Women, the Weave & Threads for a Better Future
Tracing ancestral women’s work through the past and into future possibilities
Prior to industrial manufacturing, textile creation was a time-consuming, necessary task because the only fabric in the world that comes pre-made is animal hide.
What were your pre-industrial female ancestors doing in their off-time?
They were weaving, weaving, weaving.
Oak
Reed
Linen
Cotton
Wool
Silk
Gold. (Yes, gold)
Materials, tools and techniques vary from place to place, culture to culture, season to season, village to village, family to family. So did the creations our ancestors made although commonalities exist too. Items like mats, bags, clothing, baskets, and spiritual offerings are found throughout the world.
Fiber technology is not even a species-specific event. Neanderthals, we now know, were creating cord too.
Traditional textiles tell many stories.
For instance, in the South of Italy, you can see the entrance and influences of ancient Greek settlers of Magna Graecia by following the clues in ancient remnants of cloth circa 1000 BCE.
The incoming Greeks carried a weave pattern connected to Southwest Asian traditions that the local Italic tribes did not. Italic weave patterns were in a Neolithic style related to the Indo-Europeans of central Europe. Over time, though, the Italic tribes picked up the weave pattern of their Greek neighbors.
What were your prehistoric female ancestors likely doing in their off-time?
They were weaving, weaving, weaving.
Alongside other related activities like spinning, dying, mending, and twisting.
Not that all weave work was strictly female (although it was quite common); it has been been men’s and gender queer folks’ work too. For instance, the ancient Greeks — perhaps in a bit of culture shock — found that just a bit south on the Mediterranean waterways Egyptian men were at the looms too.
Starting in the back half of the 1800s, the industrial textile production began alleviating many hands from the laborious tasks of weaving. In Southern Italy, those hands took up a new labor into its place, a labor previously only privy to the wealthy few: embroidery.
Weaving became stitching.
Into this new labor, girls and young women poured their time to create biancheria (white wear), a collection of embroidered textiles such as bedding, nightgowns, tablecloths. The biancheria alongside other embroidered and laced textiles were now an expected part of their dowry… and a way they could, out of their own hands, create wealth.
Poor families struggled to keep up with the cultural bare minimum expected for the biancheria. Embroidery required time investments that poor families could not afford. The struggles of keeping food in mouths and roofs over heads consumed most of their waking life.
When they could, though, poor women were stitching, stitching, stitching.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Italian diasporas took these skills overseas. In the States, Italian women took up textile work in factories, artisan shops, and their own kitchen tables. This work helped keep food in mouths and roofs over heads.
A half-century later in Australia, a resonant event would occur post WWII. Now famous for their handiwork skills, newly arriving Southern Italian immigrant women became sought after by their new country’s fashion houses.
Italian immigrant women were sewing, sewing, sewing.
The industrial textile industry, as we know well today, brought with it a new set of problems. Sweatshops, environmental destruction, job loss through automation, garbage heaps of poor quality textiles from fast fashion’s open-ended production cycles.
Solutions are being developed as well. Solutions that both look forward and back. Solutions like returns to traditional weaving practices, natural dyes, upcycling, fair trade practices, closed-cycle production, thrifting, and slow fashion.
If these solutions succeed, we will find ourselves in a future that looks a bit like the past with an additional technological thread running through it.
High-tech, recyclable, UV-protective clothing dyed with walnut shells or chamomile and sold at fair trade prices…which are now affordable to the average buyer because of UBI and a global living-wage standard.
Upcycled bed sheets turned into infant’s clothes with flowers and prayers embroidered into the corners sent as baby shower gifts to far-away friends via clean-energy delivery drones.
Workshops on how to create hand-woven blankets with a simple Neolithic handloom delivered in an immersive VR classroom equipped with automatic language translation.
This is a way, my friends, that together we can weave a future worth living in.
With our threads of human ingenuity — ancient, ancestral, present-day, and yet-to-be-imagined.
