In this episode, we explore how lost skills have also lead to lost social roles and lost social status…
Returning to that previous theme about Lost skills, there’s also the important point about how some skills were (and sometimes still are) linked to social roles and social status.
One of the most interesting of these is the origins of the English term ‘spinster’, which supposedly denotes an unmarried woman of ‘marriageable age’. It seems such an odd term now, almost meaningless, maybe, although it’s still used in that sense in the formal wording for wedding-ceremony - “a spinster of this parish” and all that.
But it actually dates back to a time when it related to a skill, a role, a status in society, and an almost endless task: spinning the thread.
If you want fabric, like that young woman is wearing, then the first stage is that you’re going to need some kind of thread. And just about the only way to get it is to spin some type of fibre into that thread, to hold together as a thread.
Making fabric takes a lot of thread. And back then, just about the only way to do that was to grab hold of a small bundle of fibre in one hand, and twist it onto the spindle that you were turning and turning and turning in the other hand. Hour after hour after hour. Every spare moment, you’d grab hold of the spindle, and do a bit more, and do a bit more, and do a bit more.
There are various reasons why it became a role assigned almost exclusively to young women; some reasons fair, some others probably not. Yet it does seem to have become so across almost every culture around the world - or at least in those that use fabrics, anyway. And we also see it as part of that classic triad of the ‘three sisters of Fate’, '“one spins, one weaves, one cuts”, respectively the maiden, the mother, the crone.
But the point here is that like most so-called ‘unskilled labour’, to do it well requires very real skill. As I know first-hand, even to do it all can be quite a challenge: the thread will break straight away if we apply too much force or let the thread get too thin; and if we overcompensate for that, we end up with thread that’s too thick and has great big lumps or ‘slubs’ scattered all along the line. Getting the thread to stay consistent at all is hard; doing that to make thread as thin and ‘fine’ as you’d need for some of the gorgeous fabrics we can still see in places like London’s Victoria & Albert Museum is really, really hard. And all of it done on a spindle, hour after hour after hour, by some now-unknown spinster.
But then the de-skilling process gets started.
And that process, every time, is driven by changes in technology.
The technology of a spindle is really simple: in essence it’s just a stick with a weight at the base to keep the stick spinning once it’s been turned. So in this case, the first stage of de-skilling was the invention of a piece of technology that itself now perhaps seems as ancient as the spindle: the spinning-wheel.
It still takes a fair bit of skill to drive it and get good thread from it - as again I know first-hand - but it does make everything so much easier. The power is provided by a pedal, so you have both hands free. It separates the spinning process from the process of collecting the spun thread. The power-wheel also acts as a flywheel, making the spinning-speed much smoother. And it’s fast - several times faster than with an ordinary hand-spun spindle.
But it’s a lot more complicated than it might at first seem, with bearings and cranks and more; and, given the maker-technologies of the time, would have been quite hard to make back then - you’d need a carpenter, a bodger, a wheelwright and a blacksmith all working together as one. And hence also seriously expensive: even now, a good one could well set you back a full week’s wages. So only the richer households could afford one - and they’ll get richer, too, because they’ll out-produce the ordinary spinster many times over, and push down the price of spun-thread whilst they’re at it. The spinster almost priced out of the market.
A couple of centuries later, along comes the next piece of de-skilling technology: the spinning-jenny. The quality is perhaps a bit less than hand-spun thread, but there’s now almost no skill involved at all. And it’s now much more productive: even the first version ran eight spindles at once, and by the end of that century the number of spindles could be up to a hundred or more. Fantastically profitable, compared to the work of a single spinster. But also so expensive now, and also so large, and needing so much power to drive it, that only the already-really-rich could afford to buy one - and then treat everyone entrapped into working there as near-slaves, while the money kept rolling in for the ‘mill-owner’ who did no actual work at all.
Make a killing for the ‘owner’, whilst all but killing everyone else: de-skilling technologies do tend to do that, whenever they’re used to prop up a money-based possessionist culture that then pampers a pointless paediarchy every inch of the way. Not A Good Idea…
But what about the spinster herself? True, the work was hard, and tedious, and time-consuming in extreme; yet there was real skill there, something about which she could be rightfully proud.
Yet now? Nothing. Her skills are lost; her role is lost; her status lost; her source of income and her source of independence lost as well; all of that has been taken from her, replaced by machines now run and owned by rich men for their personal profit and everyone else’s expense. All that’s left of all the spinster’s work is a social label that has long since lost its meaning, and literal ‘time on her hands’ that others are quick to exploit, to her further loss. Oh well.
Yet there’s one more twist in the thread of this tale - and it’s a twist that’s common to every case where technologies are used to drive de-skilling. The point here is that there’s a clear, well-known path for skills-development, that goes from trainee, to apprentice, to journeyman, to mastery. The trainee learns the basics, just enough to get the job done at all; the apprentice then learns more about the theory of the task, and a bit more about the practice; the journeyman learns how to put all of that into practice in the messy uncertainties of the real-world; and the master can do all of that in real-time, adjusting moment-by-moment to whatever the world may throw at us.
So in this case, that tedious process of spinning with the slow, awkward spindle teaches all of the basics about how thread-making works: tension, speed, feeding the thread and all the rest. That’s the first step towards apprenticeship, journey(wo)man, master. But de-skilling technologies simplify all of this in all the wrong ways, crushing the learning-curve to leave no time for apprentice or journeyman, so that there’s now no path to mastery. Sure, it increases the profits in the short-term, because it looks like you don’t need to pay anyone to learn any skills; but suddenly there are no masters left, no-one knows enough about how the machines work to make any new ones, there’s now no way to get there any more, and you’re now stranded in the middle of nowhere, with huge changes hurtling towards you from all different directions, and no way to tackle any of it at all. Not A Good Idea…
So that’s the real warning that we get from the spinster - and it’s a warning that we need to take seriously, too, before all of the skills that we need for the upcoming future become lost forever, just when we need them most.
Great piece, and analogy Tom. My Mother worked in a mill in the 1940's and equated the work to modern day sweat shops of their time. The improvements were both a blessing and a curse, with those who kept their work reaping the benefits and those who did not cursing the rise of automation.
The automation of these skills was as you rightly mention for the benefit of the rich and decimated small-town industries by and large.
I suppose the same holds true Today and remains a major reason as to why we are losing the art of home industries which have provided an income to the poorer section of communities over the Years.
A tragedy to say the least.