Spinning History: Heroines on the Home Front

For more than twenty years, storyteller, historian, and hand-spinner Nancy Bell has been delighting audiences all over New England at libraries, schools, museums, and festivals with her fun, hands-on, Historical “Edu-tainment.” Her “Spinning History” program is a visual arts and women’s history performance about the role the art of spinning played in the American Revolution. Dressed in carefully researched, hand-sewn, historically accurate clothing, she demonstrates three kinds of spinning from “the Great Wheel” to the “drop spindle” and sings propaganda songs, used during the Colonial Revolution, to entice young female rebels to learn to spin. Students learn that true “Independence” came about in part because women were instrumental in creating and replacing the existing textile economy in the colonies by learning to spin, something not many women did before the war.