ABSTRACT
Social historians who have studied early New England have variously described the provincial economy as a matter of household labor, family labor and even gender specific labor. Certainly individual households were settings within which the labor of textile production took place. Yet the organizational structure of textile work was not necessarily an embodiment of the “little commonwealth” imagined by some historians. The image of a colonial household as an “absolutely central agency of economic production and exchange [where] . . . [e]ach household was more or less selfsufficient; and its various members were inextricably united in the work of providing for their material wants . . .” has been particularly enduring, but this view contradicts the larger corporate effort necessary for survival in New England.2 Certainly family members worked together to a degree under the direction of the patriarch to provide for the needs of the household. However, this model of a self-contained and self-directed economic unit does not fit with the larger pattern of cloth-making. The very nature of England’s and New England’s textile-manufacturing networks meant that individuals were brought into the web of production at different points and under varying degrees of supervision. In this way, textile production demanded that colonial households be scenes of extensive as well as intensive human relations that routinely stretched into the homes of their neighbors. The basic fact of life in seventeenth-century New England was that no single household produced cloth by itself.
