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The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. (New York: Knopf, 2001. 501 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-679-44594-3.)
The Age of Homespun is a history of women's textile making in New England from the midseventeenth 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.
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 of household self-sufficiency challenged the...