ALICE HYNEMAN RHINE.
In treating of woman’s industrial career in America the subject falls naturally into periods, each one of which seems to possess some distinct characteristic. These periods can in no sense be considered arbitrary divisions, for the changes in woman’s industrial position in America have been the result of slow transitions from one state to another. The fact that is emphasized is, that certain causes can be observed which had the effect at stated times of forcing old conditions to give way to new. By taking up in their order each of these epoch-shaping factors, we can discern most easily the part women have played in the progress of American industries.
The first of these periods embraces those years of primitive social conditions when people labored to supply the simplest needs of life; when men were engaged principally in agriculture and commerce, and women carried on the work of manufacturing clothing, and attending to the wants of the household. In those days, almost every family owned a loom, spinning-wheel, reel and knitting-needles, and the family comfort depended largely on the degree of skill and industry with which these manufacturing implements were handled. In some homes, hundreds of yards of “homespun” were made yearly. The New York Mercury for 1768 credits one family, living in Newport, Rhode Island, with having within four years “manufactured nine hundred and eighty yards of woolen cloth, besides two coverlids (coverlets), and two bed-ticks, and all the stocking yarn of the family.”
In those days neither wealth nor position afforded women an excuse for idleness. Nor did their labors cease with the home. It was considered so unbecoming to be unemployed that even hours of social enjoyment were devoted to useful occupations. During the enforcement of the non-importation acts, when, among other things, cloth and stockings were prevented from coming into this country from England, a letter written from Newport tells of a social gathering where “it was resolved that those who could spin ought to be employed in that way, and those who could not, should reel.” At a similar meeting in Boston, “a party of forty or fifty young women, calling themselves ‘Daughters of Liberty,’” amused themselves at the house of their pastor with spinning, during one day, “two hundred and thirty-two skeins of yarn, some very fine.” No woman considered herself too elegant
To guide the spindle and direct the loom,
or knit the stockings which, since stocking-frames were interdicted as articles of import, had to be made for the whole people by slow process of hand. As indicative of the simple and industrial habits of Mrs. Washington, it is related that when, in 1780, a party of the leading ladies of Morristown called upon her by appointment at her husband’s headquarters, Mrs. Washington appeared before them in a plain gown of “linsey woolsey,” and, while she entertained them with pleasant conversation, her busy fingers never ceased plying the knitting-needles.
Prior to and long after the Revolution, stocking knitting was an industry large enough to claim most of what were termed woman’s “spare moments.” With the assistance of child and slave labor, large quantities were made for sale or exchange. Legislators, to stimulate busy fingers to fresh exertions, offered bounties for their increased production. In Virginia, prizes of fifty pounds of tobacco (the currency then) were given “for every five hundred pairs of men’s and women’s stockings produced, worth from three to five shillings the pair, with the privilege of buying them at an advance of seventy-five per cent. on those prices.”
Except among a few German settlers in Pennsylvania, no attempt was made for many years to change stocking-making from a domestic into a factory industry. Until 1826 the manufacture of stockings remained woman’s almost exclusive province. Then knitting-machines were set up in several of the States, but, as if there was some peculiar fitness in this remaining woman’s department, the employees in knitting-works have always been, even down to 1889, “nearly all women and children.”
Never did women work harder than during this domestic period of labor. The slave women of the South, in addition to going through all the processes of manufacturing woolen and cotton cloth, which they afterward cut and made into garments, attended to both in and out-of-door labor. They tilled the rice fields, planted tobacco, sowed the cotton seed, and helped with the harvesting. The women in the North, though not “put into the ground,” as the early adventurers termed field-work, engaged energetically in other industries. History tells of women who helped build their own homes, wielding the ax and carrying the water to mix mortar with which to build chimneys. On the farms, it was women who raised the garden truck of vegetables and herbs, attended to poultry breeding, milked the cows, made butter and cheese, did the sewing, and performed all the household chores now classed in industrial statistics as “domestic service.”
Outside the strictly necessary occupations of manufacture, household service, clothing, and garden-work, from quite early times women in America turned their attention to speculative labor and to trade. When James the First, thinking to utilize mulberry trees that were indigenous to our soil, forwarded silkworm cocoons to America, when dazzling dreams of wealth to come from the successful culture of the silkworm were indulged in by people on both sides of the Atlantic, and when bounties of money and tobacco were offered for spun and woven silk, according to its weight and width, most of these prizes were obtained by women. The success obtained by women in feeding the worms, and reeling, spinning, and weaving the silk, caused this industry, during the varying fortunes that preceded the establishment of silk-weaving as a factory industry, to be carried on mainly by them. History has preserved the names of three women famous before the Revolution as silk-growers and weavers: Mrs. Pinckney, Grace Fisher, and Susanna Wright. While silkworm culture was a failure in spite of all the fostering care bestowed upon it, and none of the pioneers realized any of the golden visions of rivaling the productions of Spain and the Indies, the efforts made by them paved the way for future cultivation.