. So far, we haven’t really discussed women’s labor. One of the mistaken assumptions about the past is that women “didn’t work,” which was simply never true or that their labor was a nice-to-have optional rather than essential to survival. As we’re going to see, peasant women worked a lot, in many cases more than their menfolk did and was every bit as crucial to the survival of the household as the labor of the men. That said labor in these households was typically gendered, meaning that some tasks were done predominately by men and some by women. There were exceptions: women come out into the fields are periods of highest labor demand (planting, harvest) in every agricultural society I’ve studied, for instance, even when ‘farming’ is a ‘male-coded’ activity. Soldiers on campaign were often made to mend their own clothes, even when ‘clothes mending’ was certainly a ‘female-coded’ activity.
But by and large, men and women in these households did different tasks, but no less necessary tasks.
But first, if you like what you are reading, please share it and if you really like it, you can support this project on Patreon! While I do teach as the academic equivalent of a tenant farmer, tilling the Big Man’s classes, this project is my little plot of freeheld land which enables me to keep working as a writers and scholar. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
Women’s Work
Compared to agriculture we almost immediately run into significant source difficulties when discussing the labor of women in peasant households or really any households. Our sources for the pre-modern period are mostly written by men; our sources for antiquity are nearly all written by men and that is reflected by their concerns. Columella’s De Re Rustica is in 12 books, of which only the last concerns itself with the activities of the vilica, the enslaved wife of the enslaved manager (the vilicus) of a large estate. Cato the Elder’s De Agricultura likewise runs 162 sections; one of which (143) concerns itself with the vilica. Our sources, being elite men, are really interested in people (and their activities) who are rich and male. Peasant women, being neither rich, nor male, are almost entirely ignored.
So while there are guidebooks in some considerable detail, as we’ve seen, on ancient and medieval agriculture, we lack matching works on wool-working, childrearing, food preparation and the many other tasks women did in these households. At best, we’ll have works like Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (Οἰκονομικός), covering what we might term ‘household management’ from the perspective of the male head of household, which might outline in brief the activities that Xenophon thinks a good farmer’s wife ought to be doing. We might also get, as with Pliny the Elder, details on specific varieties of wool or methods of linen production, but again from the perspective of an owner-operator or merchant trading the stuff, with almost no care to the women working the stuff.
As a result, whereas we can model farming from historical data contained in ancient or medieval texts, the evidence to do this for the tasks generally done by women in peasant households simply doesn’t exist. Instead, we will have to estimate from modern practitioners, often with quite a bit of required inference.
This problem is compounded by the flexibility of ‘women’s work’ in these households, flexibility that was, I’d argue, itself necessary for these households to function. As E.W. Barber notes in the introduction to her foundational Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (1994) a lot of the tasks that women did in the household were tasks which were flexible: they could be moved, or fit into small pockets of time, or performed ‘in the background’ while having at least some spare attention for other tasks. Spinning with a distaff, for instance, can be done almost anywhere: the materials can be easily carried into another room or into the village square. Food preparation – that is, cooking, though it entails more than just that – can be done with one eye open for other tasks. Cleaning tasks often take a lot of time in total, but can be accomplished in small pockets of time in between other tasks.
This doesn’t mean these tasks are less essential or easier or less labor intensive, but it is a pattern in how household tasks get gendered that is worth noting.
And Barber identifies readily what I think is the structuring reason behind that division of tasks: children. As we noted in part III, sustaining a peasant population under pre-modern mortality conditions required having a lot of children. The precise numbers will vary with small adjustments to things like mortality rates, but there’s clearly a lot of infant and childcare that needs to happen in these societies. In particular, for many of these societies – I won’t say ‘all,’ but certainly ‘most’ – there really is no ‘spinster’ class: functionally all women (and usually functionally all men) get married and at least attempt to have children and the typical couple needed to have quite a lot of children – we estimated around nine pregnancies – to maintain the slow population growth we see from these societies.
And while a great deal of the gendered expectations in these societies are a product of (patriarchal) social values, it is also the case that it was not possible for some of these tasks to have been shifted onto men in any case: only women can bear children and only women can nurse them. These societies lack innovations like baby formula or breast-pumps or refrigerated storage of milk or formula, things which enable fathers to share the load of childrearing more equitably; speaking as a father, I am quite grateful that technologies like formula exist so that I could take a more active role in my little one’s earliest months and also so that my better half could catch a break.
But the upshot of all of that is that while a peasant mother is nursing, she can never be very far from her children and “while she is nursing” – as we noted before – probably represents upwards of 40% of the reproductive period of her life (the c. 25-30 years from her mid-to-late teens to her late-30s/early-40s), which of course also coincides with the period where she would be most physically able to do heavier labor (like agriculture) in any case. Of course children do not become ‘labor-free’ just because they’re eating solids – ask the parent of any toddler – but the realities of nursing have effectively already determined who is going to be in a position to be primary caregiver, since the wife of the house (who is still having more children) must already be in situations where she can watch, feed and care for young children while the husband, almost by process of elimination, has to be in the field (keeping in mind that ‘the field’ may be quite distant from ‘the house’ because, remember, these peasants tend to own lots of little strips of land spread all over).
In that context, it makes a lot of sense for every form of labor which can be performed alongside watching or nursing small children to end up as ‘women’s work,’ not because they are unnecessary or unimportant – to the contrary, they’re extremely necessary and important – but because this household doesn’t have a ton of spare labor and someone needs to be in the fields all day.
Consequently, while it is the case that these are male-dominated societies with sharply unequal roles for men and women – often unnecessarily unequal roles, we should note – the basic division of labor, where men mostly farmed and women mostly cleaned, cooked, spun and did childcare (both with significant flexibility and crossover in both; women did work in the fields when they had to, which was often) – that division of labor was probably overdetermined even in the absence of a culture of oppressive patriarchy. But also these were cultures of oppressive patriarchy.
All of that said the ‘modular’ nature of these tasks – able to fit in the spaces that peasant women could afford to give them while managing such a heavy workload (and as we’ll see, it is a heavy workload) – makes it even harder to model out the labor demands fully, because we’re not dealing with one big task (agriculture) with a rigid schedule but a host of small tasks with variable schedules, which are no less essential.
Nevertheless, we’re going to try and we’ll start this week with textile production.
Spinning and Weaving But Mostly Spinning
Conveniently, we have already covered pre-modern textile production for wool and linen in some detail, so we can mostly summarize here.
The textile production process has a few basic steps: the fibers (wool or flax) have to be grown, the former on sheep, the latter as plants, and then either sheared (wool) or harvested (flax). There is then a phase of fiber preparation. Flax has to be retted (rotting away everything but the pith, where the useful fibers are), broken (to breath up the pith), then scutched to leave just the useful fibers; this would usually happen at the farm producing the flax, rather than being done by the household textile producer, so it would be done by some peasants but not by most peasants, though . Wool, by contrast, has to be sorted, then washed and scoured (removing oils), and then combed or carded (removing imperfect fibers, dirt and such). Unlike flax production, which often happened before the flax left the growing site, wool often reached peasant households as raw wool, so a peasant woman making clothes is going to be washing, scouring and carding her own wool. Carding, in particular, can take quite a long time, although I am told that the time and labor demands for wool preparation can be pretty heavily dependent on the quality and condition of the wool fibers. Fiber preparation in the household is a significant labor task, but a relatively small portion of total labor time, probably around 2-3% of the total labor investment.
Once the fibers are cleaned and prepared, they have to be turned into thread, which means spinning. ‘Spinning’ here is quite literal: the mechanical action that is happening here is that the fibers are being twisted around each other, their microscopic barbs (called ‘scaling’) hooking into each other in order to hold many short fibers together to make a longer length of yarn or thread. That creates a tricky mechanical challenge in that the spinner needs to slowly draw in the fibers and twist them while drawing them, since the goal is to create a long thread of fibers, rather than a single tightly-coiled ball of them. The solution to this mechanical problem, from deep in antiquity onward, was the distaff and spindle.
The distaff is can be just a simple rod although they are often shaped to better hold the raw fibers at the top (that mass of fibers is called a ‘roving’). Most distaffs for wool are quite long, so that the rod of the distaff can be couched under the armpit or rested on the ground while sitting in order to free both of the hands. The raw fibers – wool or flax, both use this process – are wrapped around the top of the distaff and often held in place by means of a cord. Some of the fibers are then drawn out of the general mass, twisted by hand and attached to a second object, a spindle. The spindle will be providing the rotary twisting motion so that the spinner has both of her hands free to manipulate the fibers themselves. Spindles will generally have an attachment point for the thread (the ‘hook’), a long section (the ‘shaft’) that functions like a bobbin to collect the thread once spun and finally a spindle whorl: a weight, typically significantly wider than the rest of the spindle. The spindle whorl’s purpose is to preserve rotational momentum: being both heavier and wider help with this, while often the base of the spindle narrows to basically a point so the spinner can with a single flick of the fingers cause a bunch of rotations and get the whole thing spinning quickly with a lot of energy.
What the spinner then does is set the spindle spinning with a quick twist at the base and then either places it on something or lets it hang supported by the thread itself (this is called a ‘drop spindle’ and was the most common for the kinds of fibers that a peasant is going to be making in the broader Mediterranean world; supported spindles were required sometimes for very slippery or very fine fibers). That leaves both hands, typically, free to control the rate at which the fibers are pulled into the thread and its spinning motion.
We often speak of these societies as ‘farming’ societies, but we might equally call them ‘spinning’ societies. Spinning is by far the most labor intensive part of this process; as noted below, upwards of 80% of the production time of a garment, including the final sewing and assembly, was consumed by spinning. Fortunately for our peasant women, spinning was a very mobile activity. As you can see demonstrated, while a spinner has to stand (or more commonly sit) still once the spinning process is begun, it is very easy to stop, pack up the distaff, roving, thread, and spindle and move to set up somewhere else or continue at a later time. This was thus a task that could be fit into small pockets of time and accomplished while watching other things: a woman could spin some thread while watching children, waiting for food to cook or water to boil, while keeping an eye on animals or – perhaps most importantly – while supervising other, less experienced spinners (like a peasant woman’s daughters, granddaughters, nieces, younger sisters, etc.).
The next major task was weaving, which is how thread becomes fabric. Weaving (and sewing) tend to feature disproportionately in the public imagination because of how much our own perceptions are rooted in textile production in a post-spinning-jenny world of industrial thread production, but weaving was a lot less time intensive than spinning, albeit far more than carding or sewing; it’s about 10-15% of the production time. Unlike spinning, weaving is not a mobile task at all. In order to weave, a loom (the frame that holds the threads) has to be set up, a set that involves quite a bit of set-up and take-down labor. In most forms of weaving, once the loom is set up, it isn’t going anywhere. Certain kinds of looms, like warp-weighted and backstrap looms, might be set up only for a single project, while later horizontal looms are essentially a permanent workspace for many projects, but in all of those cases, the loom isn’t going anywhere.
Finally, of course, garments might have to be sewn, although I should note that the amount of sewing might vary a fair bit by time period. Most ancient garments, for instance, that I am familiar with from Greece and Rome required only minimal sewing, they were ‘woven to shape’ which is a fancy way of saying they tended to consist of rectangles of fabric, with most of the shaping and gathering provided by things like belts. By contrast, medieval European fashion increasingly involves dress – for both men and women – with more complex shapes: trousers, hose, sleeves and garments with pockets, gathers, and other shaping. Those more complex patterns would have meant more sewing time, though as far as I know even in those cases for common clothing, sewing time is still a small drop in the bucket compared to spinning and weaving, at most around 5% of total production time.
There’s another vector of change over time here that we noted in the textile series, which is the emergence in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period of significantly better spinning and weaving technology. For spinning, this is the spinning wheel (known in the Near East by the 1000s AD and in Europe by the 1200s), eventually developing (c. 1530) into the treadle-driven spinning wheel. For weaving, the warp-weighted loom, which dominated Mediterranean weaving – though some specialty projects required different loom types – from the late Neolithic onwards, was eventually supplanted by the horizontal framed loom, developed in China and arriving in the Mediterranean in the 10th century; by the 13th century they were common in Europe. In the 1730s, we get the flying shuttle loom, which is essentially a perfected form of the horizontal frame loom and far more productive. The difference in production was substantial, with mature spinning wheels and the horizontal frame looms being about three times more productive than their ancient and early medieval counterparts.
