IN THE BROTHERS Grimm fairytale ‘Sleeping Beauty’, a witch casts a spell so the princess Briar Rose will sleep for a hundred years if she ever pricks her finger on a spindle. Now, the detail of the spindle may seem relatively inane. But if we’re taking a broad view of folktales, art and etymology, it’s just one of several ways spinning and textile work became associated with witches in the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution – an association so pervasive it has ongoing ramifications for how we value (and pay) garment workers today. 

The Brothers Grimm were scholars of folklore, and their stories are based on word-of-mouth tales that were passed down across hundreds of years. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, these stories reflect ‘the soul, imagination, and beliefs of people through the centuries’ – in other words, the propaganda of the time: the 1400s to the 1700s, when witch hunters were wreaking havoc across Northern Europe and New England (North America). Current estimates suggest between forty thousand and eighty thousand people were executed as witches but up to three times more were formally accused, 80 per cent of them women.