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ON THE DISTAFF
SIDE
PART
ONE
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Anglicised version of the New International Version (NIV-UK), unless indicated
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THE HISTORY
of the world is to a remarkable degree the story of Woman. By turns praised,
tolerated, and feared, she has been regarded as Doyenne, Diva, and Devil rolled
into one.
A far nobler description is that assigned to her in Genesis 3: 20: ‘mother of all the living’. Profound in its prediction of her influence
on a world thenceforth under condemnation, and transcending the mere facts of
reproduction, the ascription hints at the essence of compassion, care, and the
complexities of nurturing, which would be her domain. More than a mere alter ego
of the man, the woman would, in her own right, help to weave the rich tapestry
of history, encouraging and supporting those who had a more immediate and
visible role than she, even to bearing the Saviour and rocking His
cradle.
When assuring Israel of His love for them, the Father employs the imagery
of the mother (Isaiah 49: 15). In the shifting landscape of experience, what is wanted by the
wayfarer, the lonely, the fearful – the child crying in the night – is the fixed
point, the assurance of love unconditional. Such is a mother’s love, a
hand-payment, as it were, of God’s love, a working model of the unflagging
compassion which Jehovah feels for His children – not for Israel only, but in
the wider, revealed Plan, for all who have ever lived, and for whom He sent His
Son, born of a woman, to suffer and die, a guarantee of better things to come.
The misrepresentation of the fall in Eden as one due to sexual misconduct
has much to do with the vilification and suspicion of woman. There is no
question that the narrative of that descent from grace contains enough
information to diminish both male and female. And that first accusation of her
by man (it’s her fault – Genesis 3: 12) was, perhaps, indicative of the trend to come. For it seems that the
woman has received a double-dose of condemnation and she has been much put upon
over the centuries. The conflict thus created lies at the root of the
relationship between man and woman, at both the secular and religious
levels.
There
were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and a large contribution
was made to them by the Church. In part this was a matter of its traditionally
hostile stance towards sexuality. Its teaching had never been able to find any
justification for sex except the link with the reproduction of the species.
Woman being seen as the origin of Man’s fall and a standing temptation to
concupiscence, the Church threw its weight behind the domination of society by
men. Yet this is not all there is to be said. Other societies have done more to
seclude and oppress women than Christendom, and the Church at least offered
women the only respectable alternative to domesticity available until modern
times; the history of the female religious is studded with outstanding women of
learning, spirituality and administrative gifts. The position of at least a
minority of well-born women, too, was marginally bettered by the idealization of
women in the chivalric codes of behaviour of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. There lay in this a notion of romantic love and an
entitlement to
service, a stage towards a higher civilization.[fn1]
In this series we will consider the role of woman throughout various
phases of history, from both the secular and Biblical perspectives. In Part
One we outline the events which led to her altered status in the modern
world: that period of industrial and technological upheaval from the late
eighteenth century to the early twentieth. Part Two will examine the
emerging role and power of women in the West during the inter-war years and the
hectic decades following the Second World War. Part Three and Part
Four will address her place and influence in the church at
large.
* * *
THE DARK SATANIC textile
mills of nineteenth-century Britain brought smoke, wealth, and fame to the
nation.[fn2]
But long before the age of mass production, yarn was spun
by hand from wool or flax, using a variety of primitive implements. The fibres
were then woven together on a hand loom to produce linen and fabrics of various
styles.
Spinning was usually a woman’s occupation and is alluded to as such in
the Bible (Proverbs 31:19). While thus engaged, the woman could rock the cradle and stir the
cooking pot (an early example of ‘multi-tasking’?). The woman who spent her days
in this occupation, married or not, became known as a ‘spinster’, the word
eventually acquiring the sense it has today by the early eighteenth
century.
In the process of spinning, raw fibres were fed onto the spindle from a
stick or paddle called a distaff. Thus it was that the feminine side of the
family became principally associated with this work, and were collectively
styled the distaff side.[fn3] Distaff work came to define the place of the woman in the
home and in society at large. For the woman to aspire beyond this station was
regarded with disdain by men.
‘She rampeth in my face,’ writes Chaucer, ‘and crieth, “I will have thy
knife and thou shalt have my distaff and go spin”.’ Shakespeare puts into the
mouth of his female character, Goneril, the words, ‘I must change arms at home,
and give the distaff into my husband’s hands.’
[fn4]
Elsewhere, and with little deference to female sensitivities, we are told
that the making of linen was an employment for the weakest people not capable
of stronger work, being widows and aged and decrepit people, now the most
chargeable, likewise for beggars and vagrants, who now live idly and by the
sweat of other men’s labours.[fn5]
ENTER COTTON
By the seventeenth century the spinning wheel was in widespread use
throughout Britain, making it easier to draw the thread. Still, it remained a
cottage industry, and it was not until the latter part of the 1700’s that the
process was automated.[fn6]
The cotton industry in Britain grew up in the north-west, mainly around
Lancashire and its fringes. Here the dampish climate was most suitable for the
operation of the machines.
The cotton plant had been grown in various areas of the world for
hundreds of years. The burgeoning use of mechanised spinning machines now
created a demand for it, especially of the type which was being grown in the
United States. The subsequent trade enriched both the United States
(supplier) and Great Britain (finisher). In the southern states,
the trade accelerated the purchase and impressment of slaves, without whom the
cotton might have gone unpicked. Nonetheless, the fortunes of Manchester were
built on cotton, and the city rapidly became the world centre for the industry,
earning the sobriquet, ‘Cottonopolis’.
This commerce and the source of essentially free and abused labour
allowed the plantation system in the southern U.S. to flourish for decades.