You might imagine that meant that peasant women had tons of free time once these inventions arrived, but even a casual look at medieval fashion will tell you why this doesn’t happen: households don’t respond to increased production by working less, but rather by adopting fashions which involve more fabric, with more layers and more complex patterns, as well as having more clothes. Indeed, one thing that is very striking is how in the pre-modern world, high status clothing was often signified by its conspicuous waste of material – long, draping sleeves, billowy skirts, puffed sleeves or the heavy, complex folded-cloth garments like the Roman toga – in a way that has mostly fallen out of high status fashion since cloth has gotten so much less expensive.1
Lanam Fecit
We’ve already discussed this in more depth in the clothing series, but I do want to note just how central textile production clearly was to the identities of ancient and medieval women, often both elite and non-elite. Clothing was, of course, a major way, arguably the most major way, to demonstrate one’s status in a community. Peasants may have been relatively poor compared to aristocrats, but they were still people of status, landholders, however small, and you can bet that they aimed to demonstrate that status and position – ‘I am a person who matters‘ – in their clothing. Since nearly all of that clothing was produced at home, the burden of doing this fell on the women of the household and it is very clear that peasant women took pride in their textile work and in their skills. I named this section after the very common line in the epitaphs and eulogies of Roman women, lanam fecit, “she made (read: spun) wool,” which speaks to the value placed on doing the task and doing it well.
Likewise, in Livy’s story of the fall of the Roman monarchy, it is Lucretia’s diligent wool-working (along with her enslaved servants) that marks her out as the paragon of Roman female virtue (Livy 1.57.9-10), a motif echoed by the first Roman Empress Livia, who made a public show of supplying her husband Augustus with ‘home spun’ togas for wear in public (Seut. Aug. 73).2 Compare Plutarch’s Ionian woman, boastful about her fine weaving (Plut. Mor. 241D), the pride of Ovid’s Arachne (Ovid. Met. 4.1-145) or the reputation of Bertha of Swabia (907-966; queen of Italy 922-926, 937-948), held up as an exemplar of womanly virtue spinning her own thread and of course quite famously likewise Penelope in the Odyssey, whose womanly virtue is marked out in part by her weaving of a burial shroud – the act of weaving itself is a demonstration of her skill, but also serves as the tapestry of her cleverness, as it were, as it is the mechanism of the ruse to deceive the suitors.
We can also be pretty sure textile production would be an opportunity for households to work together, another example of horizontal relationships in these communities mattering. Not every woman would necessarily always be doing every task, but instead, where we can see household textile production that survived into the modern period, we see quite a lot of specialization, trade and exchange between households (see e.g. K.A. Bowie, “Unraveling the Myth of the Subsistence Economy: Textile Production in Nineteenth Century Northern Thailand” Journal of Asian Studies 51.4 (1992)). While we’re modeling here as if every household does every part of the textile production process (just as we’ve modeled every household basically farming all of their calorie needs) we need to remember that these peasants are embedded in networks of trade and exchange – sometimes that’s money-and-markets exchange, sometimes it is gift-and-reciprocity exchange – with their neighbors, family members and even the Big Men who own much of the land.
But most of all I want to stress that this is an essential task; there is a tendency to treat it as somehow a lesser need than the food generated by agriculture but it was necessary. A household that didn’t have sufficient textiles would struggle to maintain its status and standing in the community and of course in most climates, clothing is a non-optional requirement for cold or wet weather.
That said, while the production of clothing was an essential task, it was not a well-remunerated task. Regular weavers – not specialized in rare or fine fabrics – are some of the least well paid individuals in Diocletian’s Price Edict, paid just 12-16 denarii per day (20-40 for those working high quality linen, 25-40 for those working on silk), compared to 25 denarii per day for an unskilled farm laborers, mule drivers, shepherds and 50 or more for skilled artisans working wood, stone or metal (Carpenters: 50; mosaic workers, 60, wall painters (fresco, one assumes): 75, shipwrights, 50-60, blacksmith or baker, 50, etc.). J.S. Lee imputes a rough daily wage for spinners at 2d3 and for a weaver 3.9d; he figures that “a married woman who spent half her time spinning would have earned just under one-third of a labourer’s wage” (Lee, op. cit., 74). Lee presents this as a “good wage” compared to things like servants on annual contract, but it’s hard not to notice that it is still meaningfully lower than the wage commanded by unskilled labor per unit-time.
That may seem counterintuitive, because we’ve just noted that spinning and weaving were skills that require a fair bit of manual dexterity and practice, where the quality of the spinner and weaver has a huge impact on the quality of the final product. But it is important here to think about how the economics of these societies are structured: remember these societies are ‘long’ on people and short on capital, so it is capital, not labor, which commands most returns. The peasant household mostly survives as an economic unit because however poor peasants may seem, they own or have rights to some small amount of capital: land. But the peasant wife diligently working her wool has only labor: the capital involved is relatively minimal – a distaff, spindle, and simple loom were not huge capital investments the way farmland was. And while in an objective sense, spinning and weaving are both examples of skilled labor, in a society where nearly all women were trained to spin and weave, the skills essentially become ‘unspecialized labor’ for women (the same way these societies assume basically anyone can farm and so ‘farming’ becomes an ‘unspecialized’ labor category, perhaps most vividly, if cruelly, demonstrated by how ancient societies assume that naturally war captives could be put to work as enslaved farm workers (or, for women, for that matter, enslaved textile workers), no training required).
Yet even then, wool-working commands even worse wages than unspecialized male labor and it is hard not to see the structures of gender and power at work here. It certainly isn’t that fabric was cheap in these societies, but that it was easier to press down the wages of women, who had less power and fewer opportunities to acquire capital or engage in more remunerative wage labor. This is sometimes quite vividly portrayed, particular in the context of medieval male commercial weavers, who command higher wages than the female spinners providing all of their thread (on this, see J.S. Lee, op. cit.). Equally, in a society where it was assumed that the ‘primary’ income of the household was from agricultural labor done by men, textile production might command lower ‘wages’ (literal or figurative) due to being viewed as a ‘side hustle,’ as it were, of the household, despite its considerable labor demands.
It is a useful reminder that while economic principles govern prices and wages (in a sense, we could say here that the sharp limits patriarchal societies impose on women’s opportunities artificially increases the ‘supply’ of spinners and weavers, thus pushing down their wages), they do not do so in a vacuum but in the context of societies where deeply socially embedded patterns also play a major role. In this case, in a real sense labor mobility is heavily reduced by the nearly binary gendering of labor patterns, resulting in what at least seems to me to be quite clearly an inefficiency in labor allocation expressing itself through depressed wages for female workers. Of course that has an implication for these households: a household that ends up ‘male-shifted,’ assuming it can get sufficient land, can likely produce enough to buy or trade for the fabric it needs (albeit at significant cost), but a household that ends up ‘female-shifted’ is likely to experience significant hardship due to the lower returns commanded by textile work (and thus the motif of the poor woman spinner, struggling to keep her family afloat in the absence of a male ‘breadwinner’).
Spindle-Time
Again, for readers who want more detail on those processes or their social position, the series on textiles is there for you. But just as with farming, we are focused here on production time and subsistence, rather than the intricacies of methods and tools. Now the key tasks we’re interested in here are the ones that would be happening within most peasants households to some degree: fiber preparation, spinning, weaving and sewing. Unfortunately, our sources give us basically no indication before the early modern period how long such tasks might take, so we’re primarily reliant on the experience of modern-day practitioners of traditional methods of textile production. Even that is complicated, because most living history practitioners making textiles by hand – at least, in the United States, where I am – are interested in doing with with the technology of the late 1700s or early 1800s: treadle-driven spinning wheels (developed c. 1530) and flying shuttle looms (developed c. 1733). It is absolutely still useful to talk to those practitioners, but their production rates are going to be several times faster than what might have pertained during the Middle Ages or antiquity.
Still, I have assembled a few studies and also talked to a number of practitioners (if you spin or weave and tell me that, there is a 100% I will immediately begin asking you about production methods, tools and speeds; both my better half and I love living history exhibits and I arrive like the Inquisition when it comes to production methods) and I think it is possible to have a basic sense of the time demands. So we can pull forward the chart we used back when we discussed textile production, showing the estimated time to produce a yard (square) of fabric (8,361.27cm2).
| Fiber Preparation | Spinning | Weaving | Sewing | Total | % spent spinning | |
| Aldrete et al | 3.25 hours | 74.7 hours | 9.75 hours | 2+ hours? | 89.7 hours | 83.2% |
| Fischer | – | 100 hours | 14.4 hours | 1.4 hours | 115.8 hours | 86.35% |
| J.S. Lee | – | 36 hours | 6 hours | – | 42 hours | 85.7% |
Aldrete’s numbers here are for linen production, while Fischer and Lee are both focused in wool; Lee’s figures are for spinning using a spinning wheel and a horizontal loom (but not a flying-shuttle loom), while Fischer and Aldrete’s figures assume spinning with a distaff and a vertical (‘warp-weighted’) loom. You can see the technological impact very clearly: Lee’s textile producers are spinning and weaving a yard every 42 hours, compared to 84.45 hours for Aldrete and 114.4 for Fischer – that’s two to three times faster. Another quirk of my data so far is that I’ve never gotten good time estimates for wool fiber preparation by traditional practitioners: the problem when I ask is invariably that wool is getting carded and combed pretty regularly and it’s hard to neatly know that X amount of fabric required Y meters or yards of thread required Z carded wool which required A hours to produce from B pounds of wool, because the process just isn’t that self-contained and made more complex that we shift measurements midway from length of thread (or area of fabric) to weight of wool and we do so in a process (carding) which is removing a bunch of material from the wool by design and so weight in is not equal to weight out.
Still, the task is not hopeless. A single yard of fabric might require something like 1,800m of thread, which is right around a pound of wool (0.45kg, very roughly) and practitioners often report that it takes a few hours 3-4 or so, to comb and card a pound of wool, conveniently on the same rough order of magnitude as Aldrete’s figure for flax preparation. Naturally, production times will vary based on the quality of fibers, the skill of the producer and the technology available. Still, these figures give us something to go on for our model.
In most places in the broader Mediterranean the vast majority of textile production is going to be in wool, not linen (or imports like cotton or silk), so we can focus on wool production. Let’s assume producing a yard of fabric requires very roughly 3.5 hours of carding, 90 hours of spinning, 12 hours of weaving and another 2 hours of sewing to get us to finished garments, taking something like an average of our pre-spinning-wheel estimates. That’s a total of 107.5 hours of labor per yard of fabric used in finished garments or other textiles (sheets, etc.). That’s how fast we might expect the relatively experienced adult women of the household to work; for the sake of it, we can assume that the young girls and the elderly women work more slowly, perhaps at half the rate of women in their prime (things like loom set up, for instance, I can imagine getting a lot slower as one ages).
The last thing we do need to do is convert back over to metric: my figures for textile production are invariably in yards and pounds because in the United States – I am unsure about the rest of the English speaking world – yards is invariably how fabric is sold. But one yard of fabric is 0.836m2, so our 107.5 hours per square yard becomes about 128.5 hours4 per square meter: about 4 hours carding, 107.5 hours spinning, 15 hours weaving and 2 hours sewing, per meter square (later note: as about 10,000 comments have pointed out, I did this metric conversion wrong the first time! Fixed now, I hope). Now we can do our textile production time estimates per household:
| The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs | |
| Subsistence Fabric Required | 13.75m2 fabric (6.35kg fibers) | 18.75m2 fabric (8.68kg fibers) | 32.5m2 fabric (15kg fibers) |
| Subsistence Labor Time | 1767 hours 34 hours per week | 2409 hours 46 hours per week | 4,176 hours 80 hours per week |
| Respectability Fabric Required | 27.5m2 fabric (12.7kg fibers) | 37.5m2 fabric (17.36kg fibers) | 65m2 fabric (30kg fibers) |
| Respectability Labor Time | 3,534 hours 68 hours per week | 4819 hours 93 hours per week | 8,352.5 hours 160.5 hours per week |
That is, as you can see, quite a lot of labor time. By way of comparison, if we assume 12 hour working days, the hours each family required to hit farming subsistence (including rent but not other forms of extraction) were 2,184 for the Smalls, 3,120 for the Middles and 5,616 for the Biggs, so textile production is likely going to occupy nearly as much time as agriculture: around three-quarters of the time demand. In practice, of course, demand for textiles in the household is fairly elastic: if textile production is low, old clothes can be worn a bit longer as they wear out and fabric can be reused a little more aggressively, at the cost of everything looking and feeling a bit shabby. If textile production is high, fabric could be sold or simply allow the family to have somewhat nicer clothes. There’s a bit more flexibility here than with food, but we must stress the flexibility is not infinite: no household can survive with no fabric; if it cannot be made, it must be bought.
Now you may be thinking, “but wait, I thought you led by suggesting that women’s labor time was probably more fully employed than men’s labor time in these households, but here we’ve seen that textile production demands only around three quarters (70-80%, depending on household size and composition) of the labor as farming?”
Indeed, because women have to balance this work in textile production with a bunch of other key tasks. And next week, we’ll bring those tasks in – food preparation, childcare, water-fetching, cleaning and so on – to get a fuller picture in our model of the necessary labor largely being done by women (and girls) in these households. As we’ll see, once we total it all up, these peasant women work a lot.
- I’d actually argue we’ve gone oddly in another direction: whereas pre-modern high-status clothes often can use multiple layers to shape most bodies into the fashionable silhouette, for modern fashion, high status clothing often doesn’t do much shaping at all. Instead, one signals high status by having the fashionable body, a declaration that one can afford the leisure time (and/or surgery) to mold one’s body into the fashionable shape. Personally, I am not entirely sure this is actually an improvement, as social standards go.
