THE GREAT SILK EXPERIMENT: SILKWORMS, MULBERRY TREES, AND THE WOMEN’S WORKERS IN MORMON COUNTRY

SUNDAY, MARCH 14, 2021 - 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM - ONLINE

Presented by the Department of History.

UCSB History Associates presents the eighth annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture, this year given by recent UCSB History Ph.D graduate Sasha Coles.

From the 1850s to the early 1900s, Latter-Day Saint (or Mormon) women in both rural and urban Great Basin settlements planted mulberry trees, raised silkworms, and attempted to produce silk cocoons, thread, and cloth of a high-enough quality to use and sell. By most measurements, they failed. Homegrown silk was time-consuming, onerous, and practically impossible to profit from, primarily due to superior imported goods from Europe and Asia. Even so, this talk will show how the homegrown silk industry provided Mormon women with a venue to make their own money, shape transnational labor and commodity markets, and understand ever-changing environmental conditions. In these and other ways, Mormon women used silk production and consumption to resolve tensions between economic cooperation and competition, market isolation and integration, and religious exceptionalism and American citizenship.

This event is free and takes place on Zoom.