Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World tells how the need for clothing “built modern civilization, by motivating achievements from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution.” The book contains happy tales of innovation and entrepreneurship, but it also reveals “dark and disturbing facts about the past,” notes The Doomslayer:
In the preindustrial era, clothing was often painstakingly produced at home…. in Roman times, it took a woman about 909 hours—or 114 days, almost 4 months—to spin enough wool into yarn for a single toga. With the later invention of the spinning wheel, the time needed to produce yarn for a similarly sized garment dropped to around 440 hours, or 50 days. Even in the 18th century, on the eve of industrialization, Yorkshire wool spinners using the most advanced treadle spinning wheels of the time would have needed 14 days to produce enough yarn for a single pair of trousers….
Most preindustrial women devoted enormous amounts of time to producing thread, which they learned how to make during childhood… “Most preindustrial women spent their lives spinning.” This was true across much of the world. “At only four years old, an Aztec girl was introduced to spinning tools. By age six, she was making her first yarn. If she slacked off or spun poorly, her mother punished her by pricking her wrists with thorns, beating her with a stick, or forcing her to inhale chili smoke.”
These girls often multitasked while spinning: “preindustrial spinners could work while minding children or tending flocks, gossiping or shopping, or waiting for a pot to boil.” The near-constant nature of the task meant…cloth-making was viewed as a key feminine virtue. Ancient Greek pottery portrays spinning “as both the signature activity of the good housewife and something prostitutes do between clients.”
Women of every social class “worked day and night” to produce yarn or thread, but for thousands of years, the process was so time-consuming that “this essential raw material was always in short supply.”
Producing enough yarn or thread was just the beginning; the thread still needed to be turned into cloth. “It took three days of steady work to weave a single bolt of silk, about thirteen yards long, enough to outfit two women in blouses,” the book notes.
People also used to have cramped housing. People’s homes were often quite unpleasant, as recounted in Judith Flanders’s book The Making of Home: The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Our Homes. Before industrialization, most people lived in housing that would be considered cruel and unusual punishment if it were used to house prisoners in 21st century America. “Five people living in one room, with no sanitation, lit and warmed by firelight, ‘cramped, musty and indescribably filthy’. . . [these were] the ordinary living conditions of [our] own history.” For a house to have multiple rooms devoted to different purposes was an unimaginable luxury in the past. “For much of human history, cooking [took] place in the main living space” over the central hearth.