- Livia was extraordinarily wealthy, so we should take this narrative with a grain of salt: she made sure people saw her doing this task, probably more as propaganda than production.
- that is, pence.
- 128.569, but we’re not being that precise
.png){kind=link}
Our Host observed that cheaper fabric meant that people started to display status with the shapeliness of their bodies, rather than their clothes. This was slightly preceded by the blue jeans revolution of the 1960’s, where the middle class stopped denoting status with high-quality fabrics like gabardine, and used less visible status markers, such as the red tab on the rear pocket of genuine (and expensive!) Levi’s.
I imagine that many of the historical and contemporary complaints that we hear about modern clothing being “too revealing” is a consequence of this fashion shift. The plantiff lives in a world where skimpy clothes are a sign of promiscuity (and thus low status), but the defendant lives in a world where they are a sign of prosperity/leisure (and thus high status).
Given the development of prevention and treatment for both STDs and pregnancies, promiscuity has become, if not strictly speaking high status, at least accepted in the sense that it isn’t considered damaging to the marriageability of members of either sex. It is compatible with respectability.
More distantly, this development also relies on the labor patterns described in this series having been blown to pieces by industrialization. We buy food and clothes, we “buy” childcare from schools and kindergartens, we have piped water and washing machines — thus nowadays households are not under any practical pressure to consist of an approximately matching number of working-age men and women, nor to have a member specializing as
quartermasterhomemaker. The most visible consequence is that single-adult (including single-parent) households have proliferated, but less visibly, so have attempts at larger households, and for that matter the approach sometimes derided as “dorms for adults”.This isn’t new, though. Those Greek statues of women in clinging gowns were pretty obviously showing off the women’s bodies (as well as the skill of the artist). And there was that famous court case where a woman proved her innocence by displaying her beauty (all of it).
And it’s not like we don’t value fabrics as status symbols. Look at office dress codes, for example. We’re not as finely-tuned to the differences since we don’t work with fibers every day, but we notice some things.
I think partially it’s a matter of degrees–we are less concerned with fabric type/quality than folks in the past, though we still care. And partially it’s a matter of shifting views on beauty–they thought certain things were attractive in the past, but we don’t so we may not recognize them as being present because they’re attractive. (And bear in mind that a lot of the sources we have were individuals expressing their personal views, which can get very weird and may not represent the norm.)
I’d argue that in our times, we more keenly feel the difference in labor hours between machine-produced fabrics and clothes that have some degree of manual human labor applied to them, where custom-tailored clothes are considered significantly more valuable (and therefore, expensive) than industrially-sized clothes bought “off the rack”.
Basically all clothes have some degree of manual labor applied to them, though there’s obviously a difference in the mass-production labor of off-the-rack clothes and custom-tailored stuff.
Am I missing something, or is the math you did at the end backwards? 107.5 hours per yard, with a yard being 0.836m^2 should result in more time per square meter, not less. So not 89.5 hours per square meter but more like 128.5 hours per square meter.
It has mostly gone out of fashion, but when I was young, sixty years ago, knitting functioned much the same way that spinning did for millennia. It’s something you can do in short stretches, putting it down readily when necessary, and thus it can be combined with watching children or other domestic tasks. Also, a factor in division of labor not mentioned by Bret, it requires (or at least rewards) digital dexterity, as do many other traditional female tasks. Male tasks are more likely to require upper body strength, needed to “plow a straight furrow.”
As I alluded to, when I was a young child, many of my matrons in my mother’s social circle knitted almost constantly. Today, in my Manhattan neighborhood, most of the children in the playground are being watched by immigrant nursemaids, and neither they nor their employers are knitting. Tempora mutantur.
Partly the change comes down to reduction in the cost of clothing as you’d no doubt expect. Relevant to this series however, the shift in human reproductive patterns has had an effect as well; without the expectation of child mortality that used to be normal, when bad things happen to children we no longer consider it simple fate. Even generation ago, children died from “accidents” in the public imagination, but now in America children only come into distress because a human intervened to cause it or because a human failed to intervene to prevent it.
A child-minder engaged in some additional activity, at least if they are also female-presenting, can expect social or even economic consequences for their ‘inattention.’
“A child-minder engaged in some additional activity, at least if they are also female-presenting, can expect social or even economic consequences for their ‘inattention.’”
Female. Not female-presenting. Let’s be real here. No one treats women who identify as men (transmen) nicer than they do women who admit to their womanhood. Some men might humour “tomboys” as “one of the guys” when times are good, but when the blame for a child getting hurt is assigned … well, take a guess.
Not “presenting” as female doesn’t matter one bit, as long as the people you’re interacting with know what you are.
Men can get some added privileges (at the expense of women, and only women, mind) by claiming female identity, but that is because they are male and thus higher status than women.
ew, radfems in the comment section
transphobia is bad
There is nothing radfem about the idea that trans women are a male attempt to get at that sweet femme privilege.
Your political position as a woman would have to be very peculiar to believe both in the idea that women who can get pregnant are inherently privileged compared to men, and that trans women are somehow unduly “infiltrating” privileged spaces occupied solely by women.
A female-presenting child minder is a trans woman, we’re not talking about trans men here I think. And if you think trans women are /privileged/ in a world where politicians are calling them terrorists who should all be locked up, I really have no idea what to say to you.
Given the observed treatment of transwomen on the planet Earth, I can only conclude that the claim that transwomen receive “added privileges at the expense of cis women,” is being made based on observations of some extremely strange parallel reality. A reality that the rest of humanity has no access to, and which may exist only between the ears of the person making the claim.
How can you carry around such a stuffed bag of ideological buzzwords for justifying your bigotry, and yet not know about separation of presentation and identity?
I specifically invoked presentation as a way of warding off your exact brand of hatred, so let me be clear instead:
People seen as female because they identify as female can expect social or even economic consequences…
People seen as female because they are wearing one or more articles of clothing associated with femininity can expect social or even economic consequences…
People seen as female because they have a body type that may be associated with female identity can expect social or even economic consequences…
People seen as female because they are performing work stereotyped as female can expect social or even economic consequences…
People seen as female because the viewer thinks they are wearing one or more articles of clothing associated with femininity even though they are not can expect social or even economic consequences…
People seen as female because the viewer thinks they have a body type that may be associated with female identity even though they do not can expect social or even economic consequences…
People seen as female because the viewer thinks they are performing work stereotyped as female even when they are not can expect social or even economic consequences…
Isn’t it better to not have to detail every case, but simply have a term to use? The concept of ‘presenting as’ an identity, conceptually distinct from and associated with an identity, is a common way of talking for people whose discussions of identity are serious and concerned with understanding an respect. In retrospect, it should come as no surprise that that use is not something you have encountered in your own bigoted circles.
What “added privileges” could men get by “claiming female identity”? I’m curious in what way you believe women to be privileged compared to men in our modern (and still patriarchial) society in a way that “men” could conceivably access.
Do you think child-minders would receive obloquy for knitting? I don’t see too many mothers in the local park, but the immigrant nursemaids don’t seem to track the children obsessively: they sit and chat with the other nursemaids from their ethnic group.
I recall some thing about a German monarch who punished old women running market stalls if they weren’t also knitting. How dare they be less productive!
This was likely in Will Cuppy’s “The Decline And Fall Of Practically Everybody”, his book of weird facts about historical figures.
Looks like this was Frederick The Great, according to Thomas Carlyle.
I wouldn’t say it’s gone out of fashion, I certainly know people who do it, but more of a semi-hobby activity (like others of us might bake bread or make our own soap) than an economic necessity. It’s certainly common enough that there are plenty of women who know how to do it and could teach the rest of us in a pinch, if the clothing market shut down for some reason.
Knitting is still around; it had a big revival in the aughts. But it’s definitely a hobby rather than a necessity. For the cost of a skein of wool sock yarn that’ll make one pair of socks, I can buy five pairs of polyester-blend socks, or even buy a pair of wool socks if I find them on sale.
The same applies to sewing; the cost of fabric, thread, and notions is so close to the cost of a finished garment that it only makes sense to sew if you love the activity.
Or you want an item of clothing that is not available for purchase. That’s the reason my wife makes so many clothes for herself (and me!)
I think it’s also a display of status, like so much else to do with clothes. By wearing a hand-knitted garment (which looks very different from a machine-knitted one so everyone _knows_) you are conspicuously displaying that you had enough leisure to time to make clothes when you didn’t have to (because buying them from Shein or some such source requires a lot less resources). Or else you are rich enough to pay another person to hand-knit your clothes, of course. Either way, you are displaying your wealth.
Or, in my case, to annoy your wife by reminding her that you had a former girlfriend who did quality knitting.
Funny story, in the eyes of my great grandmother knitting was mens work.
I think it is pretty easy to guess why that is. Winter brought a time of relative leisure to farmers, at least in the climate I grew up in. But for women, the work never stoped. So knitting became a thing man did to produce “a little extra”.
“But one yard of fabric is 0.836m2, so our 107.5 hours per square yard becomes about 89.5 hours per square meter”
Your maths has gone the wrong way here: the square meter is larger than the square yard so the time must surely be larger. 107.5 / 0.836 = 128.6 hours
(Not sure if my first attempt at this comment went through; feel free to delete if there’s a duplicate)
Looks like there’s a calculation mistake when converting back to metric. A square meter is bigger than a yard of fabric, it should take longer. I think you multiplied 107.5 hours/yard * 0.836 square meters/yard, instead of dividing; the correct result would be ~128.59 hours/square meter.
The conversion between yards and meters is backwards. A square meter of cloth should take longer than a square yard of cloth because it’s bigger.
I think you made a mistake in your calculations here :
> But one yard of fabric is 0.836m2, so our 107.5 hours per square yard becomes about 89.5 hours4 per square meter
You should have the time T in hours with : T (in h) = ( 107.5 h/yd² ) * ( 1 m² ) / ( 0.836 m²/yd² )
Which translate to T = 107.5 / 0.836 = 128.6 h/m².
Very instructive otherwise!
“But one yard of fabric is 0.836m2, so our 107.5 hours per square yard becomes about 89.5 hours per square meter”
Am I misreading that, or are you converting exactly the wrong way around?
A yard is less than a meter, so producing a square meter of fabric would have to take *longer* than producing a (square) yard of fabric. Assuming the yard-to-square-meter number is right, it should be 128.6 hours per square meter (unless my sleepy brain made a mistake)
It looks like your math is wrong. A square yard is smaller than a square meter, so you should have *divided *107.5 hours per square yard by 0.836 to get 128.6 hours per square meter.
Wait, I think you accidentally converted the square yard/hour into square meter/hour incorrectly? Your results show less time per square meter than per square yard, even though a square meter is larger than a square yard.
Or am I mistaken here?
“But one yard of fabric is 0.836m2, so our 107.5 hours per square yard becomes about 89.5 hours per square meter”
Our host seem to have his math backwards here: Square meter is bigger than square yard, so it should take longer time to produce it – about 127 hours.
“men mostly farmed and women mostly [list of several things]”
Men also had a “secondary occupation” in things such as getting large quantities of firewood (for all that cooking and general heating), constructing the houses, etc.
“conspicuous waste of fabric”
Even as late as the WW2 era US, wool fabric was subject to rationing and correspondingly some styles of conspicuous consumption thereof (e.g. zoot suits) were popular.
“our 107.5 hours per square yard becomes about 89.5 hours per square meter”
128.59 hours per square meter.
Children were often sent out to gather firewood — sticks and windfall branches and other dead wood, primarily. That was a necessary job well within their abilities. Also driving out animals to pasture and minding them, and then driving them back to the farmstead.
In the interests of not merely posting another observation about a unit conversion error, I’m going to bring up that “Via Wikipedia, a distaff and spindle at work” follows the unfortunate tendency for historical writers to airbrush women out of existence. “Via Wikipedia, a depiction of a woman operating a distaff and spindle” would be more accurate.
There’s a small math error comparing the hours for yardage of fabric vs square meter. You multiplied 107.5 by 0.836 when you meant to divide
The saying “it will cost the shirt of your back” is a fossilized remnant of a time when clothes were very expensive and required a lot of work.
I think the implication is that it’s the last shirt you own and so has to be the one being worn. That makes it a greater loss.
See also Matt v.39-41:” But I say unto you that ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him two.”
As current red carpet and couture designer runway looks are both body revealing, and voluminous — yards and yards of trailing fabric, and / or / maybe — underneath the yards of drapery, there is little to nothing — what is this telling us about our current economic condition and textiles?
Clothing that is both revealing and voluminous shows the status of the person in two ways – 1) they have the money, energy, discipline, and taste to shape their bodies to fit current fashion standards, and 2) they are wealthy enough to have impractical clothing that requires lots of other people’s help to put on and to move around (in an age when even rather well off people no longer have servants). Also, this clothing itself requires a lot of hand labor (rather than machine work) to make, and likely needs to be customized to the body. When you read fashion press, like I do, it’s pretty common for the designer or the celebrity to proclaim that this gown needed thousands of hours of hand-beading, with an emphasis on what was done by hand.
