The Enlightenment, however, saw attitudes and circumstances beginning to change. Among the upper classes in England, for instance, young people began to want to make their own choices in marriage and to look at it more as a romantic attachment than a business partnership. This, ironically, was what made the actual wedding a far more formal, legalistic event. In former times, a word and exchange of hands before witnesses was enough to make a marriage. But in 1753, Lord Hardwicke was persuaded to bring in a marriage law because increasing numbers of couples were running off by themselves to get married without their families knowing. Hardwicke’s law meant that for the first time, people were obliged to get married in church.[3] If they were old enough, they did not need parental consent – but the announcement of banns and all the arrangements for the wedding meant that the parents had plenty of time to intervene. So the romantic church wedding is actually something quite new.
The romantic idea of marriage now so dominates the Western mindset that it is hard to think of it in any other way. Contact with other cultures is making people more aware of arranged marriages and even forced marriages, but for most people in the West it is all about love. Amazingly, the majority of people do manage to find ‘the one’ and make their own choice freely and lovingly.[4] The downside of this, of course, is that when love goes, most people feel that the marriage must go, with distressing consequences not just for the couple but for any children involved.
Most romantic marriages are actually successful. Considering how easy it is to get divorced, it is remarkable how many not just survive but thrive. Banner headlines may alarm you with the statistic that 45 per cent of marriages in the UK end in divorce. That means, of course, that 55 per cent last a lifetime. For 1 in 10, marriage lasts for more than 60 years. Couples who stay together a lifetime mostly confirm that their spouse is the best and most important thing in their life by far. Most of those marriages that fail, fail quite quickly, but the failure does not put the divorcees off marriage. In the USA, three out of every four divorcees remarry within four years, and one in three within a year.
So marriage brings immense happiness to many millions of people, even though it has been the butt of countless jokes.[5] Yet it has come in for a great deal of criticism beyond the jokes, which are essentially affectionate and almost always come from men who love to make a meal out of how hen-pecked they are. Feminists have been particularly strident in their condemnation of marriage. ‘The institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women,’ Marlene Dixon wrote. ‘It is through the role of wife that the subjugation of women is maintained.’
It wasn’t just that many wives were made to suffer a life of drudgery and isolation by their husbands; they were legally at a disadvantage in many ways. In the UK, for instance, a wife used not to be allowed to own property; any property she had at the wedding immediately became not jointly held but solely her husband’s. This finally changed with the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882. Much more distressingly, it was a husband’s legal right to rape his wife until shockingly recently. Indeed, Andrea Dworkin scathingly asserted that: ‘Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.’ In most countries, spousal rape, as it is called, wasn’t made illegal until the 1980s and 1990s; and in many countries, such as Pakistan and Sudan, it is still permitted.
Fortunately, the weight of the law in Western countries has been gradually putting right some of these wrongs, and the pressure of feminist arguments has dramatically changed the way many husbands behave in the home.[6] Since the middle of the last century, though, the stigma of ‘living in sin’ has gradually weakened, and numerous couples are choosing to cohabit rather than get married. As a result, the number of marriages has declined steadily. Yet it has not declined nearly as dramatically as some people predicted in the 1970s, when it seemed that all young couples were simply living together. In fact, the number of marriages in the UK is little more than 20 per cent down on its highpoint in the 1960s.
It seems that for all its drawbacks, for all the ease of simply living together, most people still want the bigger commitment of a formal marriage. Just how important it remains is borne out by the expenditure on the wedding itself. A survey in 2007 showed that the average cost of a wedding in the UK has soared to £25,000 and although many people try unusual ceremonies and locations, such as scuba diving weddings and camel-mounted weddings, millions still opt for a full-blown ‘traditional’ wedding. The Victorian novelist, George Eliot, explains it all very simply in Silas Marner: ‘That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger.’
[1] In Christian society, the whole pattern of marriage is very particular. In the early Christian era, marriage was of surprisingly little interest to the Church. St Paul’s writings show that it was all thought rather pointless anyway, since the end of the world was nigh and it was better to spend the time preparing for the end than bringing children into the world. That changed in the Middle Ages when the Church began to become legally involved in the marriage process. In the thirteenth century, too, marriage became a sacrament, a holy bond equivalent to committing yourself to Christ. Instead of just agreeing to live with your spouse and raise a family together, you were committing your souls. This dovetailed very neatly into the romantic ideal of marriage, which is perhaps why many people today, whether they are believers or not, still choose a Church wedding.
[2] Just how ‘pragmatic’ this could be is indicated by the surprisingly common practice in some countries of leasing out or selling your spouse. The very idea seems shocking today, but wife sales, such as that portrayed in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, were not that uncommon. It was a simple way of moving on, since marriages were often business arrangements. But by Hardy’s time, the practice was rare.
