FemiKnitsm

This is an article I wrote as my final project for my magazine writing class.

A woman in her 20s gets on the subway and takes a seat. She has a short, trendy haircut and a pierced eyebrow. When she settles into her seat, she takes out needles and yarn and begins knitting. Several of the other passengers on this uptown train watch her with interest, their eyes bouncing from her knitting needles to her facial piercing.

For a lot of people, the word “knitter” conjures up the image of a gray-haired old lady – possibly their grandmother – making some hideous sweater or lumpy afghan to give away for Christmas. Or maybe it’s the oppressed 1950’s housewife, in her pearls and hoop skirt, knitting socks for her family to distract herself from her domestic boredom.

That may have been the case at some point, but those stereotypes hardly ring true anymore. It might seem unusual to picture a twenty-something woman with Kool-Aid dyed hair and tattoos picking up a set of needles and making a sweater, but today, women and men of all ages and walks of life enjoy domestic crafts like knitting, sewing and baking.

A new generation has taken on an ages-old craft, bringing with it all of its beliefs and technologies. The cliché attached to domestic hobbies has been abandoned and replaced with younger, fresher ideas and manifestations. Ravelry.com, a knitting and crocheting website known to members as “MySpace for knitters,” has over 230,000 members. Kelley Deal of the Breeders has written her own pattern book, Bags that Rock, and Debbie Stoller, Editor-in-Chief of the feminist magazine Bust wrote the Stitch N Bitch books. The knit and crochet books are immensely popular; the first one sold over 200,000 copies within six months of its release. There are also books about “punk knitting” as well as the title DomiKNITrix by Jennifer Stafford.

Many of the women and men engaging in these activities identify themselves as feminists. During the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, which was characterized by the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the popularity of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and, most famously and controversially, the Roe v. Wade decision, many well-known activists denounced these domestic arts. They saw cooking, sewing and knitting as ways to trap women indoors and keep them from leaving their kitchens in pursuit of jobs and liberation.

Today it’s not uncommon to see feminists, the same people who will picket for reproductive rights, rail against objectification and fight against deep-rooted gender stereotypes, enjoying these activities. Ravelry boasts groups dedicated to magazines like Bust and Bitch as well as general feminist groups. Searching Ravelry for “feminist” and “feminism” will turn up about 20 different groups, the largest of which, “This is What a Feminist Knits Like,” has over 2000 members.

Feminists have gone from denouncing and avoiding these crafts to embracing them. They have taken activities formerly cast aside as “woman’s work” and turned them into hobbies, occupations and even forms of liberation.

“I definitely love that women are reclaiming the work that was once used as oppression. By taking the power into her own hands and knitting for her own reasons, a woman is subverting the authority of yore,” Jess Hicks, a Ravelry member, said. “I believe that many women have decided that they should be able to enjoy any activity they wish. Reclaiming the agency to craft has empowered many women.”

Maybe second-wave feminists were crazy to completely denounce crafts as patriarchal. After all, isn’t choosing an activity purely for your own enjoyment the most liberating decision of all? Many believe that one of the fundamental purposes of feminism is to allow women the freedom to make their own choices in regard to career, sexuality, lifestyle and, in this case, hobby.

One could argue that society has mandated certain ideologies during different eras; that second-wavers had the right idea for the time they were living in.

As Ravelry member Henofthewoods pointed out, “Early Feminists were not dealing with a world at all like what we deal with. Sometimes their positions were extreme to the point that we look now and they seem silly, but in context they were doing the best they could to remake the world.”

Perhaps in order to get to the point where women could choose these activities, the very ones that kept them tethered to their living rooms, as hobbies they first had to distance themselves from them completely. In that era, it may have done an actual disservice to feminism to sew or bake for fun; women had to prove the world would continue to turn if they avoided domestic activities before they could return to using them for enjoyment instead of work. These hobbies had to disappear before they could have their comeback.

“I only knit when I want to, and if I don't feel like cooking, my husband doesn't think less of me. I think we had to go through a period where it wasn't OK to enjoy knitting or cooking before it was OK for us to like to do it, when we want to, again,” said Stephanie, a law student who identified herself as a feminist knitter.

