Distaff Day

What the day is

Distaff Day is observed on January 7, the day after Epiphany. It is also called Roc Day or Saint Distaff's Day, though no such saint ever existed; the name is a joke of long standing.

A distaff is the staff that holds unspun fiber while a spinner draws from it. Because spinning was constant, unavoidable women's work, the distaff became a shorthand for women's labor generally, and survives in the phrase distaff side to mean the female line of a family.

Origin and background

In the medieval and early modern European calendar, the twelve days of Christmas were a genuine pause in work. Distaff Day marked the end of it for women, who returned to spinning, while men generally went back at Plough Monday, the first Monday after Epiphany. Neither day was a full resumption: both carried a tradition of horseplay, with men setting fire to the flax and women retaliating with buckets of water, a custom Robert Herrick recorded in a short poem in the seventeenth century.

The scale of the work behind the day is easy to underestimate. Before mechanical spinning, every thread in every garment, sail and sack was drawn by hand. Producing enough yarn to keep a single weaver supplied took the output of several spinners working continuously, which is why women spun while walking, watching children and minding pots, using a drop spindle when a wheel was impractical.

The observance survives today through handspinning and fiber guilds, who hold Distaff Day gatherings in early January to spin together, and for whom the historical connection is the point.

How to take part

• Look for a local fiber guild. Many hold open Distaff Day events and are welcoming to beginners.
• Try a drop spindle. They cost very little, and an hour with one explains the history better than reading about it.
• Finish something. The traditional spirit of the day is returning to work in progress, which most crafters have in quantity.
• Read Herrick's poem on the day. It is six lines and takes a minute.
• Look at the fiber content label on what you are wearing and consider how long that yardage would have taken by hand.