Book Review

The Age of Homespun is a history of women's textile making in New England from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth. As readers of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's earlier work would anticipate, her new book is no conventional history. She continues the experimentation with historical form that she used so successfully in A Midwife's Tale (1990) by organizing each chapter around an object associated with women's needlework or weaving, including such items as Indian baskets, woven coverlets and tablecloths, and spinning wheels. From those objects she ranges out, following both the tightly woven threads and the loose ends and using the objects both as hard evidence and as metaphor. In the process she writes a history not simply of women's work, but of New England itself, seen from the perspective of women and their labor. At its best, The Age of Homespun is wonderfully disorienting, challenging the way we write and remember history. The book is multilayered and quite complex: think of a large loom, with many shuttles flying. A brief review cannot do justice to the intricacy of the pattern or to the extraordinary skill required to execute it.	1
Ulrich takes her title from a speech given by Horace Bushnell at Litchfield, Connecticut's centennial celebration in 1851. Unlike celebrants at other centennials, Bushnell recognized that women's productive labor was critical to the making of New England and, by extension, the American nation. At the same time, the very notion of an 'age of homespun' is pastoral, an image of a golden age of rural contentment. Like Raymond Williams, Ulrich believes that 'pastoral almost always has political content.' Hence, 'Bushnell's celebration-The Journal of American History March 2003 1495 of household self-sufficiency challenged the materialism of his own age while leaving its structure intact.' The pastoral of homespun made women the repositories of a lost republican virtue, which, like the Indians who had seemingly also disappeared from the New England landscape, could safely be lamented because it was gone.	2
Ulrich's challenge is to recover this lost era without romanticizing it--that is, without writing pastoral herself. She must not only write the period's history but also instruct us in how to feel about it or, to be more precise, she must deprive us of the feeling that we are accustomed to getting when the myth of the age of homespun is invoked. She uses several strategies to achieve this end. First, she focuses on objects more than on the women who made or used them. She describes the objects and the processes used to make them in loving detail, but she lavishes less attention on their makers. Her point seems to be that we should know these women by their work. Second, each chapter is more a series of loosely connected vignettes than a straightforward narrative. In the process, Ulrich is able to tell us an extraordinary amount about New England's history, from how indigo was used to dye wool (beginning with fermenting the indigo for two weeks in a vat of urine) to the function of women's textile making in the nascent consumer economy. But the episodic nature of the exposition necessarily keeps us from identifying with any one person or any one moment. Ulrich used a similar technique in A Midwife's Tale, beginning each chapter with a seemingly inscrutable snippet of Martha Ballard's diary and then proceeding to show how it illuminated an important aspect of the midwife's life. In The Age of Homespun, she works her historian's magic on deceptively mute objects, making them yield story after story--but objects are not the same as people, and most of us do not care about them in the same way.	. . .