āConsider the Vikings. Popular feminist retellings like the History Channelās fictional saga āVikingsā emphasize the role of women as warriors and chieftains. But they barely hint at how crucial womenās work was to the ships that carried these warriors to distant shores.
One of the central characters in āVikingsā is an ingenious shipbuilder. But his ships apparently get their sails off the rack. The fabric is just there, like the textiles we take for granted in our 21st-century lives. The women who prepared the wool, spun it into thread, wove the fabric and sewed the sails have vanished.
In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a yearās work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days.
King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.ā
āā¦Picturing historical women as producers requires a change of attitude. Even today, after decades of feminist influence, we too often assume that making important things is a male domain. Women stereotypically decorate and consume. They engage with people. They donāt manufacture essential goods.
Yet from the Renaissance until the 19th century, European art represented the idea of āindustryā not with smokestacks but with spinning women. Everyone understood that their never-ending labor was essential. It took at least 20 spinners to keep a single loom supplied.
āThe spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers are sometimes idle for want of yarn,ā the agronomist and travel writer Arthur Young, who toured northern England in 1768, wrote.
Shortly thereafter, the spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution liberated women from their spindles and distaffs, beginning the centuries-long process that raised even the worldās poorest people to living standards our ancestors could not have imagined.
But that āgreat enrichmentā had an unfortunate side effect. Textile abundance erased our memories of womenās historic contributions to one of humanityās most important endeavors. It turned industry into entertainment.
āIn the West,ā Dr. Harlow wrote, āthe production of textiles has moved from being a fundamental, indeed essential, part of the industrial economy to a predominantly female craft activity.āā
- Virginia Postrel, āWomen and Men Are Like the Threads of a Woven Fabric.ā in The New York Times