[3] From 1836, civic marriages were permitted as an alternative.
[4] Perhaps one of the most touchingly humane arguments for marriage was put by Robert Louis Stevenson in Virginibus Puerisque: ‘A man expects an angel for a wife; [yet] he knows that she is like himself – erring, thoughtless and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things … You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realized, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities … and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support your own unworthiness and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the ... blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground.’
[5] ‘Bigamy is having one husband or wife too many. Monogamy is the same.’ – Oscar Wilde
‘I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.’ – Lord Byron
‘God created sex. Priests created marriage.’ – Voltaire
‘Courtship to marriage is as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.’
– William Congreve, The Old Bachelor (1693)
‘Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.’ – François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
‘The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.’ – Heinrich Heine
‘Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.’ – Groucho Marx
[6] This has opened up another area of contention, though. In divorce settlements, the court usually awards custody of children to the mother, often along with the family home, and the husband is obliged to pay maintenance. It’s not easy to see a solution
to this, since most children prefer to stay with their mothers and they need a home and support. But the ex-husband may be left with no home, no access to his children and crippling debts. So there has been a lot of media coverage about men who are going on ‘marriage strike’ – refusing to get married because the cost of a failed marriage would be too high.
#49 Weaving and Spinning
There is not a task more humble, yet more lastingly valuable than making cloth through spinning and weaving. For tens of thousands of years, this time-consuming labour absorbed almost every waking moment of the lives of countless women and girls.[1] Women spun while they walked to market. They spun as they fetched water. They spun as they watched the flocks. They spun as they tended the cooking or looked after the children. And when they had finished the spinning, they started weaving. Indeed, spinning and weaving took up more time than all other activities put together. This stopped only when the business of making cloth was automated with coming of the Industrial Revolution, with its power looms and spinning jennies. Today, cloth-making is bigger than ever, a gigantic global industry worth over a quarter of a trillion pounds.
We naked apes cannot really survive without clothes, except in the very warmest climates. Although a few primitive tribes in remote tropical areas go pretty much naked, most of us have to dress for warmth and protection from the elements, not to mention social reasons. Furs and leathers just aren’t practical or comfortable to wear for long either. A few remote peoples in the cold parts of the world were prepared until quite recently to put up with the discomfort of furs for their warmth, such as the Inuit with their caribou skin clothes and the Chukchi with their reindeer and seal skins. But they were the exception. For most people, through most of history, woven clothes have been essential.
The idea of spinning and weaving is incredibly ancient. Indeed, it may be almost as old as humanity itself. Recently, German anthropologists Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking used molecular dating to establish that human body lice, lice that live in clothing, first appeared at least 107,000 years ago, not so long after the emergence of Homo sapiens. Archaeologists have found objects that may be sewing needles dating back 40,000 years ago and, in a cave in Georgia, dyed fibres dating back 36,000 years. Imprints of woven cloth have been found on clay figurines dating back up to 27,000 years ago at Dolní Ve˘stonice in the Czech Republic.
The oldest actual cloth is a fragment from Çayönü in southern Turkey. Here a 9,000-year-old piece of linen was found in 1988 wrapped around the handle of a tool made from antler bone. To make the linen, the people of Çayönü would have had to strip fibres from the flax plant and soak them in a river or pond, leaving them supple and golden blonde (the origin of the poetic ‘flaxen’ for a girl’s blonde hair). Then the fibres can be spun and woven into cloth, but it is a long and elaborate process.
Natural fibres, either from plants such as cotton or flax, or from animals such as sheep and goats, tend to be far too thin, weak and short for using to make clothes. But they can be twisted together
to make much longer, stronger threads. When twisted like this, the fibres are bound together by friction. The fibres can be twisted in the hand or rubbed together on the thighs. But someone in the forgotten past had the simple but brilliant idea of ‘spinning’ them. That meant rather than twisting them by hand, you let a stick called a spindle and a weight called a whorl do the work. You just wrap the fibres around the spindle, drop it and start it spinning like a top, or rather a yoyo with the momentum of the whorl. Then you keep feeding in fibres to build up the growing thread which gradually wraps around the spindle.[2]
It’s a task that requires considerable skill. You can’t afford a lapse in concentration. You have to keep stretching the fibres, for instance, to keep the thread an even thickness – the origin, maybe, of the phrase ‘spinning a yarn’ to describe someone who was stretching the truth a little in a story. Yet despite the problems, countless women became adept enough at it to carry on spinning while doing other activities. It was too time-consuming not to, but it certainly confirms women’s reputation for multi-tasking.[3]
However marvellous, though, by itself a spun thread is of only limited use. Where it really comes into its own is when it is woven into cloth. Nobody can be sure how it was first done, but Ancient Egyptian tomb models and Ancient Greek vase painting show a loom in use many thousands of years ago. The loom’s not the only way to weave, but it is an invention of genius. Remarkably, it was in use both in the Americas and Eurasia at least 3,000 years ago, so its invention may just possibly date back far enough to be carried to the Americas by the first migrants from Asia.
