St. Distaffs Day

Distaff Day, also called Roc Day is 7 January the day after the feast of the Epiphany. It is also known as Saint Distaff's Day one of the many unofficial holidays in Catholic nations.

Many St. Distaff's Day gatherings are held large and small throughout local fiber community. The distaff, or rock used in spinning was the medieval symbol of women's work.

In many European cultural traditions, women resumed their household work after the twelve days of Christmas. Women of all classes would spend their evenings spinning on the wheel. During the day they would carry a drop spindle with them. Spinning was the only means of turning raw wool cotton or flax into thread, which could then be woven into cloth.

Men have their own way of celebrating this occasion this is done through Plough Monday. It is the first Monday after Epiphany where men are supposed to get back to work.

Every few years Distaff Day and Plough Monday falls on the same day. Often the men and women would play pranks on each other during this celebration as was written by Robert Herrick in his poem "Saint Distaffs day or the Morrow After Twelfth Day" which appears in his Hesperides.

Today is Distaff Day, the first free day after the twelve days of Christmas. Sometimes referred to humorously as St. Distaff’s Day, it was when women traditionally resumed their domestic work after the holidays—a distaff being being the spinning tool that holds the fibers to be spun aloft before they’re collected onto the spindle. The day was obviously one of transition; often pranks were played, no doubt to ease the shift from festivity to drudgery. Men would set the flax afire, and women would douse it and the menfolk both, as celebrated by Robert Herrick in his 17th-century poem, “St. Distaff’s Day; or, the Morrow After Twelfth Day”:

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaffs Day:
From the Plough soon free your team;
Then come home and fother them:
If the Maides a-spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow:
Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maidenhair.
Bring in pailes of water then,
Let the Maides bewash the men.
Give St. Distaffe all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good-night,
And next morrow every one
To his own vocation.


These days “distaff” is most often used as an adjective, to connote women’s work or the female branch of a family. Before looking into the etymology of the word I always thought of it as somewhat counterintuitive—the word “staff” doesn’t exactly bring to mind the feminine. But there you have it. Spinning was exclusively a woman’s job, and all women spun: the working classes to clothe their families and noblewomen to avoid idle hands.

Interesting, then, that today Judith Warner’s article Fear (Again) of Flying showed up on the New York Times’ online preview of Sunday’s Magazine. Her gist, as far as I can tell, is that women are turning back toward hearth and home, turning inward to yoga and ritual and what Dani Shapiro calls “daily obligations.” Actually it’s not entirely clear what she is getting at—is this about feminist backlash? Midlife crisis? The discontent of the middle class? (Although I think that last is the subject of pretty much every lifestyle piece in the Times.) Revenge of the former latchkey children whose mothers went back to work? Warner writes:

Here, there are no Isadora Wings (she was the heroine of Erica Jong’s 1973 liberationist novel Fear of Flying), no good little wives poised for naughty takeoff into the exciting wider world. There’s no chafing at the ties that bind to home and family. Instead, there is a deep desire for rules and regularity—“a dream of order and contentment and beauty,” as [author Claire] Dederer says…. There’s no sense that personal liberation is to be found by taking a more active role in the public world.

Instead, making a home is re-encoded as a privilege, an accomplishment, even a form of freedom from the burdens and demands of the workplace.

Except I just reread Fear of Flying last summer and it’s not just a story of running away from family and its obligations. Jong is writing about how complicated those family obligations are for everyone, and how women—and men—need the chance to make up their minds about how they feel on the subject, rather than be slotted into one role or another. I suppose it’s natural that, given the time and the topic, Isadora Wing had to go through the extra-literary rite of passage of becoming an icon. But it’s only gotten worse, this journalistic need to compress those choices into trends with all their attendant 21st-century electronic baggage, and I don’t get the feeling that Warner really knows where she stands on the subject either. Meriting an article in the Times Magazine does not a movement make.

I actually prefer Jong’s take on it, a musing of Isadora’s from Fear of Flying:

Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.

Now this, to me, makes sense. Take up your distaff and your spindle if that’s what you want to do, and throw another log on that metaphorical fire. It’s only January 7, and there’s plenty of winter ahead.