PASADENA, Calif. — HAND-KNIT sweaters? Hand-thrown pots? How about quilts stitched on a sewing machine? In an age when artisanal items can be sold at a premium, what products should qualify as “handmade”?
This is the problem confronting executives at Etsy, the online marketplace for all things vintage and handmade, which has not allowed factory-made products to be sold on its site since it was founded in 2005.
But last month, Etsy announced new policies that would allow sellers to apply to peddle items they produced with manufacturing partners, as well as to hire staff and use outside companies to ship their goods — all provided that the sellers demonstrated the “authorship, responsibility and transparency” intrinsic to handmade items.
By easing the definition of “handmade,” Etsy is trying to accommodate individual vendors who are having more and more trouble keeping up with their growing volume of customers. But many Etsy users are outraged by what they see as Etsy’s abandonment of its commitment to human handicraft, with some jumping ship for purer artisan sites like Zibbet.
Yet Etsy’s latest move is entirely in line with the history of handmade goods, a history that is more complicated than the simple term “handmade” implies. The artisans have run head-on into the problem that led to the Industrial Revolution: Making things by hand is slow. Really slow.
Nearly 4,000 years ago, when Assyrian women wove fancy cloth for their menfolk to sell hundreds of miles away in what is now Turkey, the problem was already there. We have the women’s letters to prove it.
“About the fact that I did not send you the textiles about which you wrote, your heart should not be angry,” wrote one wife, as translated by the Assyriologist Klaas Veenhof. She couldn’t finish the textiles because she had to stop and weave new outfits for her daughter’s coming-of-age ceremony — but “whatever textiles I can manage I will send you with later caravans.”
Like the Etsy artisans, these women worked for their own profits. They liked to keep them, too. In one letter, a wife asked her husband to hide the silver she earned inside a bale of wool to avoid notice by the tax collector. With their profits, these women ran their households and bought raw materials — which sometimes included slave girls to increase production — to make more cloth. After all, handmade goods require many hands; machines, there were none.
Unless you call the hand loom a machine. The ancient Assyrian loom already had mechanical aids in the form of a complex of wooden bars and thread loops to open the passages for the weft thread to go across the cloth. The women no longer had to use their fingers to part each pair of threads.
And what about the hand spindle, a mere stick with a bit of pottery or an apple stuck on the end? Its whirling speeds up the process of thread-spinning enormously. But spinning the thread took much longer than weaving it. (At least one Middle Kingdom Egyptian wall painting of cloth-making shows a worker saying to the thread-makers, “Hurry up!”) It was that bottleneck — lack of thread for the weavers — that led to some of the most important machines of the Industrial Revolution, such as the spinning jenny.
Since then, machines have essentially made all the thread and yarn we buy to knit and crochet and sew our handmade sweaters, doilies and dresses.
Oops. Are those crafts then not “handmade”?
I have friends, hand-weavers, who spin their yarn from hand-processed fiber. But they use a spinning wheel, a labor-saving invention developed in the Middle Ages. Does that yarn not count as handmade?
Using a spinning wheel to make thread does seem quaint and old-fashioned enough to qualify, especially set against the giant mills of today. But by that logic, everything made by an earlier, outmoded technology could count as handmade.
The truth is that almost none of the objects that we think of as handmade truly are. And that has been the case for thousands of years — long before Etsy announced this latest change to its website.
A fully handmade item, like the fragment of Egyptian linen from 2,500 B.C. that I came across in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is a testament to human skill. Fine as silk, 200 threads to the inch, the linen had been hand-split and spliced end to end to make the thread.
But that kind of artistry is a rare treasure today, as time is short and machines, ranging from the simple to the complex, are with us to stay. Ultimately, it is the human care, effort and ingenuity used to create an object that is important, and not whether it fits the exact definition of “handmade.”
Just because an object includes manufactured parts doesn’t mean it can’t reflect the touch of an individual creator’s hand: the subtly uneven knit, the finger-marked clay, and all the other happy unmechanical surprises of human quirkiness.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber, a professor of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College, is the author of “Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.”