Whatever the truth, there are always two sets of thread at right angles to each other in woven cloth, the warp and the weft (or woof). The warp threads are the threads that are held in place during weaving; the weft, which may be one long thread, is woven over and underneath them alternately to bind them together. In a loom, a series of parallel warp threads is stretched between two pieces of wood. Alternate threads are separated, so that first all the odd threads can be lifted or warped together, then all the evens can be.
As one section of warp is lifted one way, the weft (‘woven’) thread can be fed through the space or ‘shed’ between them, so that it passes with all the odd warp threads on one side and the evens on the other. When it reaches the other end, the lifted section is dropped, and the other section is pulled up, so that when the warp is fed back through it passes with the odds and evens on the opposite sides to the first pass. In this simple way, the weft is woven under and over the warp so that it alternates in both directions.
There are many different varieties of loom, of course, and various technical improvements were made, even early in its history. One was the heddle, which is a simple bar that allows the weaver to lift selected warps into the shed. This enabled the weaver to create complex patterns. Another innovation was the treadle loom, which allowed the weaver to lift the warps with a foot bar, freeing the hands to work better.
A third ancient innovation is very intriguing indeed. This is the warp-weighted loom, which uses weights hung from the warps to stretch them, rather than a fixed frame. What makes it intriguing is that not only is there archaeological evidence for it right across Europe dating from around 6,000 BC, but an astonishingly similar loom was also used by the native people of the coast of north-west America long before any Europeans apparently crossed the Atlantic.
For tens of thousands of years, hand-spun thread and hand-woven clothes provided people around the world with all their clothes. Whether the threads were vegetable fibres such as cotton and flax, or animal fibres such as sheep and goat’s wool and silk, they were all made in essentially the same way. Poor people had neither the time nor the resources to make anything but simple, coarse clothes. But the rich could have the best spinners and weavers make them incredibly elaborate clothes from the most delicate silk and the softest wool. Fine clothes were not only functional as well as valuable status symbols, but could also be things of extraordinary beauty. Indeed, the very finest hand-made clothes are among the most beautiful of all human creations.
Beyond clothes, though, woven cloth found a host of other uses, from tents to curtains – and perhaps most importantly in sails. Sails can be made from other materials. But there is none that has the lightness and strength of woven material – and in particular canvas, made from the spun and woven fibres of hemp.
The automation of spinning and weaving in the Industrial Revolution took away the livelihood of many skilled hand weavers and spinners, but it also saved many women from a labour they did not necessarily relish, however much we may romanticise it now. Automated weaving and spinning were the industries that kick-started the Industrial Revolution, the first global manufacturing industries, and in some ways they are what gave us our modern world. The manufacture of textiles was a key factor in the growth of the first big industrial cities – and of course, it provided the cheap clothes that all the rapidly growing pop
ulation needed.
Weaving and spinning has none of the technological wizardry of a computer, nor the intellectual weight of logic, nor the magic of aerofoils. Yet this incredibly simple yet absolutely ingenious idea has endured almost as long as humanity and continues to bring us more comfort from day to day than all of them put together. Mahatma Ghandi regarded hand-spinning as the most wonderful and worthwhile of all activities: ‘If there is one activity in which it is all gain and no loss, it is hand spinning.’ Maybe he was right.
[1] It wasn’t always women, of course, but it generally was. In 1381 the preacher John Ball famously opened his sermon to the Kentish peasant rebels with the words, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’, as if the man digging and the woman spinning was the most ancient arrangement for honest toil. Spinning, though, was so time-consuming that quite often only young girls and unmarried women had the time to do it properly – hence the term ‘spinster’ for an unmarried woman.
[2] The unspun thread was usually stored on a stick called the distaff. In the past, the female side of a family was often referred to as the distaff side, maybe because of the way women were ever there supplying the family with its basic needs, or maybe because holding the distaff was women’s work. The term is still sometimes used in horse-breeding.
[3] Of course the classic image of home spinning is with the spinning wheel, not the simple spindle. Spinning wheels were known in both China and Baghdad, as well as in Europe, in the thirteenth century, and it’s likely they were invented in China some time earlier. The first spinning wheels were hand-turned, but in the sixteenth century a treadle was added so the spinner had both hands free to spin.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 2