The extreme example is catwalk fashion – I know both a modiste for a fashion house and an ex-catwalk model and the thing they both remember as the oddest (as well as most stressful) part of the gig is that models are literally handsewn in to their outfits and then afterwards cut out of them (very quickly!). The clothes are more or less designed to be utterly impractical
Your remark about “living history exhibits” reminded me of a visit to Silver Dollar City, where my appreciation of the soap-making demonstration was slightly reduced when I caught a peek “backstage” and saw that both the lye and the fat were coming out of industrial plastic containers. I suppose it’s a necessary compromise – both extracting lye from wood ash and rendering and washing fat would take far too long to demonstrate.
Admittedly this was 60 years ago, but my mother did a bunch of historical recreation stuff about colonial American soap making, which I *think* included making lye from wood ash.
Well, Silver Dollar City isn’t strictly a re-creation site, more of an amusement park with some craftspeople (many highly skilled – the glassblowing demonstrations are excellent). I’m sure other sites are more faithful to their chosen time period.
There is a non-for-profit park down in Arkansas that has the intermediate steps, Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View if I recall correctly. Also had folks making hominy, cloth and musical instruments. Probably depends on who shows up for the season.
Having made various sorts of such compromises as part of living history demonstrations… they’re necessary compromises. It’s not just the time factor either. The materials coming out of those industrial plastic containers is 100% predictable in it’s quality and behavior. This is not necessarily true of ‘home made’ materials. And the production of the precursor materials for many processes often involves a certain amount of skill in their own right.
For example… When making bread, we use flour and yeast from out local megamart. Making flour by hand not only requires time, but additional equipment and the skills to use it. Using commercial yeast means the behavior of the dough (both proofing and baking) is absolutely predictable.
My goal is to have recognizable loaves of bread coming out on a regular basis… and that would be much harder without those compromises. (Plus, they’re part of our lunch and dinner.* So they need to be edible.)
*Volunteer organization, and we buy our own supplies.
Remember that the long tail of production affects every single element of these recreations. Look at that chart above — how many person-hours of spinning must take place for one weaving demonstration?
Would it be more useful for educational purposes to have a demonstration that can show weaving once a year when their spinning volunteers have accumulated enough yarn, or one that shows weaving and spinning every weekend?
This is true for nearly every product. As a blacksmith, I can turn an iron bar into a fork or a hammer in a few minutes or hours. Obtaining that iron bar from ore is a process of weeks.
The plastic tubs of store bought lye are eliding the fact that even old societies held complex economic chains of production. If you are in a frontier situation, you are trading time for that chain, and making soap once or twice a year from long-accumulation of previous efforts. If you are in a more developed town, you are relying on other craftsmen and farmers to supply you.
I got to wondering what people did when they weren’t in good sheep or flax country, but a quick check reveals that goat hair also counts as wool and can be used for textiles.
And Wikipedia has a table of alternatives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_textile_fibres
There’s a *lot* of ways to get textiles, some better than others, but it’s basically one of those things you can probably get *something* whenever you live. (I think the exception would be the very farthest orth arctic, where you’d have to rely on skins)
They basically all come under the headings of animal or plant fibres though. The particulars vary a bit.
“There’s a *lot* of ways to get textiles, some better than others, but it’s basically one of those things you can probably get *something* whenever you live. (I think the exception would be the very farthest orth arctic, where you’d have to rely on skins)”
Oddly enough, there IS another exception. Large parts of Earth used to be dependent on bark cloths.
Quite different technology and constraints – as in, not possible to weave to desired size. Quite laborious, I guess. How was the production organized?
The regions that lacked textiles and depended on bark cloths – and had substantial peasant populations – included Eastern North America and Polynesia. Any others?
The fiber taken from bark for primitive textile use is not that different from other plant fibers. A society that performed a lot of gathering might prefer the semi-permanence of a tree source over an annually-sown hemp analog, but eventually cloth comes from weaving.
True bark cloth, like tapa cloth, isn’t woven. Bark is beaten into thin sheets, which may be then glued together.
But cedar bark textile is made from shredded and woven cedar bark, so you can use trees as a source for traditional weaving. But that’s not what chornedsnorkack was referring to.
(source: wikipedia articles)
Cotton, if you live in the dry tropics or subtropics. (Different cotton species seem to have been independently domesticated in both the Old and New World, and I think some people think in some places it was the *first* domesticated crop, before people started doing agriculture for food).
There are a number of other plants, such as hemp, jute and even some nettles that are quite hard to distinguish from linen, especially in the state organic matter tends to be in the archeological record, and are worked in a similar way.
Some of those are grown (and take precious farmland), some are even wild and gathered, and there are enough of them to cover a variety of weather patterns.
I have a memory of somebody online mentioning that when a selection of textiles recorded in museums as linen were actually tested they found that they actually came from a wide variety of plants, but I can’t find an actual source.
Similarly for wool there are sheep, but also some goats, camels, alpacas, yaks, llamas etc.
And then there are cotton and silk, and those other fibers mentioned in other comments that are outside my areas of knowledge.
Shellfish was the one that really surprised me in the Wikipedia list.
Famously one of the few clothing options available to mermaids wishing to protect their modesty.
Wait, are you saying you don’t have your suits hand crafted out of lobster shell? The fuck is wrong with you?
Byssus! Captain Nemo’s crew wore uniforms made of byssus. Also known as sea silk. It’s the fine fibres that some bivalve shellfish produce to attach themselves to rocks.
With regard to non-sheep sources of wool:
I was fascinated to learn that some Native American peoples of the Pacific Northwest, in addition to collecting and weaving hair shed by mountain goats (which I had heard already) and making cloth from cedar bark, developed a breed of dog that was raised specifically for their hair, which was sheared like sheep wool and then spun and woven into cloth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Wool_Dog
One thing that I think should be noted is that while women obviously took care of children for the early period, children started helping out wiht general work *early* (if only carrying/fetching things) So sons at least, would be working along with their fathers from when they were very small. (by our standards) and daughters of course would work with their mothers.
One thing I’ve always been kind of confused about is that I remember a french traveller in Sweden in the 1600’s remarking that swedish peasants, while poor, were all dressed in wool and not linen (the implication being that this was better) which feels odd since I’ve always assumed linen to be the more expensive/exclusive cloth.
“One thing I’ve always been kind of confused about is that I remember a french traveller in Sweden in the 1600’s remarking that swedish peasants, while poor, were all dressed in wool and not linen (the implication being that this was better) which feels odd since I’ve always assumed linen to be the more expensive/exclusive cloth.”
How do the labour requirements of wool vs. linen production compare? Land requirements? Climate and soil quality sensitivity?
Here in North Europe, linen required good quality farmland, and gave little else besides linen (a modest amount of linseed). Whereas sheep could be raised on otherwise poor quality pastures that were useless for linen or grain anyway.
Geography can have a big effect on what is seen as expensive or cheap. France is a flax-growing country (according to my high school French textbook), so linen may be cheaper there. Whereas it would be expensive in a country that doesn’t grow flax, like Sweden.
I remember being shocked when I found out that cotton was considered a luxury product in 18th C Britain. From my perspective as an American Gen Xer, everyone knew that cotton sweaters were cheap and wool sweaters (especially 100% wool ones) were pricy and fancy.
That’s because we (I’m a Brit) had to get our cotton from you, wheras you generally got your wool from us, given that amongst other things, the UK has good sheep-rearing country.
“I remember being shocked when I found out that cotton was considered a luxury product in 18th C Britain.”
Calico cotton, specifically. Import was heavily controlled to help the local cotton industry (see Calico Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_Acts). It wasn’t seen as a luxury because it was particularly expensive, but because it looked nice. In fact it tended to be cheaper than local wool or local cotton, hence the need for protection.
Relative prices can certainly vary with time and place. Adam Smith considers chicken a more luxurious meat than beef.
Huh, I’d thought the ideal European clothing setup was linen underclothes (easier to wash, harder to dye), wood overlayers for display and warmth. (Where underclothes might cover your whole body, rather than modern minimalist underwear.)
I don’t see the wheel in “La dernière Fileuse de mon village” being driven by a treadle (meaning a foot pedal, English is not my first language?). She turns the big wheel with a hand-crank in her right hand,doesn’t she, and the spindle is then driven very fast by a rope transmission?
Yeah that is not a treadle wheel but a Great Wheel. She is using her left hand to draft the fiber, with a spindle or quill facing the back of the picture so you can’t see it. She is using her left hand to rotate the drive wheel, which turns a drive band that rotates the spindle. The bigger, or greater, the wheel, the more mechanical advantage she gets – more twists added for less effort. It is fair to think of a great wheel as a drop spindle in a frame.
One could drive a great wheel with a treadle, but is isn’t a thing because the process is discontinuous and the wheel needs to stop and go – spinning to add twist, the pause or stop to reorient your hand, then go to wind the yarn onto the spindle (repeated indefinitely).
A treadle spinning wheel has an innovation called a flyer that uses the witchcraft of differential rotation to store the yarn on a bobbin (spool) at the same time as new yarn is being formed (twist added). So you can get the wheel going with your treadle and spin merrily along.
“In this case, in a real sense labor mobility is heavily reduced by the nearly binary gendering of labor patterns, resulting in what at least seems to me to be quite clearly an inefficiency in labor allocation expressing itself through depressed wages for female workers.”
I am inclined to run this argument the other way around: What stopped women from carrying out better rewarded “male” work? Well, we started out defining “male” tasks as ones which married women were not available for because they conflict with childcare. This being the case, we don’t need “social expectations” to explain why married women didn’t do them in (apparently) any society in Eurasia, over a period of thousands of years.
Having decided that A is unavailable to do B because of C, there is no justification for assuming that D must be stopping A from doing B. We knew that A would not be able to do B already.
Note that in societies with the West European marriage pattern, there would be some unmarried women available for tasks that conflict with childcare, so this depression might be less severe there – but only for unmarried women. Not married ones.
I remember reading an ethnography of a southern African society’s encounter with Western missionaries. (It was by John and Jean Comoroff, but I don’t remember the title.) The missionaries were appalled to see that local women, rather than men, did the farming. They thought it was against God’s will and made the women stop farming and forced the men to do it. This shows that at least under certain conditions, women do farm. (I don’t remember what the men did. Hunted? Fished? Traded?)
In a similar vein, while Squanto’s famous tutoring of the Pilgrims in New World farming did happen, farming was considered women’s work by the natives in that region.
I don’t know about Africa, but the Northeastern Indians had no draft animals, so farmers didn’t need to steer a plough, so upper body strength was not required to farm, and women could do it.
Africa certainly *had* domesticated livestock, including cattle and in some regions horses and donkeys, but my understanding is animal drawn ploughs were common in Ethiopia but not really elsewhere. Possibly because of the disease environment (which might make cows and horses fragile and valuable enough that you wouldn’t really want to use them for heavy labor).
Why is driving a plough harder than tilling the land without one?
Why is driving a plough harder than tilling the land without one?
Because you sometimes have to deal with recalcitrant oxen?
Does that entail farmers wrestling with them?
“Does that entail farmers wrestling with them?”
I dunno much about plows, but I do have the impression that hoe-based farming has tended to be dominated by women, with men taking over when livestock-driven plows get involved. I don’t know enough about rice paddy farming to say where that falls in this.
Does that entail farmers wrestling with them?
I’ve seen that done a couple of times, though I certainly don’t have a *lot* of experience watching farmers plough fields (in the developing country where I spent three years, like in most of the rest of Africa, ploughs were quite rare, at least in the region where i was).
AIUI, the men in these societies are generally hunting or fishing. Without young children. The children are with the women. And in Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham describes how, among the Hadza hunter-gatherers, the women and children collect small game and immobile foods, with the menfolk venturing further after more mobile prey.
In general, then, the married women conduct more childcare and dominate those occupations that are easiest to combine with childcare.
Analogously, these days jobs that require being away from home for several days or weeks tend to be done by the male and the childless.
The Ateker peoples (Teso, Karimojong, Turkana, Jie etc.) have farming as women’s work. As pastoral peoples, the men and boys are out with the herds (often quite distant). The women farm for part of the season, then join the men with the herds after the harvest has been collected.
Again, this fits the pattern of ‘men do the work you can’t do while watching children’. Just in this case it’s ‘walk dozens of miles a day driving livestock’.
I don’t know enough about Ateker agriculture to know the ins and outs of it though. I understand the main bulk grain s sorghum if that enlightens anything.
I understand the main bulk grain s sorghum if that enlightens anything.
Sorghum is very labor intensive, but a big part of the labour requirement in ‘traditional’ sorghum agriculture involves physically staying in the field all day while the grain is maturing and chasing away birds when they come to eat it. Unlike corn, sorghum doesn’t have a husk so the grain is unprotected. (This has been a significant problem up to the present, to the point that some people have discussed breeding sorghum to be somewhat more poisonous so that birds can’t eat it). This is *very much* the kind of thing you can do while caring for children, since the birds require sporadic rather than cosntant attention.
