My Mask Is Homespun

I had to go to the store to buy flour. We had run out but our trips to three different stores over the last few days yielded nothing. So, I got up early and headed back to our local grocery chain and I procured two five-pound packages from the three that were on the shelf. Standing in line with my loot I noticed not the faces of my neighbors and fellow shoppers but the face coverings of people I could not recognize. Some were store bought, hospital style or dust masks, and some were homemade. The homemade ones really caught my eye, I noticed (from a safe distance) how much care had been taken in making them. I have friends who are making masks and I have seen videos and patterns; it is well beyond my rudimentary sewing skills. These homemade masks are just as much a show of a deft hand with a sewing machine as they are a way to demonstrate one’s civic virtue, one’s caring for others, one’s standing with science and evidence in the face of conspiracy theories and ignorance.

The ability for clothing to be part of a broader political statement is well documented. Fashion can be about trends but there is almost always an underlying political statement about identity or belonging. Fashion has the ability to divide us into classes, regions, political groups, races, but fashion can also inspire and bring us together. These homemade masks got me thinking about the use of homespun cloth in the pre-Revolutionary War Era as a signifier of American Patriotism.

Eighteenth century colonists were subject to derision by more cosmopolitan Brits for their lack of fashion as well as their lack of couth. The term “Yankee Doodle” was a derisive taunt leveled at colonists by Britons as far back as the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–42).[1] But by the 1760s, “The Yankee Doodle dandy, born a generation earlier as a British caricature of the uncouth colonial who could only dream of emulating a London macaroni, now proudly inverted his tastelessness into a symbol of patriotic simplicity.”[2]

The use of homespun fabric in the colonies became sartorial patriotism, a symbol of both American independence and a rejection of British opulence. Where it was once fashionable to try to emulate British tastes with fine imported linens, in the decade before the Revolution wearing homespun was a source of great pride. Communities held spinning contests, newspapers printed congratulatory stories about families’ production of homespun, William Attlee gave a detailed report to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia about the impressive amount of local manufacture of textiles. Homespun was all the rage. As a symbol of economic independence, it helped establish the movement towards products “made in America” celebrating our productivity and ingenuity. “A homespun economy would rectify imperial corruption by supporting an alternative commercial logic.” And this was more than mere protest cloth, this was manufacture “monopolized not by government but by a civil society resting on the energies of independent householders” and therefore instilled with democracy.[3]

To be fair, the use of homespun was never really a replacement for imported materials. Much like those who tried to give up drinking tea during the revolutionary era, giving up imported cloth was more symbolic than fully practiced. Wartime scarcity did force some people to make do with homespun (as well as teas made from local herbs), but this never became the standard practice. Still, the desire to show one’s civic duty and support for a political cause by making clothes from homespun fabrics or not serving tea, were political acts available to all patriots in the revolutionary era, an opportunity for the leveling of protest.[4] “The elevation of homespun to a political ideology in America on the eve of independence was an especially striking expression of the wider social implications of dress.” This was the perfect combination of knowhow, civic-mindedness, and industriousness required to defeat the old regime. “Breaking flax and shearing sheep, and then transforming the raw fibers into cloth through a chain of tasks mobilizing the entire family, rehearsed the republican credo of propertied independence. When yeomen donned the coarse products of their home industry, they embodied an equally republican frugality. In both instances, the homespun constituted a conscious opposition to British luxury and corruption.”[5]

By the time of the Revolution, American patriots had claimed “Yankee Doodle” as a moniker of pride, challenging the British conceptualization of manhood along the way. When General John Burgoyne’s surrendered to the American forces under General Horatio Gates at Saratoga in the fall of 1777; accounts emphasize that the vanquished British troops marched in defeat while Americans played “Yankee Doodle.”[6] The unsophisticated farmers and frontiersmen of the colonies, clad in the rough flax linens, had defeated the cosmopolitan Red Coats on the field of battle. Before the revolution was over our taste for homespun waned, “Such coarseness did not long remain in the wardrobe, particularly not among those political classes who talked most about it.”[7] But for decades, the spirit of homespun as a symbol of can-do patriotic pride lingered on.

Fashion, as a political statement, is being altered by stay-at-home orders, but what happens when we are able to venture back out to create our new normal. Will we embrace the simplicity of our soft and baggy work-from-home-wear, or will we be excited to show off something more glamourous? Will homemade masks be a part of our new normal or will the thrill of shopping publicly again turn us away from our handiwork? After weeks of living online, will we thirst for the return of in person retail behind a mask sewn together with civic pride, or will we make consumerism our patriotic priority? The symbolism of homespun lasted for decades after the war and it is possible that some element of our mask making, our crafting for the greater good, might stay with us after the pandemic has gone.

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[1] Eran Zelnik, “Yankees, Doodles, Fops, and Cuckolds: Compromised Manhood and Provincialism in the Revolutionary Period, 1740-1781.” Early American Studies 16, no. 3 (2018): 515.

[2] Michael Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Homespun to Ready-Made.” The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1556.

[3] Zakim, 1564.

[4] Elizabeth Cometti, “Women in the American Revolution.” The New England Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1947): 336.

[5] Zakim, 1553.

[6] Zelnik, 540.

[7] Zakim, 1554.