distaff

The spinning wheel replaced the distaff, which was even lower tech.

But it really could do with an illustrative video showing how spindle and distaff are used.

I still want to get an Arduino and build a real-world "distaff". Not sure how to properly model the inputs...

I'm a fully normal, heterosexual male and don't much care for distaff stuff! So, why'd I buy the flowers?

Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead.

Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them.

Before industrial revolution, more labor hours were spent on working distaff and spindle than probably any other single job. Industrial revolution reduced number of spinning jobs to roughly zero.

Speaking from the distaff side here, meritocracy would be a really nice thing to have. But what happens all too often is that a company wanting to distance itself from xxx-discrimination will quota hire the not-terribly meritocratic, because hey we just confirmed our own prejudices.

I'm more skeptical that the technique of crocheting, a technology used to make and mend fish nets, was not in use by the distaff side of a household long before that and the the relatively obvious way of making piecework using homespun yarn and hooking through the holes of a previous row was not common among groups of otherwise-idle hands. Techniques and patterns have long been passed on orally.