In fact, it sounds like the kind of task that children could actually help with from a very young age, like four, given the enthusiasm with which one observes them chasing pigeons in the city.
@ey81,
Believe it or not, that does seem to be a thing!
Account from some missionaries in South Sudan (which i think is now ranked as the poorest/least developed country in the world):
https://mklm.org/south-sudan/bird-chasers/
The problem, AD9, with this analysis is that even in cases where we see men entering a traditionally female preparation (certain medieval weavers’ guilds as specific examples, and men doing cooking as ‘chefs’ as a more common one), we see the men being paid significantly higher wages to do substantially the same work.
It can therefore very much be true that women are simultaneously being blocked out of traditionally male-gendered forms of labor by many women needing to take care of children and by all women, regardless of whether they had children, being restricted by social expectations.
Simon, you haven’t given an example of women being restricted by social expectation from doing any task whatever. You have claimed the reverse: that men were paid more than women when going against social convention and taking a “womans” job. That would suggest there was a local shortage of women to do that particular job, so that employers were desperate enough to hire men, who were expensive because they had well-paid alternatives, to supplement the cheaper women, who lacked these alternatives.
People of Sex A doing a job customarily done by sex B does not show that people of sex B are restricted from doing jobs customarily done by people of sex A.
Considering your comment about chefs I should point out that the above definition of “mens work” was work that is difficult to combine with childcare responsibilities, and was therefore not done by women. Working as a chef is notoriously hard to to combine with family life and childcare responsibilities because it requires working away from home at times when the children would usually be at home and expecting to be fed. Working as a chef would therefore fit what was, for the purpose of this discussion, defined as “men’s work”. And there is nothing strange about men doing that.
If you start off by describing a task as one that B can not do, you can not then give the absence of B doing it as an example of social convention stopping B from doing something. Other facts might offer such an example, but not the one just given.
In order to show that women were stopped from doing something by social convention, you have to show that women were stopped from doing it by social convention. Not that they were stopped from doing it by the biological requirements of raising children; nor that social convention failed to stop men from doing something else.
These aren’t really apposite examples. The structure of the weaving industry varied over time, depending on both the weaving technology and the overall economic structures of the time and place. The fact that it might be sometimes a male job (whence the surnames Webster and Weaver) and sometimes a female job is consistent with the theory that at times when it could be done most efficiently by full-time workers, it was done by men, and when it was a side hustle, it was done by women. And “chef” is normally a full-time job, which involves preparing complex meals for third parties, whereas cooking is a domestic task.
Was that even the case in the first place?
I recall that in Ancient Egypt and certain periods in Ancient Mesopotamia it was not unheard of for women to have such professions as scribe and doctor; though women who were educated as scribes were uncommon, I don’t know about doctors.
Moreover, according to the in Encyclopaedia Iranica Online*, the Persepolis Fortification Tablets mentioned not only women part of the ‘skilled labour*’ force, but also given equal rations as men according to their level of qualification; however, for ‘less skilled workers’ women received one third less food than men.
I would be greatly surprised if that had all been unmarried women…
* It had been this article: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/women-i , though poorly enough it does not provide definitions of ‘skilled’ labour or how many women were present there.
Moreover, modern history is filled with women who work full-time whilst their mother, sister, aunt, or such watches their children; I very much doubt that had not been an option in antiquity…
Am I misunderstanding your argument or are you claiming that such things as ‘patriarchal institutions/cultures’ and ‘misogynistic prejudices/attitudes’ had very few effect on such measures as female labour mobility and income in the pre-modern era, because ‘biological differences’ or ‘childcare’ already sufficed to explain nearly all the gap?
If so, that would quite an extraordinary claim. Just go back to the 19th century to witness how massive the effect of ‘patriarchal institutions/cultures’ and ‘misogynistic prejudices/attitudes’ can be on such measures as female labour mobility and income…
And not only in the ‘West’, things were even worse in, for example, certain parts of India. Based on what I had read such attitudes still hold the place back.
Note, not to claim that ‘biological differences’ had no effect on female labour mobility and income in the pre-modern era; the considerable differences in such measures as upper body-strength certainly exacerbated income differences.
However, I find myself wondering whether that in the absence of ‘patriarchal institutions/cultures’ and ‘misogynistic prejudices/attitudes’ such ‘biological differences’ might even have driven ancient women into professions mostly requiring mental skills, like scribe, doctor, or architect, whilst a mother/sister(-in-law)/servant or slave girl took care of her children and household chores. After all, would in such a scenario women not be less disadvantaged in such professions relative to those were strength is important?
One of the most fundamental transformations of women’s roles in the world is the invention of various applications that reduce labor. This includes washers and dryers, dishwashers, microwaves, anything that saves labor in general household tasks. While women still primarily do these tasks even in the most progressive countries (Scandinavia), the overall labor hours are reduced to a mere fraction of what they were previously. Therefore, maintaining the home and working are no longer exclusive to each other in the modern day; one person can work full time and take care of the home (albeit with a lot of work for one person).
This is why you see such a particular transformation of feminism and society in the 20th century, as women gain free time and enter the workforce in full due to these massive labor savings. Not to say your point that one women watching the children while the others do something else is ridiculous (this is common among many social species), but it is true that due to labor savings modern women’s life cannot be truly compared to the past.
The overwhelming majority of women in industrialized societies have never been homemakers so those women who “entered the workforce” due to reduced labor hours afforded to homemaking were a small minority of the total female workforce and likely limited to high status households that used to be able to afford to subside on only a single (male) income.
I’m confused. The female labor participation rate rose from about 32% in 1950 to about 60% in 2000, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. So your “high status” households are more than a quarter of the population, and you “small minority” is about half the female workforce?
I am very well aware of the reduction in hours spend on ‘house production’ made possible by such devices. I recall that ourworldindata had a good graph about that, though it appears to be gone as I cannot find it again.
However, if I recall correctly most of the reduction in worked hours on ‘home production’ happened in the latter half of the 20th century.
And less labour saving appliances being available in the first half of the 20th century did not prevent massive mobilisations of women as workers during both World Wars, with states even doing such things as setting up child care program to get mothers to join the workforce.
Whilst the pre-modern era was even worse than the first half of the 20th century; I suspect it would not have been an insurmountable obstacle but only lead to worse ratios of full-time working women to ‘supporting’ women.
Note, I admit I am very much not a historian and thus could have missed something. However, I doubt most others in this discussion know any more of these subjects than me.
“Am I misunderstanding your argument or are you claiming that such things as ‘patriarchal institutions/cultures’ and ‘misogynistic prejudices/attitudes’ had very few effect on such measures as female labour mobility and income in the pre-modern era, because ‘biological differences’ or ‘childcare’ already sufficed to explain nearly all the gap?”
No. I am saying that this essay has defined “mens work” (among peasants) in such a way that peasant women could not do it to any significant extent anyway. Given that definition, no restriction of any kind can have much effect on whether peasant women did it.
This essay has also stated that “– the basic division of labor, where men mostly farmed and women mostly cleaned, cooked, spun and did childcare (both with significant flexibility and crossover in both; women did work in the fields when they had to, which was often) – that division of labor was probably overdetermined even in the absence of a culture of oppressive patriarchy.”
If that is true then the patriarchy, however oppressive, can not have caused significant economic harm by restricting women to those tasks because *according to the essay*, they would have been restricted to those tasks anyway. It might have been harmful in many other ways, but not that one.
You may argue that the essay is wrong to state this. If so, you are arguing with the essay, not with my comment.
Well, then you must have interpreted the essay differently than I did.
I had the impression that according to Bret both ‘biology/childcare’ and ‘patriarchy’ were important explanatory variables.
Originally when I had first read the essay I had wondered based on Bret’s comment about ‘nearly binary gendering of labor patterns, resulting in what at least seems to me to be quite clearly an inefficiency in labor allocation expressing itself through depressed wages for female workers.’, made me wonder whether he believed that the ‘sharp limits patriarchal societies impose on women’s opportunities artificially increases the ‘supply’ of spinners and weavers, thus pushing down their wages’ had been at least equally as important as ‘biology/childcare’ would have been directly on its own.
So, I had been considering to ask, if I had interpreted his words correctly, how good the argument for that position is. For example, if ‘patriarchy’ was important to explain ‘ancient gender gaps’ we would expect that those would be smaller in less patriarchal societies; though I don’t know if we even have enough data available to compare the ratios of male to female wages of, say, Ancient Egypt and Greece.
However, then in the comment’s section I had encountered your comment which appeared to go even farther in the opposite direction, as I understood it it appeared to say that ‘limits patriarchal societies impose on women’s opportunities’ had actually not been important at all, and all my time instead had gone to write a reply to your comment.
And not only in the ‘West’, things were even worse in, for example, certain parts of India. Based on what I had read such attitudes still hold the place back.
This is mostly true, but one wants to qualify it a bit. Especially in pre-modern or modernizing societies, cultural views about gender roles always have to be balanced against economic necessity. A woman (or man) might look down on themselves for doing a particular job (and be looked down on by others) on the grounds that it’s more appropriate for the opposite sex, but still do it because it’s the best job they can get.
I remember seeing, in southern India in the middle of the summer, a group of women lined up breaking concrete with sledgehammers, dressed in saris of all things (as opposed to the salwar-kameez which is easier to move around in and presumably to do heavy labour in, and is more popular among younger women especially in urban areas). I mention how they were dressed as an indication than these women were probably fairly ‘traditionalist’, but still, doing heavy industrial labor because that was presumably their best option in the job market. And it probably wouldn’t be hard to find poor men doing traditionally female-coded work because they need the money.
That said, this was also in one of the less ‘patriarchal’ states: while the “core” of South Asia, around the Indo-Gangetic Plain, is indeed extremely patriarchal, that’s generally believed to be less so in the south, east and especially among the tribal peoples of the far northeast. In India you can see this graphically in things like the sex ratio which reflects sex-selective abortion, and is distorted much more in the center and west than it is in the south, east or northeast.
Yes, I read that had even went back to Ancient Greece. Back then there were extremely patriarchal cultural views about gender roles but only the elite could afford to completely fulfill them; for example, despite strict norms on female seclusion poor families often found themselves forced to send out their women to work outside to make ends meet.
Those parts in the North were the ones I had been thinking about.
I read that even in the 21st century there the female labour force participation rate is lower than in the south and northeast, as a result of strict norms on female seclusion which had been imported from Central Asia during the Mughal Era.
However, I had not gone into detail as I was not fully certain of the accuracy of the entire rest of what I had read; those blogs had not looked to me like they were specialised in Indian history.
For example, one of those blogposts had used as example cases from the early 20th century of women who were forced to manufacture textiles at home because of those strict norms on female seclusion even when they could have made several times as much money working in textile factories; going on about how bad that was for women’s economic opportunities*.
However, I lacked to knowledge to be completely sure they had not taken something out of context or represented something unusual as normal.
* Poorly enough I forgot whether industrialisation had also been mentioned; young women working in textile factories had played significant roles in the industrialisations of among others Britain and Japan, though I don’t know how replaceable that had been. Either way, I suspect that had likely been less important than other factors like underinvestment in education or crony capitalism.
“young women working in textile factories had played significant roles in the industrialisations of among others Britain and Japan,”
This reminds me of the discussions in the last few threads about whether early industrialization was actually better or worse than peasant life, and why or why not that might be the case. One thing I don’t think got mentioned was that factory work and urban life, even if didn’t leave you materially better off (and even if it exposed you to threats like epidemics, etc.) might still be appealing to people for non-material reasons, i.e. if it set you free from the cultural and social constraints of the village. I can see that being especially important for women.
In the UK, fabric is generally sold by the linear metre, as I understand it; it’s not one of the handful of weird carve-outs we’ve preserved (road miles, beer, cider, milk, precious metals)
As I understand it, the Caribbean and Canada are officially completely metric, although some preserve non-metric units for trade with the US, so may still sell in yards at least externally. Guyana is officially metric, but seems inconsistent, from personal experience, so I’m sure you can buy by the yard there if you want to.
Given that the UK is one of the less statutorily metric countries in the English-speaking world, I would be surprised if Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and most of English-speaking Africa (i.e. all of it except Liberia) use anything other than linear metres.
Australian here. We sometimes use feet as an informal measure and we kept the beer glass sizes.
I remember when I was driving in Canada a few years back, distances were all posted in kilometres, but for some reason when I would ask directions, people would quote me distances in miles.
I remember a Canadian remarking that her Australian husband was “impressed” with his Canadian, 30 metre long, 8 foot high, fence.
… and in the US, and Canada, it’s typically sold, at least at retail, by the linear yard, with the width usually being quite a bit more than a yard (although it can be less, too, for specialty items). I don’t sew, but I spend time with people who do, and have shopped for fabric with them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it sold by the *square* yard.
