On spinning, spinsters, and the oddness of history

Rest assured, there are more links at the bottom. But first:

We’re less than 100 days from the U.S. presidential election¹ on Nov. 5. Be sure to check your registration and all the other when-and-where-type details in your state. Also: if you want to get involved, this is a good place to find opportunities wherever you are and whatever your ability.

On a personal level, as an ordinary human running for New York State Assembly Seat 122, I’m simultaneously energized by all of the possibilities and exhausted by all of the work. All we can do is the work, tho, and I am privileged to be able to do it.

Still, I read sometimes and sometimes it’s even something that doesn’t have much to do with politics.²

I just finished Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore, which is all about Jane Mecom, who was Ben Franklin’s sister. The pair wrote letters back and forth and Lepore has gone deep on what they contain.

But for me, what was most interesting were the history bits, like this passage about how knowing how to spin meant a woman would be chaste:

“In the more lurid corners of London that Franklin had been frequenting, the battle of the furniture was smutty; the wanton tea table versus the virginal spinning wheel was a commonplace of early-eighteenth century satire.

In Edward Ward’s 1702 poem The City Madam, and the Country Maid, the city madam is ripe to be undone: Loosing at last, so little is her Care,/Her Virgin Treasure on a Founder’d Chair, and all because she does not spin: she’d been 'bred,/Scarce knowing Hemp from Flax, of Yarn from Thread.

By contrast, the virtuous country maid does naught but spin: Her Needle, Bobbins, and Knitting Pins, or Reel,/ Some new Device or the Spinning Wheel/Are still Employ’d, and with Content Caress’d. A spinster was a virgin.

A 1714 pamphlet called Adam and Eve Script included a chapter on the ‘the Huswifry of the Spinning-Wheel;’ it describes a spinster who ‘waddles, like a Duck, with her Toes inwards, in due Observance of her Mother’s good Counsel, who bid her always be careful, before she was marry’d, to keep her great Toes together, lest some Clown or other should tumble in between them.’”

But, really, most interesting is aside story about Patience Wright, a widow in need of an income who became a wax sculptor. Wright met met Jane in Boston in 1771 and wanted an introduction to Ben Franklin, who was in England at the time.

“When [Wright’s] husband died, she, like Jane, went into business. She started making people out of wax, pulling life-size molded wax figures out from between her legs. It was astonishing, unrivaled, and scandalous. Abigail Adams called Wright ‘the queen of sluts.’”

Once in London, Wright would sit in Parliament, sculpt, and take notes. ‘She heard a great deal of loose talk at her waxworks, while taking the likenesses of the king’s ministers,’ Lepore notes. Wright would send her intel back to the states inside the wax heads she made.

Which I take as further proof that no one notices a woman of a certain age, which is our super-power.

The links:

• Phil Williams³ proves that a) there are still journalists and b) they are doing the hard work confronting hate.

• When I was very, very pregnant with kid #2, I could have literally waddled my way from my house to the hospital maternity ward, which was about a half-mile away.⁴ A dozen years later, that delivery floor has been shut down and pregnant people have to drive 30 minutes away. And we’re some of the lucky ones.⁵

• If you, like me, are transitioning into crone-hood, this piece is very much for you.

• Gender is so much more complicated than we want it to be — and the podcast Tested (which is being hosted by NPR’s Embedded) does a great job outlining how we got to where we are when it comes to women’s sports.

• A podcast for the infrastructure nerds: Backed Up, which is all about a municipal sewer systems and is MUCH MORE INTERESTING than you’d think.

• This Sporkful episode about the Victorian obsession about celery reminded me of a bit of local-ish history about the Celery King of Albany.⁶ History is wild, y’all.

• A blowfish gets a glow-up.

1. And a bunch of state and local offices, too, which I’d argue deserve even more of your attention than the presidential.

2. Although everything is political, really. Like Jane Franklin lived a very, very different life from her brother Ben and not just because he was a statesman. Men and women occupied very different spheres in Colonial America — and the more I read about her, the more I realized not as much has changed in more than 200 years than one might hope. Which makes me want to simply walk into the sea.

3. I might be having some kind of weird mental lapse but didn’t he used to be in Knoxville?

4. I’m very, very, very happy this did not happen.

5. Non-urban healthcare systems are such a mess, y’all. Such. A. Mess.

6. Why do I know about him? Because one of my obsessions (Isabella Bird) stayed in his hotel (which might have been a stop on the Underground Railroad) when she passed through Albany. I’m ready to write my Bird book any time, btw.