Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVd: Spinning Plates
This is the fourth thread of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc) 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.
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## 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.
From the British Museum, a French painting by Jean François Millet (c. 1850s) showing a peasant woman carding wool. The two large boards with handles she holds are the hand carders.
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.
Via Wikipedia, a distaff and spindle at work. The spindle drawn here looks to be a hand-held spindle for short-stapled wool.
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.
From the British Museum, a Greek white-ground oinochoe (c. 490-470) showing a woman spinning with a short-handled distaff and a drop-spindle.
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.
Via Wikipedia, a manuscript illustration (1237) showing a woman working at a spinning wheel. This is, to my knowledge, the earliest visual depiction of the technology.
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
Via Wikipedia, a painting by Guillaume Fouace (1888), _La dernière Fileuse de mon village_ (“The Last Spinner In My Village”) showing a French woman working at a spinning wheel. The wheel is driven by a treadle and she keeps the wool for spinning on a distaff.
## 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.
Via Wikipedia, painting by Albert Anker (1888) showing Queen Bertha instructing girls on spinning (in this case the fibers are clearly flax, though wool would probably have been more appropriate for a tenth century spinner in Italy).
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 2 _d_ 3 and for a weaver 3.9 _d_ ; 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.
Via Wikipedia, a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguerau (1873), The Spinner, showing a young woman with her distaff and spindle. As with many of his paintings, the subject is idealized, and rather well dressed for what is presumably meant to be a peasant woman, although spinning was an activity which might be done by all classes of women.
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%
Figures are from Aldrete _et al_., _Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor_ (2013), Fischer, “The $3500 Shirt” (2013) and J.S. Lee, _The Medieval Clothier_ (2018). Note that J.S. Lee’s figures are for the later Middle Ages and thus assume a horizontal loom and a spinning wheel, thus the much faster production time.
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.
Via the British Library, detail from the Luttrell Psalter, Add MS 42130 fol. 193r (1325-40), showing one woman spinning with a spinning wheel while another cards wool. Once again, thanks to J.S. Lee for citing his manuscript details completely so I could run this down and get the image.
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_ 89.5 hours4 per square meter:**about 3 hours carding, 75 hours spinning, 10 hours weaving and 1.5 hours sewing** , per meter square 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| 1,230.6 hours
23.6 hours per week| 1,678.1 hours
32.3 hours per week| 2,908.75 hours
55.9 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| 2,461.25 hours
47.3 hours per week| 3,356.25 hours
64.5 hours per week| 5,817.5 hours
111.9 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 _at minimum_ a bit more than half of the labor time as farming across the whole household. 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 half (a little more than half, 50-60%) 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_.
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1. 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.
2. 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.
3. that is, pence.
4. 89.87, but we’re not being that precise
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