I once read a youtube comment, from a person in the US. The european youtuber said that fabric in europe is usually sold at the meter with a width of 1.40 meters. The commenter wrote that they suddenly understood why the fabric they bought (by the linear yard) always had this weird width.
I’m a seamstress who’s bought fabric in Canada and Australia. Canadian stores usually priced things by the yard, but would absolutely sell you a meter of fabric if you asked. Australian stores had everything in meters and would look confused if you asked for a yard of fabric.
I’ve never seen any fabric store in the modern era that sold fabric by the square meter or the square yard. It’s not a particularly useful calculation for most sewing purposes. About the only time I could think that buying fabric by the square measurement instead of the linear measurement would be practical would be when converting from historical patterns that assumed much narrower widths of fabric than are available in modern times. Six or seven decades ago you would often run into fabrics woven at something like half the width of modern looms and transferring patterns made for those widths to modern wider fabrics does require a bit of rejiggering how things fit.
If you want to talk to people who are interested in textile production by hand, the website Ravelry includes a social media/comment section that might be a place to ask if anyone wants to be interrogated. In case you hadn’t heard of it before.
My wife, who spins and knits instead of weaves, is an active member and in her telling they are a friendly bunch.
Yes, I’ve heard of the site and been told basically the same – that it is a friendly and inviting community. I really want to be able to go back to hand textile production and give it a lot more time, but right now I’ve got too many damn projects as it is. One day!
Weaving is not a mobile activity, but knitting is. My guess is that it’s also slower. Do we have any understanding of how often fabrics were knitted vs woven?
Also, with the move from more rectangular clothes to more sewn to shape is there any change is the volume of fabric needed?
It’s not known when knitting originated; the most recent research I’ve run across says the earliest known piece of knitting dates from around 1000 CE. Older surviving fabrics that look like knitting turn out to be a different craft like nålebinding/nalbinding.
Oops, you triggered my trap card. Infodump incoming.
First, sidenote:
Before knitting caught on, there was needlebinding, which has some practical advantages. Knitting requires a matched pair of longer needles and ideally one long continuous strand of yarn or thread, whereas needlebinding requires a sewing needle (you’d have that anyway) and uses shorter lengths (like might be left over from weaving or sewing). Plus, needlebinding that wears through (like on a sock heel) doesn’t unravel or fray like knitting or weaving. So, for a lot of history (and certainly before knitting was invented in 1100 or so), your hypothetical crafter would be bringing along her needlebinding, not her knitting. That said, I’m going to refer to knitting for the rest of the post because that’s what I know and do myself.
To your actual question:
As a general rule, weaving is much faster and uses less yarn for the same amount of finished fabric as compared to knitting or needlebinding, so if you were really trying to be thrifty I’d guess you’d use weaving for anything you could (remember, spinning is by far the most time-consuming part – using more yarn is a real problem for efficiency even if the loom can’t be moved around). Plus, there’s the sheer AMOUNT of spinning that needs doing – if you’re out and about and need a portable project, there’s always more spinning.
The extant knit garments I’ve seen pictures of from before the knitting loom tend to be socks, hats, and mittens or gloves, which makes sense. Those are still the most popular knit projects today – stretchy knit fabric makes for a nicer fit, they’re smaller items that don’t take as long to finish (a really good knitter can do a sock or even a pair in a day), and the more dense use of yarn means that they’re warmer on your extremities. Plus, those are all funky curved shapes that it’s hard to cut efficiently out of rectangles anyway, so knitting them to the shapes you want ends up being less wasteful. The equation on how you use your time and thread (which is itself time) makes the most sense in those situations.
Sprang is the more widespread pre-knitting (and pre-weaving probably) solution for making stretchy textiles. It is a twining technique invented multiple times, very early, all over the world, and well attested in pottery impressions where the textiles themselves have poor survivability. One modern researcher/source for a gentle introduction is Carol James.
And while I’m monologuing, pre-cotton Japan is rich with bark bast fiber textile traditions. Linden, wisteria, kudzu, more I am forgetting. The labor involved makes flax and hemp processing look like a picnic. Harvest the plant or tree, then the bark has to be peeled or pounded to remove it from the tree or vine, separated from the outer bark, often delaminated into thinner layers, scraped and scraped and scraped, split lengthwise into narrow ribbons, washed in lye, often fermented in bran for softening, and then spliced end to end rather than twisted to make the yarns. Of course the Egyptians spliced their flax too, adding twist after the fact for strength.
Sewn to shape usually doesn’t mean using significantly more material, but it does mean throwing some away. Woven cloth comes in rectangles, it would be really hard to weave into any other shape. Making holes or curves or triangular gussets or whatever means cutting away some of the material, and there’s not much you can do with the leftovers.
Tailors did try to arrange the pieces of more close fitting garments like some kind of geometrical puzzle to waste as little as possible. But maybe part of the higher status for shaped garments is showing that you can waste fabric.
(You can knit to shape without throwing material away, but I’m going to guess that knitting takes even longer.)
I’d always assumed quilting was done with scraps of cloth from worn out items, but these scraps would work too.
It uses a bit more fabric, but it also wears more quickly. You can vary the position of a sarong/kilt/shawl so that it wears fairly evenly, or at least the most worn bits don’t show/are not critical. Harder to do with breeches or shirts.
So on the second question about the changes to the amount of fabric required for a garment, it’s a little complex. For me to make a standard ancient Greek ionic chiton or Roman female tunica would take about 3.5 yards of fabric. In warm weather, a single chiton or tunica is a fine outfit. However it’s not enough for cold weather. In cold weather, I could easily be wearing an inner tunica, an outer tunica and then a palla over that to even try to stay warm. Together these would come out to around 11 yards of fabric for a cold weather outfit. This cold weather outfit also poses significant limits on my mobility. The palla doesn’t stay draped when I’m swinging my arms around wildly or otherwise doing hard labor.
With a late medieval outfit, I can make a basic kirtle type dress from around 4 yards of fabric. So that takes a little bit more to get to a very basic warm weather outfit. However that basic kirtle is significantly warmer than the tunica and provides better mobility. For a cold weather medieval outfit, I’m going to need a smock, a kirtle and then an overgown. Together these will come out to around 10 yards of fabric because my inner smock layer is more fabric efficient than the earlier inner tunica of the Roman era. More importantly, this outfit is both considerably warmer in cool weather and because it’s fitted to my body instead of draped, there’s no problem with me doing intense work while wearing it. I have much better mobility especially in the arms and shoulders.
The medieval outfit is a lot more work to make. It also requires more fabric for a warm weather outfit. But it more than makes up for the disadvantages once cold weather comes into play. There’s a reason why people in cold areas tend to take up complex sewing patterns early and why areas that are consistently warm often stick with draped clothing. The extra work is worth it when the temperatures plummet.
> In this case, in a real sense labor mobility is heavily reduced by the nearly binary gendering of labor patterns, resulting in what at least seems to me to be quite clearly an inefficiency in labor allocation expressing itself through depressed wages for female workers.
What is the inefficiency here? Low wages are not an inefficiency. Consider a town that needs 10 game developers, pays game developers $0, and has 1000 game developers. Inefficient, but not because of the low wages.
In what direction is the claimed inefficiency? Is the claim that some men should have switched from farm labor to textile work, or that some women should have switched away from childrearing + textile work into farm work? Are textiles oversupplied or undersupplied or on what basis are you claiming inefficiency?
> textile production might command lower ‘wages’ (literal or figurative) due to being viewed as a ‘side hustle,’ as it were, of the household, despite its considerable labor demands.
The labor theory of value is generally not predictive/correct. It’s about supply and demand. As you yourself describe, this was labor that could be done while cooking or rearing children or . Just as today there is no shortage of housewives looking for work from home, presumably there was no shortage of women looking to do textile work. That supply is what commands wage levels, not the labor theory of value.
I think a more precise reading of the text here would be instructive. “Textile production might command lower wages due to X, despite its considerable labor demands” is not an assertion that the objective value of the textiles is this or that due to the labor invested. It is an observation that this form of labor was treated by society as not merely low-compensation, but worthy of low compensation, for the reason “X.”
However, this is about more than the monetary wages or lack thereof. Nearly everyone’s wages are terrible in a medieval society because the majority of the population is teetering on the brink of subsistence most of the time. It is about social approval and how much respect a trade gets. And that is the other part of weaving/spinning being seen as a “side hustle”
The pay you receive for an action is not proportional to the moral worth associated with that action. Even if the moneylenders are rich, it might be that the moneylenders are despised. Indeed, they might be rich *because* they are despised. It might take a lot of incentive to get people to do something widely reviled. Keeps the competition down.
OTOH, Livia was well-regarded for spinning wool, however slight the market value of the thread produced.
Esteem is not money, even today, and probably even less so in the societies of the past.
Pay is not just supply and demand, even in modern times. In older times, prestige was definitely more compensable. And collectors of refuse are widely despised, but not therefore better compensated.
Supply is based on the cost of inputs. For both farm work and weaving/textile work, the input is “people’s time, using widespread skills (so no demand for extra training or something only a few people can do.” So the expectation would be that, in a completely open market system where people could take jobs wherever, you’d see the wages get quite close together, and if weavers were paid less, for people to move from textile work to farm work.
We know that women did go out and help with harvests or other farm tasks if necessary, so it is physically possible to do the different job, and there is a little time slack where “mixes well with taking care of kids” doesn’t need to apply. A completely open market typically doesn’t need that much slack for the prices/wages in question to even out, so it is likely that wages would even out somewhat.
> We know that women did go out and help with harvests or other farm tasks if necessary
The harvest songs I was taught had some death imagery. The explanation we were given was that harvesting was dangerous. It was possible for even a young person in the prime of their life to pass away in the field from heat exhaustion. Of course the village will take every bit of help it can get during harvest season, but health and physical ability put a pretty hard cap on output.
> A completely open market typically doesn’t need that much slack for the prices/wages in question to even out
Could you expand on this? Lets simplify by pretending that both men and women are equally productive at farm work (aka no comparative advantage). Spinning can be done in winter, at all times of day and maybe even at night, and potentially while doing other work. Does the fact that some spinners can switch to farm work during harvest season suffice to equalize spinning and farming wages?
I assume you’d have every single spinner doing farm work at harvest time, but that still leaves you with 90% of the spinning labor that happens during cooking, at night, between October and April etc. I guess your spinsters can transition into construction work for those months.. So you are right that slack isn’t really the load-bearing explanation, it’s more about comparative advantage or artificial barriers.
The situation of women doing farm work (in Western societies) is a little more complicated than that. Women often worked in the field at harvest time, but there was still often a gendered division of labor, with, for instance, men reaping while women sheafed and bound.
Wait.
If Diocletian caps the wool weaver’s pay at 15-40d per pound, and a pound represents ~100 hours of labor, then the daily pay for weavers isn’t anywhere near the 25d for farm laborers. It’s even worse than the 12-16d we’re given for “women weaving tunicas.”
The only way I can see this working is if the “wool weaver” entry doesn’t count spinning…even though it measures in pounds. I could believe that a weaver uses 1 or 2 pounds of carded and spun wool in a day, which would bring the wage more in line. But then where is the wage control for spinning? I only see prices per “uncia” for the more exotic threads.
Weavers are usually not spinners. The number of steps between sheep and shirt are many.
Since the warping, and weaving, take so much less time to do; and aren’t as interstitial as spinning, the professional weaver has people spinning for them, in part because that enables the production of yarn to keep up with the loom; albeit prior to the spinning wheel, esp the more improved models of the 1400s-1500s, which are still the functional models of the present, it took a lot more spinners than it did in the age of “cottage industry” in the UK.
But, as I know the numbers for cottage industry weaving. If combed top (and combing was a trade, and at times quite profitable, as evidenced by things like Woolcombe Abbey) is used, 1: the spinner doesn’t need to prep (saving time) and 2: harder/more durable worsted yarns can be made; though they take longer to spin than the loftier “woolen” yarns from carded wool.
Worsted cloth makes more money, so it’s worth the time.
Assuming yard wide bolt (which is about the largest one can easily do on a treadle-loom, with a thrown shuttle) it takes 3-4 skilled spinners, working full time, to make enough yarn to dress the loom, and then weave the cloth, during the time the weaver is dressing and weaving.
So yes, I think the payment is for nothing but the weaving.
“But most of all I want to stress that this is an essential task; there is a tendency to treat it as somehow a lesser need than the food generated by agriculture but it was necessary. A household that didn’t have sufficient textiles would struggle to maintain its status and standing in the community”
This sort of implies that its essential in the same way a state of rhe art military is- not for survival against nature, but in brutal zero-sum competition with other humans who will wipe you out if you cant keep up. Maybe we need an arms control agreement for fashion.
On the face of it, maintaining status and standing in the community is a less essential task than avoiding death from starvation. It is a less irrecoverable failure.
OTOH, you can freeze to death faster than you can starve.
