Distaff and spinning

Meaning

The Philosophical Summary says that its single practice for white and red is so easy that a woman could undertake it beside the distaff or while spinning. Rocken is the distaff in this domestic comparison, not the rye-grain suggested by a different modern German spelling. The image makes the work compatible with an ordinary concurrent task and leads directly into the analogy of eggs beneath a hen. It is a claim about simplicity within this companion's rhetoric. The main treatise's separately qualified comparison with women's work must still be read at its own passage, where the dangerous preliminary stage is explicitly excluded.