During the American Civil War (1861-1865) the Union navy blockaded southern
ports to prevent exports of the bales to Britain, and this did create tension
between America and Britain, though the sentiments of the British population
were broadly against slavery. Indeed, workers on the Manchester and Liverpool
docks expressed their support of President Lincoln’s efforts to abolish slavery
and refused to unload the southern cotton from the ships, even to the detriment
of their own livelihood. In acknowledgement, Lincoln
wrote:
I know
and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working people of Manchester and in
all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously
represented that the attempt to overthrow this Government which was built on the
foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest
exclusively on the basis of slavery, was likely to obtain the favour of Europe.
Through the action of disloyal citizens, the working people of Europe
have been subjected to a severe trial for the purpose of forcing their sanction
to that attempt. Under the circumstances I cannot but regard your decisive
utterances on the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism, which
has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic
and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and
universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom.
I hail this
interchange of sentiments, therefore, as an augury that, whatever else may
happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and
friendship which now exists between the two nations will be, as it shall be my
desire to make them, perpetual.[fn7]
FORGING AHEAD
Building on its early lead in industrialisation and backed by its
established strength in finance, maritime power, and in possession of captive
colonial markets, Britain surged ahead in the production of textiles, iron and
steel, in what has became known as the Industrial Revolution, its ample supplies
of coal and iron ore feeding the factory maw. Dirty work it may have been, but
it brought prosperity to the nation on an unprecedented
scale.
From the exigencies of this astonishing period of economic expansion
arose many of the inventions which would help to lay the foundation for the
technology of our modern capitalist world.
The development of the railway, too, introduced mobility to the
population. Easier and quicker travel and the better wages on offer in the big
city enticed rural populations into London, Sheffield, Liverpool, and Manchester
and their satellite mill towns. Sprawling suburbs and urban poverty followed as
a consequence, and it was not long before socially conscious reformers began to
see that along with the benefits of the mechanisation, there were many
disadvantages. Women and their children now toiled in enormous brick buildings,
operating and maintaining huge, dangerous machines, with hourly threats to life
and limb.
This further migration of woman into the broader domain of the man had
begun and could not be reversed, though decades would pass before she would be
considered his practical equal. The effects of the Industrial Revolution on the
status of woman would be felt long after the close of the nineteenth
century.
FIN DE SIÈCLE
Rapid industrialisation followed in Europe and North America, and by the
end of the nineteenth century, Germany and the United States had caught up with
and, in some respects, overtaken Britain. Notwithstanding the disruptive
technology and the problems which came with it, there was widespread optimism
that the new century would bring a new world, an automated demi-paradise with
justice for all. Politics and national interests declared otherwise, and there
were ominous signs of war on the horizon. And, like the age that spawned it,
this war would be different from all others. Armoured battleships, long-range
cannon, and vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine would be the new
harbingers of destruction.
The cataclysm broke forth in August 1914. As men from around the world
were sent out in their millions onto the battlefields and into the trenches of
the Great War, waves of women moved in to take their place in the factories and
offices. This additional movement from home into industry further enhanced the
woman’s role in the social structure of the new
century.
The stage was set for what was to come when the war was
over.
To Be Continued in Part Two
__________________
^[fn1] P.
416, History of the World (J.M. Roberts, Oxford
University Press, 1993)
^[fn2] ‘Jerusalem’, a poem written by William Blake (1757-1827),
refers to ‘those dark satanic mills’, contrasting them with the ‘green and
pleasant land’ of England. It evokes the early influence of Christianity on the
island (including the speculative assertion of a visit by Jesus). The words were
later set to music by Sir Charles H.H. Parry (1848-1918). The hymn has become a
quasi-national anthem and is a firm favourite on the last night of Henry Wood’s
Promenade Concerts, broadcast annually by the BBC in the
summer.
Lyrics: http://www.artofeurope.com/blake/bla21.htm
^[fn3] The opposite term, applying to the male, is ‘the spear side’. In defining ‘distaff’,
the Oxford English Dictionary has: ‘Old English distaef: the first
element is apparently related to Middle Low German dise, disen
‘distaff, bunch of flax’; the second is
staff.’
^[fn4] From The Monk’s
Tale (The Canterbury Tales, by
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400);
Goneril to Edmund, King Lear, Act IV, Scene 2,
by William Shakespeare.
Lyrics: http://www.william-shakespeare.info/act4-script-text-king-lear.htm
^[fn5] England
in Transition, Dorothy George (Penguin Books, 1964), p.
104.
^[fn6]
Notable innovations in
mechanisation were made by James
Hargreaves (1720-1778; the Spinning Jenny); Richard Arkwright
(1732-1792; the Water or Spinning Frame); Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823;
power loom for weaving); Samuel Crompton (1753-1827; Spinning Mule). In
the United States, Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the Cotton Gin
(en-gin-e), which reduced the time needed to clean the cotton
before spinning. Whitney helped to lay the foundation for the later development
of the textile industry in the United States. Of all the inventors in this
field, Whitney may be the only one memorialised in contemporary song. The
American lyricist, Ira Gershwin, alludes to him with the line, ‘they all laughed
at Whitney and his cotton gin’. (‘They All Laughed’; lyrics by Ira Gershwin,
music by George Gershwin; published 1936).
^[fn7] http://www.dingquarry.co.uk/location--geography/cotton-famine-road.asp
Copyright ukbiblestudents.co.uk. You are free to reproduce this material in whole or in part, but please let us know if you do and link to our site, if possible. All illustrations in this article are in the public domain. For identification: Woman with Distaff – William-adolphe_bouguereau_the_spinner; Cottonopolis – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottonopolis1.jpg (from an engraving by Edward Goodall
(1795-1870).