Revolutionary Domesticity

Women, non-importation agreements and spinning bees in the American Revolution.

Women at a quilting bee. Lithograph, 1876 © Bridgeman Images.

Spinning yarn from cotton or flax is careful, necessary work which has become invisible in modern life. But at the dawn of the American Revolution, it was revolutionary. Women across the colonies organised spinning bees to protest British regulations and altered their purchasing habits to support boycotts, leveraging their domestic power to influence the revolution.

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