Spinning Resistance: Women, Cloth, and the Long Memory of 1776

The spinning wheel keeps showing up at moments of political crisis — and it’s never just about spinning. In the 1760s, American women turned spinning bees into public acts of resistance against British taxation. Arts and Crafts reformers claimed it as a rebuke to industrial capitalism. In the 1920s, Gandhi made the charkha the emblem of Indian independence from the British Empire. Twentieth-century American women, meanwhile, rediscovered it as a symbol of a revolutionary female tradition the original 1776 had denied them — decorating their homes with it, wearing the loose clothing it evoked, …