| Historians of plantation slavery have been silent on the subject of female artisans. Yet, weavers, spinners, and seamstresses, by reason of their gender and skill, held special status in the plantation hierarchy. Many were creative and highly competent. Their essential craft gave them empowerment not granted to unskilled field laborers, and their place of work afforded them a degree of personal autonomy unknown to most house servants. However, in the Chesapeake area, which historians frequently consider as a geographic entity, the opportunities for female artisans to craft their own identities varied considerably over time and space. Factors such as size and demographics of the slaveholding unit, staple crop and agrarian demands, kinship network, stability of the slave community, and external influences on cloth availability, all affected the female artisan and the economic and social relationships established by her craft.;This study looks at two Chesapeake counties---Cecil on Maryland's upper Eastern Shore and Richmond on Virginia's Northern Neck---to assess the degree of self-sufficiency in domestic cloth manufacturing and when and why changes in production occurred. Cloth making, predominantly carried on by bound labor on many large Chesapeake plantations, played an important but largely unrecognized role in the economic strategies employed by their owners. Planters relied on slave artisans to perform some or all of the steps necessary to turn raw fibers into the thousands of yards of cloth needed for furnishings and clothing for the black and white members of the plantation community. Detailed studies of the process of making cloth and clothing on several large plantations reveal similarities, but also important differences. To counterbalance the perspective of the planter as cloth manufacturer, the life histories of two female slave artisans demonstrate the range of their textile skills and the individuality and complexity of their work experiences within the context of the Chesapeake plantation system. |
