Homestucks ❤ Socialism

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

That thing with Abigail Adams and lace did not happen. I went looking. I scoured JSTOR and my university library collections. I asked my friends who are into textile history. I read a book full of all the Adamses’ collected letters to each other. No reference to lacemaking ever came up anywhere. (In fact, there’s a letter in which she asks John Adams to send her cloth and handkercheifs from Europe that she could sell for a profit back home to make money for what appears to be her own family/household; here’s another with a similar request from 1780. Funding the war is not mentioned.) Here’s a record of Martha Jefferson buying lace in 1778, so she probably wasn’t making it! Here’s a letter from John Adams in 1778 suggesting sumptuary laws to stop people from wearing too much ribbon and lace, because mostly it was coming from England and he didn’t want American money going to England! Here’s a 1780 record of a conflict over profits of selling French fabric and lace in America, something that didn’t stop and was still very profitable. These are the kind of things that come up when you search for Revolutionary War era primary source references to “lace.” You can look at them yourself. Massive quantities of American lacemaking by Revolutionary women to fund the Rev War just did not happen.

The pins thing, meanwhile, is because pins were imported from England, and were being jacked up in price massively—and probably refer to dress pins for securing clothing, not needlework or lacemaking.

buddy i WISH i could

its funny bc this reminded me of the family trees i tried to make for this au on canva like two years ago. they were ... um. they were! !! ! ok not good. new version which might be worse somehow