In Praise of Pins: from Tool to Metaphor

Abstract

��� This essay is concerned with a simple tool, the pin, and two persons named Smith. In conjunction, they highlight a surprising view of European economic, social and cultural history. It is a tale of how this tiny tool became a necessity of life, an object lesson in early economic planning, a constituent part of capitalist theory, a symbol of European social criticism, a metaphor for female oppression, and, last but not least, a weapon in the campaign for women’s liberation. At the same time, the story pinpoints some complex lines of European, that is Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Scottish, communication. It is not the pin as object that concerns us here. This is an essay in the history of ideas which attempts to trace the development of a small and practical device into a concept that appears metaphorically in the work of some of Europe’s outstanding thinkers and writers. In textile-related labour pins and needles are tools with a separate function and history. Pins might be used to hold things together semipermanently, while the needle is a far more passing object, moving through layers of fabric and leaving thread behind. What also distinguishes needles from pins is the long folk and parable tradition about the needle’s eye. The difficulty of threading the small eye inspired a metaphor used in the religious texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that was based on the impossibility of passing a large object or animal through the eye of a needle. Yet since this essay will focus on the grand tapestry of interdisciplinary overview rather than the exquisite embroidery of specialist detail, that distinction – as in the 1960s song ‘Needles and Pins’ by Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono, later so brilliantly performed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – is largely disregarded.