I often remark on the trend of young women knitting and spinning these days, something women my age would never even have thought about doing. I wonder if it has something to do with what’s coming.
Perhaps we’re ready for that consumer revolt after all.
It is no accident that clothing manufacture on an industrial scale has always been oppressive work, one in which people have been terribly exploited. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, or the appalling conditions of the Lowell mills of the 19th century are not aberrations, any more than the room full of 12 year old Philippine slaves is now. Every step of industrial clothing production is inhumane and unjust in most circumstances, from the growing of cotton, which was once the product of American slave labor, and is now the most toxic crop produced in the US, putting more pesticides into the ground and water than any other, to the production of silk in India, to the sewing of dresses in factories all over the world. There are exceptions, but just as industrial food production is fundamentally and essentially inhumane, in ways that cannot simply be resolved by a little tinkering, there seems little contrary evidence to the claim that industrial cloth production is equally morally problematic.
Cloth production has always been tied up with colonialism, slavery, and power. Thus, it is no accident that many of the most successful revolutionary movements in history framed their revolutions in part on the rejection of the clothing of their oppressors. Around the time of the American Revolution, for example, poorer women had always worn homespun, but in refusing to buy British cloth imports, women had their own Boston tea party. Urban and upper and middle class women accustomed to buying cloth or clothing imported from Britain proudly wore only homespun, and clothed their family entirely in their own production.
During and before the Civil War, people in the North refused to wear clothing that came from the South, because it was a product of slave labor. Women spun, wove and knitted their own wool and linen clothing, in an attempt to undermine the southern slave economy.
And Mahatma Gandhi, of course, in his famous swadeshi movement, called for a boycott of all British cloth, and for women and men both to work daily at the production of khadi, or homespun cotton cloth, spun on an indigenous spinning wheel called a charka.
In each of these cases, the clothing revolution was a revolution of women, of people who had historically been left out of revolutionary planning. In India, the khadi revolution was the first call for women to be full enfranchised. In America, particularly during the civil war, women took their economic power to boycott quite seriously, and it led to women take new public roles in the anti-slavery movement.
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That was a fascinating read.