Ravelry member Catmadknitter pointed out that the difference is between enjoying these activities and being forced into them. “’Stick to your knitting’ is a nice way to say ‘sit down and shut up’ after all,” she pointed out. “[Second wave feminists] were trying to break a stereotype. If you view knitting, crafts, etc, as something you do because you have a second X [chromosome], then yes, it would be distasteful.”

Some think that the older generation of feminists got it wrong by distancing themselves from the domestic side. Jessica Dillard-Wright cites privilege as a catalyst for what she sees as an odious mistake.

“Why condemn women who choose to stay home, who knit, who teach, who find satisfaction in their children? That is no better than they who condemn working women for occupying themselves outside the home, which, I’m sure we can agree, is highly antifeminist,” she said. “Hobbies don’t determine feminism, politics do.”

Dillard-Wright doesn’t believe that the recent popularity of domestic hobbies should be treated as reclamation of the crafts. “To suppose reclaiming knitting is a radical act is to undermine the significance of knitting and the women who knit in the past,” she said. “It elides some of the very important, day-to-day contributions of women in history.” She feels that crafts will always be popular to some extent because of the quality of handmade goods as well as the common ideas of punk and DIY that never fully die out.

Of course, breaking down a cliché will always bring some criticism, as Henofthewoods discovered. “I have had a boss tell me never to knit in public again if I want to be taken seriously,” she said. “I really wanted to hit him.”

Mike T. has, on a smaller scale, gained a new appreciation for early feminists because of how he is treated as a male knitter. “Any man who knits in public and has gotten stares has gotten a hint of what it must have been like to have been one of the first women in a factory, in medical school or voting,” he said. It may be a very small hint, but such discomfort has helped men like him take feminism more seriously.

Ataralas is a male member of the feminist website Feministing.com who learned to knit in college. Several women in his dorm were learning and piqued his interest in the craft. He has also experienced gender-related backlash for his hobby.

“I think knitting has increased my vehemence for feminism, particularly as I move in knitting spaces. The crap way I've been treated at some yarn stores for being a dude who knits has really opened my eyes to being able to look for the same behaviors towards women in other establishments,” he said, citing computer stores as an example.
Unconcerned with the usual gender stereotypes, he added, “I like to knit because when I'm done, I have something I want, like a sweater or socks.”

Another young feminist, Caitlin, likes to use her knitting to force people to re-evaluate their own preconceptions. “I love knitting in public because it confuses people. I’m gay and feminist and smart and I’m knitting, and people just can’t reconcile those things. I love when I force people to rethink things even a little bit,” she said.

Catmadknitter was born into a family that enjoys similar results. “My mother gleefully sat at the front of the ERA folk knitting away in the 1970s and early 80s. She liked the ‘The militant lesbian is knitting clothes?’ reaction,” she said.

Caitlin also enjoys the connection it provides with older generations. “Older women get really excited about it and start asking what I’m knitting and ‘ooh that’s nice wool’ and they get to connect and feel down with the kids for a bit and I love that.”

Crafts, like many other hobbies, offer their participants more than most anticipate when they first embark upon them. For many young domestic crafters, their hobby has introduced them to friends and fostered a new community to meet like-minded people. Sometimes this has the simple benefit of broader social horizons; sometimes it results in more than that.

“I have met so many amazing feminists throughout my undergraduate and graduate school careers who knit. Each woman does so for different reasons, but they all wish to subvert authority and create their own unique, handmade garments. Overall, knitting has made my life immensely richer – and my body immensely warmer,” Hicks said.

The friends that Henofthewoods made through her crafts helped her through a rough patch. “I needed to gather strength to make some changes in my marriage. Just knowing that I have some friends who don’t have to go back to being his friend too helps me be more open about my feelings about him. Not that feminism equals throwing his sorry ass out, it’s just that I needed some support before I could really decide that I would be OK on my own,” she said.

Stephanie (who asked to have her last name withheld) had a unique take on the traditional knitting circle.

“I used to host a group called Porn and Knitting; we'd knit and watch porn, obviously,” she said. “No one was actually turned on by the porn. Mostly we'd Mystery Science Theater 3000 it or make some bullshit fake postmodern critical commentary on the whole thing.” Stephanie added that the group was fairly evenly mixed between men and women as well as gay and straight.

“If that isn't a moderately ironic take on the whole situation, then I don't know.”

(incidentally, I got an A-)