Abstract:

Spinning has been for centuries a fundamental economic activity, mainly pursued by women and characterized by relevant social and cultural connotations.
The availability of good yarn at competitive prices was vital to the success of the textile industries. Strands manufacturing represented one of the most dynamic commercial enterprise encompassing regional and international markets. Local economies were included into global trends, traditions and know how embedded in rural communities were used to feed large-scale trade, flows of goods linked worlds, cultures, societies. Hand spinning was an essential practice both in the country and in the cities.
It was the principal income-generating activity pursued by women as well as a fundamental means for furnishing their own families with textiles. Girls and widows, daughters and wives of sharecroppers, labourers, fishermen, artisans or factory workers spun in the evenings and in any moment free from the fields or domestic duties. Different people were linked by identical practices. Spinning straddled the boundary between social classes, societies and places. In the villages, were men and women spent the evenings working together in the stables or near the fire, spinning acquired a peculiar social value as an occasion of encounter. People shared thoughts and feelings. By the mid 18th century spinning was also at the centre of massive technical innovations that paved the way towards the emergence of the factory system, industrial capitalism and eventually contemporaneity. New spinning technologies dramatically changed the society of most western countries. Spinning mills were soon associated with proletariat, slum and ruthless exploitation of women and children.
Yet new and old coexisted for decades. Factory work and cottage industry, drop spindles and spinning mules, self-consumption and market oriented manufacturing overlapped in time and space. Different temporality coexisted in the same areas. Spinning was not simply an economic activity but it was also associated with cultural values. Spinning became a common metaphor in literature, art and everyday discourse symbolizing women_s industriousness, diligence, patience, dedication and abnegation. Its social role and position let it to grow to a central aspect of the construction of folk culture and memory.
Countless tales about spinning emerged all around Europe.
Yet, despite the numerous studies on textile history, spinning has not yet been a subject of a major research in its own right. _Spinners, Spinning Wheels and Spinning Mules_ aims to fill this gap providing a comprehensive history of material and cultural aspects of spinning in 19th century Veneto provinces.
The research approaches the subject from a whole range of relevant perspectives treating it as a practice that was at the same time material, economic, institutional, gendered and cultural. Theses thematic areas are analysed within a diachronic and comparative framework, highlighting the patterns of transition into the Modern world and comparing the present case with other European experiences. The long-term analysis is completed by micro studies of single communities, families, individuals, the two approaches enhancing each other and giving to our topic a more actual, concrete, appealing, yet problematic, character. The projects also presents unconventional aspects. It crosses the usual boundaries between scholarships, involves the combination of material and documentary evidence, focuses on women's position in work and society, offers an instrument for interpreting industrial past and its evolution into modernity, reads the major transformations that contributed in building the present from the side of the common people through one of their most common practices.

Research fellow:
Dr. David Celetti