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Question

Clothing and Fashion in the Revolutionary Times

1) Women and men of revolutionary America sought to invest themselves with virtue as they escaped British “corruption.” The most zealous partisans of colonial rights took that investiture to a literal extreme: they made and wore particular clothing as an emblem of political commitment. In the 1760s “homespun,” any coarse cloth made in America, became a badge of opposition to British colonial policy.
2) Clothes sewn from domestic textiles identified the men and women who wore them as friends of liberty, freed from the vanity of British fashion and the humiliating dependence on British imports. As early as 1766 the radical press called for increased domestic industry to offset American reliance on English cloth. It aimed its pleas particularly at the women who managed colonial households.
3) By 1789 radical propaganda had produced a new ritual of American resistance, the patriotic spinning competition. Wives and daughters from some of the wealthiest and most prominent families, who had heretofore vied to outdo each other in acquiring the latest English finery, were the featured players in this new form of political theater. Its setting was usually the home of a local minister where, early in the morning, respectable young ladies, all dressed in homespun, assembled with their spinning wheels. They spent the day spinning furiously, stopping only to sustain themselves with “American produce...which was more agreeable to them than any foreign Dainties and
Delicacies” and to drink herbal tea. At the end of the day the minister accepted their homespun and delivered an edifying sermon to all present. That was a large group, often including from 20 to 100 respectable female spinners as well as hundreds of other townsfolk who had come to watch the competition or to provide food and entertainment.
4) Women reveled in the new attention and value that the male resistance movement and the radical press now attached to a common and humdrum domestic task. By the beginning of 1769 New England newspapers were highlighting spinning bees and their female participants, sometimes termed the “Daughters of Liberty.” Front pages overflowed with praise of female patriotism: “The industry and frugality of American ladies must exalt their character in the Eyes of the World and serve to show how greatly they are contributing to bring about the political salvation of a whole Continent.”
5) Spinning competitions and the vogue of wearing homespun served two political purposes. First, the bees actively enlisted American women in the struggle against Britain. Wives and daughters from families of every rank were made to feel that they could play an important role in resistance by imitating the elite women showcased in public spinning spectacles. Every woman could display her devotion to liberty by encouraging industry and frugality in her own household. Many women took pride in the new political importance that radical propaganda attributed to domestic pursuits. Writing to her English cousin, Charity Clarke of New York City cast herself as one of America’s “fighting army of amazons---armed with spinning wheels.”
6) Spinning bees and “dressing down” in homespun also contributed to the solidarity of the resistance by narrowing the visible distance between rich and poor Americans. In accounts of spinning competitions, the radical press emphasized that even the daughters of the elite sacrificed for the cause of resistance by embracing domestic economy and simplicity.
7) And what genteel women wove, leading men wore. On public occasions throughout the revolutionary crisis, radical leaders appeared in homespun, displaying both their patriotic virtue and their identification with poorer Americans who could not afford British finery. When they returned to their home counties to muster local militia companies, many southern gentlemen adopted homespun “hunting shirts,” long, loose, full-sleeved frocks that reached past the thigh. The dress of the frontier united the gentry with ordinary men of the backcountry while declaring their superiority to the corrupt mother country.

a. women were taking a great risk in not buying British clothing.
b. the women who made homespun clothing played an important role in the resistance movement against the British.
c. the spinning of homespun clothing created a greater rift between rich and poor.
d. the British tried to stamp out spinning bees.

Answer 1

b. the women who made homespun clothing played an important role in the resistance movement against the British.