“Some of our Matrons say that ten runs were a week’s labour; if so Miss Lydia performed the labour of four days and one-fifth of a day in one day.”
“Upon hearing of the exploit of Miss Beach [he continues in his address] the wife of Capt. Isaac Pratt, of the South part of the town, came upon the arena. Between early dawn and the setting of the sun, she had actually spun six runs, but at this moment her husband interfered, and peremptorily forbade her proceeding further. She sat down, and wept like a child, when she ought to have rejoiced, that she possessed a husband, in whose eyes her future health and happiness were more precious, than the brief applause which might arise from success in that contest.”
He goes on to say that Lydia Beach became the wife of Jesse Buel, son of Capt. Jonathan Buel, “while her garland was yet fresh upon her brow; but the doating husband was destined to see it wither down to the grave, for Lydia never enjoyed health from the hour of her triumph.”
From this it is evident that the spinning-wheel as well as the sewing-machine has had its victims. It was well for these toiling women of the pioneer towns if they had husbands thoughtful enough to stop in time the self-sacrifice of daily labor at the wheel, as well as in this spinning-match for glory only. Of such pious women Chaucer could scarcely have said:—
“Deceite, weepynge, spynnynge, God hath give
To wymmen kyndely that they may live.”
For not only did these women live, but also their families and their country because of their spinning.
The Stamp Act year was drawing on, and the storm of indignation was beginning to rumble in the distance, soon to burst like a tornado on England’s commerce with her colonies. From Massachusetts to South Carolina the colonies were alive with patriotic societies of women called “Daughters of Liberty,” who banded themselves together with the agreement to drink no tea, and wear only what their own hands could spin and weave. Among the Daughters of Stratford, Connecticut, were two children of a Tory father, of the elder of whom it is written, “that having lost her thimble she would not buy another, as it would be an imported article; and Polly, the little sister, scorning an English needle, learned to sew with a thorn.” Think of that, all ye modern women to whom sewing is enough of a “thorn” in itself without using another to sew with.
Everywhere these Daughters met together to spin, once to the number of seventy in one place. In Rowley, Massachusetts, “thirty-three respectable ladies,” as the story runs, “met at sunrise with their wheels to spend the day at the house of the Reverend Jedediah Jewell, in the laudable design of a spinning-match.” Of course the Rev. Jedediah preached to them; but they were also given bodily sustenance in the form of a “polite and generous repast.” All honor to these Daughters of the olden time whose spinning-wheels did surely spin out their country’s glorious destiny! “Queens of Homespun,” Horace Bushnell called such women, “out of whom we draw our royal lineage.” And to-day, another patriotic society of forty thousand modern Daughters, their descendants, have surely honored themselves in choosing for their insignia this very spinning-wheel and distaff, this symbol of their grandmother’s toil and self-sacrifice and patriotism; for in that little emblem are embodied all the blood and tears, the sorrow, the rejoicing, and the patient, steadfast labor of the women of the American Revolution. The Rev. Mr. Powers in his centennial address, after eulogizing the men, thus speaks of these patriot women of our land:—
“Nor do we speak of these men only, but their mothers, their wives and their daughters were like them.... They sustained their full share in all the trials and dangers of the Ocean, of the wilderness, and of war! Their courage in times of peril, and their fortitude in trials never forsook them! They gave up their husbands and their sons for the cause of God and their country, and their example was all powerful. And this was true, not only of Pilgrim women, but of women in the Revolution. This town possessed them. I will give one instance of this that it may be a memorial of her. Abraham Parmele was a warm patriot in the Revolution ... but in this it is said, he was thrown into the shade by the patriotism of his wife Mary Stanley that was. She was fixed in the righteousness of the cause of the colonies, and when war broke out, she said they would prevail! She said she could pray for the cause of America; and not in the darkest period of the conflict, when many faces were pale, and many hands were on their loins, did this woman’s confidence fail her in the least,—and her actions corresponded with her words. Four different times did she fit out her own son Theodore for the battlefield, and gave him her parting blessing; and with her own hands did she make five soldiers’ blankets, not to sell, but sent them a present to the poor soldiers, who, after the battles of the day, had neither bed nor covering for the night. Could soldiers thus sustained ever relinquish the cause of their country? Never!”