Between a Rock and a Hard Place:
18th Century Textile Workers
OK, why have I titled this project with an enormous cliche, and what do rocks have to do with textiles or textile workers? Well, a rock is another term for a distaff. It's all clear now, isn't it? No?? What's a distaff?? Check out the illustrations in the corner (coming soon) to see just what one looks like. Basically, it's the stick onto which is wound fiber ready for spinning. It can be hand held, or attached to a spinning wheel. If the Venus de Milo still had her hands, she'd be holding a distaff in one of them, a drop spindle in the other. So, that explains the rock. What about the hard place? Well, the hard place is where textile workers found themselves on the eve of the Industrial Revolution when their livlihoods were being diverted to the factories. Even before this, textile workers found themselves embroiled in one controversy after another. They became the object of pastoral poetry, nationalistic bombast, moral lectures, and romantic emulation. What this project seeks to do is to situate the real workers within the context of the literature, in effect putting the textile back into the text.