Fiber production can be survival-vital in other ways, too. Ocean fishers need lines or nets, and likely sails. Tents like yurts may need felt. Cold nights or winters really benefit from blankets, though I suppose those might be made out of used fabric rather than being primary production.
But if you’re a coastal fishing village, the output of women is probably exactly as critical as the labor of the men who sail out and use the nets.
Elsewhere in the article it is more specifically pointed out that clothes are necessary for survival in most non-tropical climates, making your household’s supply of textiles a true necessity, not just a matter of being fashionable and respectable.
But people had already figured out how to make clothes for survival in ancient times. The productivity increased in medieval and renaissance times, but they didn’t suddenly start wearing 3x as many layers for warmth. Instead they went all out on making the fanciest, most labor intensive clothes to signal status.
One exception I can think of were the puritans of early New England, who had a religous rule to only wear plain black unadorned clothes. Maybe it’s not a coincedance that they also ended up with some of the best schools and eventually an industrial boom.
You’re taking elite circumstances and universalizing them. Peasants, that is most people, turned surplus cloth into slight expansions in the amount of time they could spend outside, into slight improvements in disease resistance for their children, into an overall reduction in the number of holes in their outfits.
No, I’m just… repeating what it’s in this blog post really. It emphasizes *heavily* how clothing wasn’t just for survival, but that it was heavily driven by concerns about status and keeping up appearances, with lines like “A household that didn’t have sufficient textiles would struggle to maintain its status and standing in the community and of course in most climates” and “households don’t respond to increased production by working less, but rather by adopting fashions which involve more fabric, with more layers and more complex patterns, as well as having more clothes.” Not to mention the handy chart at the end with calculations showing how “respectability” took about twice as much time as “sustenance.” I don’t see how you read all that and come away with the conclusion that all clothing from pre-modern times was strictly for survival.
Maintaining resepectability does feed back into survival. When times are hard the less respectable are let go first. For humans, social connection is life or death.
That is a slight misconception about the Puritans. They wore plain clothes, yes, often homespun and in muted colors, but black was considered too aristocratic for most. Check out Fischer, “Albion’s Seed,” pp.139-46. Also Ulrich, “The Age of Homespun.” Those corrections are consistent with the larger point, that perhaps they channeled their energies into fancy schools rather than fancy clothes.
” They wore plain clothes, yes, often homespun and in muted colors, but black was considered too aristocratic for most.”
Because good solid black dye was really expensive and faded quickly, if I remember correctly? Cheap vegetable dyes were brightly coloured, yellow or green or red.
“yellow or green or red.”
I believe the cheap dyes would be red, blue, and yellow, maybe in that order (also brown, but that’s not “bright”.) Green would be a double-dye with blue and yellow. AIUI madder, woad, and weld are the big color plants for Europe, though I think onion skins can bestow at least a pale yellow.
@ad9,
You also need *multiple* sets of clothing, that you change regularly, if you want to avoid epidemic diseases like typhus.
Or a steam bath, as in much of the steppe
That does make sense in terms of why steam baths are popular!
I thought that the lice or ticks that spread typhus can live on clothing though (or leave their waste their which is also infectious for a while).
Clothes get steamed too. Running over the seams with a hot iron was also a way to kill lice.
Women’s textile production was *even more important* in China than in western Eurasia, believe it or not. The saying “Men till, women weave” was the classic expression of the gendered division of labor for more than 2000 years. Since the time of the Han dynasty at least both men and women were subject to taxation. Depending on the dynasty, either the household had to provide both grain and textiles, or each adult male was assessed an amount of grain, each adult female, textiles.
The cash value of the grain & textile taxes tended to be roughly equal (see, e.g. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, p. 186), but it’s rare to see either primary sources or scholars admit it: the life-or-death significance of the grain tax, and the grain harvest, absolutely dominates everyone’s thinking. But (as Bray shows) up until the Single-Whip Tax reform of the late 16thC (after which all taxes were rolled into one, to be payed in silver) women’s textile production wasn’t just a foundation of the home, it was a foundation of the *state*.
As is usual for premodern technology, most of the technical innovations Dr Devereaux mentions above were invented in China several centuries (at least) before they appeared further west. Originally, Chinese tax textiles were hemp in the north, silk in the south. Cotton became important starting around the time of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, and spread rapidly. I don’t know enough about the workflow for hemp and cotton textile production to know how much of it went to spinning. The workflow for silk production is very different: silk is “reeled”, because it comes off the coccoons as long threads, several of which need to be twisted together to make a workable floss.
Another society where women’s textile production turns out to be fantastically important is Viking! I have a book about Viking era ships with details of how big the hulls, masts, and sails are; but it never really clicked with me before this article just how much work was involved in making a sail.
A typical smaller longship has about a 45 square metre sail; an oceanic merchant ship (knarr) about 80 – 85 square metre sail; a big longship for a major jarl or king over 100 square metres. Multiplying by the times in the textile production table gives thousands of hours to over ten thousand hours of work. Per ship.
(Even removing the sewing time, which I’m not sure would be entirely accurate as a sail does need to be joined up and often reinforced with a lattice, makes hardly any difference.)
And the cloth for a sail needs to be thicker than cloth for clothing. And the sails have to be replaced a lot more often than the wooden parts, to the point that every ship carried spare sails.
“And the sails have to be replaced a lot more often than the wooden parts, to the point that every ship carried spare sails.”
Sailing ships also carried spare spars, though – and I am not sure how often you needed to *replace* a sail rather than just repairing it.
Did Viking ships carry spare sails or spars routinely? A sail’s a big bulky item (and expensive) and their ships were small.
Not sure about Viking ships specicially, but it was common to carry several sets of sails – heavier cloth for stormy weather, sometimes smaller sails to bend on in stronger winds, plus additions (bonnets, drabblers) for light airs.
“Not sure about Viking ships specicially, but it was common to carry several sets of sails – heavier cloth for stormy weather, sometimes smaller sails to bend on in stronger winds”
Really? If there’s a storm coming, you reef your sails – or furl them completely – but I have never come across references to people taking the sails down completely and replacing them with different ones in response to a change of weather. New sails get hoisted when the old ones are damaged.
Modern dinghy and yacht racers will have storm sails, but did older sailing ships?
“Another society where women’s textile production turns out to be fantastically important is Viking!”
There are few societies in the world where I would expect textiles to be more important than in that one. There are places in the world where clothing is not essential to human life: I would not expect Scandinavia to be one of them.
(Possibly making a sail was more prestigious than making clothes, but it couldn’t be more essential.)
On a slightly related note: it has been suggested that agriculture in Peru began with the cultivation of cotton to make fishing nets.
Owning a ship was prestigious, but making the sails was often slave labor.
> There are places in the world where clothing is not essential to human life: I would not expect Scandinavia to be one of them.
Though that far north, stereotypically furs become both more vital and more available. Of course they need their own processing (as did deerskins in North America — also women’s labor, at least in the few case studies I’ve read.) Vikings wore linen and wool like the rest of Europe, but I’d guess winter was fended off with furs more than with “more wool”.
Furs weren’t particular common for the Norse. Cold weather mostly did mean wearing more wool.
The one obvious common furry animal raised in herds was sheep itself.
How commonly did the Norse wear sheep furs?
One sheep can be fleeced several time and flayed once. How many layers of wool cloth provide as much warmth as a tanned sheep fur? How will the labour requirements of providing, oh, the Biggses with 15 kg woollen spun and woven cloth compare against providing the same Biggses with 15 kg of tanned sheep furs (between leather and fleece weight)? No spinning for the fur, but what are the labour requirements of tanning, and who will be doing it?
Also: yes, much of the leather is thick, stiff and poorly fitted for flexible and odd shaped parts of body like gloves – and so is woven textile. For gloves, the logical techniques would then be needlebinding and such, that provide a fabric that is thick and flexible compared to woven cloth then?
I’m just dropping in to say, hands are hard and Bouguerau does a very good job with them. Which possibly is much of the point of the painting.
I’ve spent thirty minutes or so learning to use a drop spindle from a friend into the hobby, which makes me very glad to be born in an age where I can spend my time on other things.
Plus Bouguerau’s work is just dang pretty, like Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Some peak 1800s painters, if you like their style.
One thing I’m curious about, academic culture-wise: how far is the analysis in this series from something publishable? It seems like the kind of thing that, if it were done with a higher level of detail and more explicit error estimates, would easily be an actual academic paper, not just pop scholarship. (I think biologists publish this kind of thing for ecosystems, for example.) But at the same time, you aren’t giving the impression that you’re doing a pedagogical summary of a more detailed standard type of calculation or reference. Instead, while you cite people who confirm part of what you’re doing, one gets the impression that nobody else has done the modeling exercise in full. Is that true?
Dr. Devereaux is already heavily involved in doing the fully publishable and academic form of such an analysis for certain aspects of the economy of the Roman Republic.
Doing the same for textile production within a given specific society would itself be one of those projects that takes years to bring up to publishable standards. He may well intend to do it some day, but the operative word is “some day.”
If he publishes this, it will probably be more of an entry level book. Most of what he writes is well known to premodern historians, he just is extremely adept at conveying that in clear and readable prose
Is this well known to other historians in quantitative detail, or just in broad qualitative strokes? That is, are there “standard models” for peasant household economies of different time periods, that estimate total hours used on different tasks and how vulnerable they were to things like bad harvests?
I may have said this before, but I think Prof. Devereux’s best approach would be to de-emphasize the academic work, which seems to be producing neither money nor tenure, and write various series of popular books. One series could be along the lines of “A Physicist Looks at Star Trek” and works of that nature, so “A Military Historian Looks at Game of Thrones/Lord of the Rings/Etc.”; and a second series would be along the lines “Life in a Medieval City” etc., so “What Our Ancestors Wore”/”How Our Ancestors Fought”/”What Our Ancestors Ate.”
I spin (spindles, both drop and supported; as well as wheel) and I weave (shaft, rigid heddle,and inkle).
I’m glad to help answer questions (esp as I know a lot of folks who do work at figuring out pre-wheel/pre-“modern” shaft looms).
Rigid heddle, and inkle looms, are quite portable, and useful for smaller widths and trims (as are card looms, but I’ve yet to get around to picking up card weaving).
I do want to say I think “The last spinner in the villiage” is using a hand turned variety of Great Wheel. Great wheels/walking wheels, used the inertia of a push on a large wheel to put a lot of time into spinning a pointed spindle end to great speed, and spinning “off the tip” (as with supported spindles) very fine yarns (what we would think of as “thread”) can be made. It’s the sort of spinning wheel Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger with.
One of the efficiencies of a that sort of wheel is the yarn will self-wind onto the spindle, whereas with a drop/supported spindle the copp has to be added in a step which interrupts the flow of drafting/spinning (supported spindles also have more complicated copp management because you want to wind a “loose” cop up high, and then, when that’s ‘full’ move it further down to pack it more tightly, and to increase the rest mass near the pivot, but I digress).
The hand-cranked wheel has fewer moving parts (no treadle pivot, no footmen [to connect treadle to linkage], no linkage to convert vertical motion to rotational).
If it were a treadly wheel I would expect the drive wheel to be closer to her foot, and higher from the ground; because the leverage from where her foot is would be terribly inefficient, and maintaining the controlled rates of rotation on the drive wheel would be a lot harder.
A couple of thoughts about other reasons why textile labour might be less visible or less highly rated:
If you’re in a mediaeval society, how will the landowner expect his rent, if not in coins? Either in labour, in goods, or in some mixture of the two. And the labour will be labour on his own fields – so farm labour, men’s labour – while the goods will be farmed goods – grain, eggs, livestock, oil, wine, cheese and so on.
From the landlord’s point of view – so from the point of view of the literate people who keep his accounts and records – men’s work and what it produces is much more visible.
Second, we modern people are not subsistence farmers. But we nevertheless have, I think, a lot more instinctive understanding of how much time food production takes than how much time clothing production takes. I’m not a farmer, but I’ve grown food crops in an allotment and herbs in a garden, I’ve reared chickens and sheep and made cheese and cider, I have (of course) cooked. I’ve made food from scratch – starting from a bare patch of ground and some seeds. Not often, but I’ve done it at a hobby level, so I have some very basic understanding of the amount of time and effort required. A lot of us could say something similar.
And a lot of us have probably made clothing too, but starting from cloth or at best from wool yarn, which is, as OGH points out, skipping the hardest part, that of turning the raw product into usable thread or yarn. Very few people have the experience of making clothing from scratch – starting with a pile of fleece recently clipped off a sheep or whatever. So we massively underestimate where the labour goes.
We’re all met together here to sit and to crack
Wi’ our glasses in our hands and our work upon our back
There’s nae a trade among ’em that can mend or can mak
If it wasn’t for the work of the weavers
If it was not for the weavers, what would you do
You wouldna hae the clothes that’s made of wool
You wouldna hae a coat of the black or the blue
If it was not for the work of the weavers
There’s soldiers and there’s sailors and glaziers and all
There’s doctors and there’s ministers and them that live by law
And our friends in Sooth America, though them we never saw
But we ken they wear the work of the weavers
[CHORUS]
There’s folk wha’s independent of other tradesmen’s work
The women need no barbers and dykers need no clerk
But nane of them can do wi’oot a coat or a shirt
No, they canna lack the work of the weavers
Though weavin’ is a trade that never can fail
As long as we need clothes for to keep another hale
So let us all be merry o’er a bicker of good ale
And we’ll drink to the health of the weavers
A couple of issues with this one.
First, inkle looms were a thing. These are small-ish looms that can easily be taken from place to place–as evidenced by my wife doing just that. They are also extremely simple, just a few planks for a frame with dowels on them at angles (exact configurations vary). I’m having trouble finding history on these, but I can’t imagine these weren’t used earlier than our first official records (First Appearance Datum is never the first actual appearance), given that ribbons were popular for all kinds of uses in the Middle Ages.
Second, I’m not buying that most living history folks are from the Early Modern Era. Pensic alone constitutes a HUGE number of such people, enough to technically be a town under Pennsylvania law (a combination of Valhalla and Brigadoon). Anyone interested in Medieval fiber arts should make a trip to Pensic during the first week (the second is largely focused on the combat, though honestly it’s more a matter of degrees, as classes still occur). There are always classes on the topic, and merchants will gladly talk your ear off. And you never know the level of expertise you’ll find. My wife and I got to meet perhaps the world’s leading expert on kilt-making at the time when we went, and she got a very thorough lesson in the traditions of men wearing skirts (I, on the other hand, got to spend 45 minutes being a case study and model).
I will also note that while weaving may have been the most common method for making cloth, it was hardly the only one. Knitting is known from the 11th century. Nalbinding is several thousand years old and doesn’t require as much spinning. Shepherd’s knitting–a precursor to, if not an example of, crochet–is documented as a widespread craft among the lower classes in the 1800s, with good evidence of origins much, much earlier (there’s an Egyptian cloth that’s double crochets in a chevron pattern, for example). There’s also tatting and bobbin weaving and felting and carpet-making and just a whole slew of other ways to turn fibers into cloth.
The problem is, as is mentioned in this article, all this stuff was done by women, largely peasant women, which means documentation is nil. The attitude was very much that the peasantry was beneath notice, and women’s work–and especially crafts–were irrelevant. Even when they are noticed the documentation is garbage. Anyone who’s done crochet and knitting knows that there’s a HUGE difference between crochet slip stitches and actual knitting, yet they’re lumped together in ways that suggest the people writing these things have never held a needle.
And yes, I’m still miffed about SciShow. I crochet, I can’t stand the process of knitting, but I respect it and that video is a crystal clear example of precisely the sort of contempt people hold these arts in, even today. That someone could make a video like that in 2025 should convince everyone that we know essentially nothing about how women worked in the past.
I’ve sheered sheep and washed wool using Medieval methods (okay, our scissors were shaped a little different). Got pretty good at it, too–not quite “Ausie with electric sheers” levels, but respectably swift. Didn’t do much carding or spinning, just enough to know I don’t like it. My wife and some of the other ladies of the group did spin the wool, though. It didn’t take them long to get fairly good at it. Obviously more time and experience would mean better outcomes, at every stage of the process, but they could make some respectable garments out of what we cut off the sheep. With drop spindles my experience is that speed is tricky. The thing can only drop so far–too far and you separate the fibers, snapping the thread. And the tension–which is necessary to the process–is largely governed by gravity. The spindle WILL fall, it’s just a question of how fast. This leads to a situation where you’re constantly re-setting the thing. You’ll note that the spindles are always shown with a certain amount of thread on them. That’s the thread you’ve made wound round the spindle as you make it.
So I think “How fast can you make X yards of thread?” is not, after a certain (early) point in one’s training, going to be meaningful. Once you get used to the tension speed will be dictated by your arm length, not skill. The real question is going to be “What is the thread good for?” Low-quality thread will be lump, hard to work with, and break easily (“lump” means poorly-twisted fibers, which makes them weak), resulting in clothing that doesn’t last. Good-quality thread will be smooth, even, and strong, good for everything.
First, does an “inkle loom” make any significant difference to textile production, given that this is specifically an article about peasant farmers and takes an annalist approach of looking at several centuries rather than narrowing in on one particular time and place? Steppe nomads also used portable looms, but in a finite sized article they don’t get mentioned either.
As a long time SCA person you are quite likely over-estimating the number of medieval living history folk, for the same reason that I over-estimate the number of tabletop roleplayers. We humans do tend to assume that our own social circle isn’t unusual.
As you yourself note, the historical / literary / archeological evidence for many aspects of textile production is almost non-existent. In a finite sized non-academic article I am glad Prof Devereaux doesn’t bother listing all the things we don’t know about. AFAIK, most of the textiles in use by peasants in the areas and periods under discussion were woven, so sticking to those does give a reasonable overview.
“How fast can you make X yards of thread” is very meaningful when it absolutely positively requires X yards of thread to weave enough material for a shirt, and those X yards take tens to hundreds of hours of work! The best spinners are faster than the average, are they five times faster? I doubt it. And I am absolutely sure that the spinners with the longest arms don’t have arms even twice as long as the average. The table gives ranges of hours, not a precise value, which to me adequately covers probable differences in type of equipment and operator skill. Which of the numbers do you think are implausible?
And for those who’d like to learn more about medieval living history, please provide a starting point?
One academic who has done a lot of work to recreate northern European spindle/distaff spinning techniques is Katrin Kania: https://www.pallia.net/en
She teaches workshops in-person in Germany and online on the technique, as well as makes and sells reasonably-priced reproduction spindles, whorls, needles/pins, and other tools on her site. I have no idea if she’s shipping to the US right now.
“Drop spindle” is largely an American term and is based on spinning techniques mainly in the Andes (but not exclusively, as spinning techniques vary tremendously) popularized by Abby Franquemont–and the research of her parents–and by Ravelry. MUCH of–but not all!!–spinning in medieval Europe involved a distaff (totally neglected by Pennsic, especially the vendors– unless things have changed there) and “in-hand” spinning. Check out artwork from medieval Europe depicting spinning. Again–‘drop spinning’ did exist, but most of the images show in-hand spinning and always a distaff (which let women tuck the distaff into their belt and spin while walking, riding mules, etc).
Also–young children (boys and girls) were taught to spin. I can’t remember the exact ages, but possibly by age 4, they are playing around with a spindle and fiber–in medieval Europe? I’m not sure, but I would bet that it holds true at least for girls. There are photos of men in the Middle East spinning wool while tending sheep–not medieval Europe, but even so…
“Second, I’m not buying that most living history folks are from the Early Modern Era. Pensic alone constitutes a HUGE number of such people”
I’ve never been but is Pennsic really mediaeval? The website says “pre-17th century” which includes the Early Modern as well. Things like this make me wonder as well:
“And you never know the level of expertise you’ll find. My wife and I got to meet perhaps the world’s leading expert on kilt-making at the time when we went” – the kilt, as currently worn, is an 18th century invention and even the older “great kilt” is not mediaeval but early modern. Mediaeval Scots wore tunics and cloaks.
Most things that even interested people think of as “medieval” are early modern, yes. I can’t speak on Pensic specifically but I’ve noticed it many times.
“Most things that even interested people think of as “medieval” are early modern”
Indeed. For example full plate armour is very late mediaeval and early modern, and I don’t think you really get horse armour until the early 16th century.
One of the most early-modern things about Pennsic is, ironically, probably the presence of hundreds of people who are obsessed with recreating a rather inaccurate version of what they think the Middle Ages were like. Early modern Europe was full of people like that. Look at Henry VIII and his tournaments. None of the chivalric orders except the Garter are actually mediaeval.
There’s maybe a parallel here with steampunk. Supposedly this is Victorian-inspired, but most of the most obvious visual signifiers of steampunk – zeppelins, goggles, dreadnoughts and so on – are Edwardian, or even interwar. Even HG Wells was only just Victorian.
“I don’t think you really get horse armour until the early 16th century.”
You get horse armor by 300s BC, if not earlier, in Iran/Persia; long tradition of cataphracts there. Seleucids, late Romans, Sassanids, Byzantines.
“Horses covered with scale armor are alluded to in the ancient Chinese book of poetry, the Shi Jing dating between the 7th to 10th centuries BC” though that’s probably hide armor, not metal, and partial coverage. Chinese cataphracts in early centuries AD.
Of course, that’s all scale armor; “full bard” plate armor for horses would be late, just as plate armor for humans. Not sure about mail barding.
True of course, and a welcome reminder to be clear when I’m just thinking of the middle ages in western Europe.
Mail barding was apparently a thing in mediaeval Europe, though very little survives: https://exarc.net/issue-2022-1/ea/evaluation-mail-horse-armour
How does Diocletian’s price edicts have an entry for the weavers of silk?
No one in the Mediterranean knew how to cultivate silkworms or produce silk until 200 years after Diocletian died.
My understanding was that all the silk in Europe in Roman times came as pre woven fabric. Like someone in China wove the silk into fabric and those fabric pieces would make their way west.
In that case, what are the weavers of silk actually weaving?
Chinese silk was better, but the Mediterranean had silkworms too.
Citation? If there were ever silkworms in the ancient Mediterranean region, they were long gone and forgotten by 550 AD, when Justinian learned the secret of silk production from returning Nestorian monks (according to Procopius).
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b6d2d1/in_classical_antiquity_the_aegean_island_of_kos/
TIL:
Different wikipedia pages say different things — one that “coa vestis” was wild silk from Kos, another that it’s now thought it was transparent fabric and not from Kos at all, despite Aristotle and Pliny. At any rate, silk made from the (damaged) cocoons of wild moths is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_silk
Domesticated silk gives longer threads that are easier to dye, and more of it. So there needn’t be a contradiction — there could have been local silk production, that was supplemented or displaced by Chinese silk, whether imported or transplanted.
Amusing line:
‘Moreover, the Chinese were aware of their use [wild silks] in the Roman Empire and apparently imported goods made from them by the time of the Later Han Dynasty in the 1st to 3rd centuries CE.[14][15]’
If accurate, there might have been two-way silk trade: Rome importing larger amounts of finer, and dyed Chinese silk; China importing Roman wild silk with attractive natural colors.
Sad that we didn’t get a cameo from that part of the Decretals of Gregory IX where a woman is bothered by a giant bird wearing a poncho while she’s trying to spin. It’s always something.
(I can’t remember the exact number but it’s somewhere in Royal MS 10 E IV, f. 138v through f. 148r*)
It’s kinda all very well to talk about how people shouldn’t underestimate the importance of women’s work, while at the same time yet again devoting a single section of a 4+ part series to things relating to women after several sections ignoring them entirely.
What a pointless comment.
I don’t think the previous pieces ignored women, unless you think that premodern farm labour was done only or mostly by men, which I can definitely tell you it wasn’t.
If you’re reading the rest of the series I think Dr. Deveraux has laid out very well *why* the series didn’t talk about women’s work up to this point – because despite its importance, it doesn’t show up in official records at all, and so is much more difficult to tease out of what little data we do have than men’s work is (and that most women *also* did “men”‘s work anyway).
Just a note that the caption on one of the figures is wrong: “The wheel is driven by a treadle” is incorrect. The last spinner in the village is using a great wheel. You can tell this from her right hand, which is turning a handle attached to the wheel’s axle. There is no foot-driven treadle to be seen.
The term “drop spindle” is also an incorrect modern term from the craft revival of the 1960s and 1970s USA. It is just called a “spindle”.
For nore up-to-date historical knowledge of Western European spinning, check out the FB group ” Distaff Spinning Through the Ages” as a starting point.
Will Fix.
As someone who hand sews for fun, this bit:
“Let’s assume producing a yard of fabric requires very roughly 3.5 hours of carding, 90 hours of spinning, 12 hours of weaving and another 2 hours of sewing to get us to finished garments,”
I think rather underestimates how long sewing a garment takes. yes your most basic ‘rectangle with a head-hole’ tunica probably won’t take that long, but shaped garments require cutting into pieces and then sewing and then hemming, not to mention sewing eyelets for lacings, adding basic trims etc. And that’s discounting modern needles and pins as well.
Spinning absolute takes the longest amount of time, but sewing also takes much longer than *two* hours. The only ‘garments’ I’ve made in two hours or less have been things like children’s aprons, and mittens. A friend of mine can do a medieval kirtle in a day, if she does nothing else – which as discussed these peasant women weren’t – they’re doing all the other household work as well.
I actually suspect the real reason unspecialized men earned more than unspecialized women was because women eat less.
A working man, even if he has no family to support and very low bargaining power, cannot accept a wage that won’t afford him 3000 calories a day, because if he does his health will collapse and his employment along with it. A lone woman can accept a wage sufficient to afford 2000 calories a day and remain fit to continue working. In a world where food takes a huge percentage of a person’s income, that leads to a large disparity in wages even if patriarchy isn’t a factor.