Doing Feminism: The History of Craft Making and the Performance of Gender
By Joseph Golden
ABSTRACT
This piece explores the renewed interest in crafting in contemporary culture from a feminist perspective. As an everyday expression of creativity, craft carries multiple and complex meanings for women craft makers. Statistically, women dominate these crafts areas, with more participation than men (Ulrich, 2001). The research examines how needlework both performs gender and, in turn, constructs gender by focusing on women as producers of cultural products and creators of social value. Therefore, the gendered aspects of production regarding domesticity and the home, the feminist politics of craft culture, and craft as a means to promote feminist causes are examined. Further, the research examines how men approach the tradition of craft making and needlework and how these practices affect their embodiment and performance of masculinity. Correspondingly, there is a need to understand better how both women and men who sew recognize their sewing practice regarding domesticity, gender, and well-being.
INTRODUCTION
For over 9,000 years, women have employed needlework for domestic, artistic, political, and educational purposes, managing and sustaining their well-being or subsistence (Barber, 1994). Needlework refers to specific practices described as “women’s work” or the “domestic arts”: sewing, quilting, embroidery, knitting, crocheting, and weaving (Buckley, 1998). Historically, women performed needlework almost exclusively and were viewed as an expression of femininity and relegated to the domestic, interior sphere. Needlework has played a shift in women’s cultural identity and economic production. It could be argued that their identity stories were created through textile handicrafts — including local historiographies, personal biographies, and unique tastes. Traditionally, it is a field where mothers, daughters, and sisters learn and developed their feminine identities, hence their marriageability (Parker, 2010).
Because women’s stories are frequently omitted from historical accounts, contemporary scholars turn to material culture to recognize women as producers of community products and creators of social value (Goggin, 2017). Johnson and Wilson (2005) suggest that textile handcrafts have historically been the “most visible result of women’s labor” (115), expressing identity and leaving a “trail of artifacts” (115) valued by family and friends. Feminist artifacts serve as evidence of the existence of feminism and its cultural labors. (Eichhorn 2013, 157; Piepmeier 2009; Rentschler 2017). Scholars examine such feminist artifacts partly to grasp the cultures of production, where they are made, and to account for the experiences that shape feminist consciousness and feminist knowledge
Feminists, consequently, examine the ways collective practices, such as quilt making, can build community and politicize women. What it means to “do feminism” and “make feminist things” then are connected. In current work on feminism and craft, “making” matters because of its roles in creating shared knowledge, constructing collective consciousness, and building community and relationships of solidarity. (Rentschler, 2019). To “do” feminism, in this perspective, means making things as feminists and making feminist things. Feminist making may or may not be done by self-identified feminist makers, such as Colonial American quilters. However, quilts tell stories of the women who made them (Berlo and Crews 2003:12) and recount the stories of the quilts’ creations and their subsequent history that often links together generations of women’s families. Quilting is a story that can be understood as feminist history.
However, quilts did not become “officially” recognized as art in the United States until 1971, when the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited quilts. As Parker (1984) notes in her feminist study of the difference between arts and crafts, artworks were created as merchandise and were objects of value; crafts were produced in the domestic realm for love, making gendered differences in addition to economic ones (5–6). A close look at art history reveals the gender biases that privilege men’s ‘high’ art over women’s ‘low’ craft, even indirectly, can be realized as a device to argue the universal powerlessness of women (Atkinson, 1982).
Historically, needlework, including knitting and sewing, had been derided by Second-wave feminists primarily due to their relationship with the domestic sphere and with the feminine (Markus, 2019). Feminist attempts to reclaim craft since the 1960s and 1970s have rejected the idea that craft served solely to keep women busy (Lippard 2010; Parker 1984). As a site of feminist politics, textile handicrafts have been redefined and accepted as creative, self-expressive, consciousness-raising, and economic empowering (Waterhouse, 2010). Further, it contributes to creating alternative masculinities and femininities, promoting the formation of new feminist communities (Kelly, 2014).
Textile handicrafts have also been applied for subversive activities. Rozika Parker, in The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984), writes that the art of embroidery has functioned as “the means of educating women into the feminine ideal, and of proving that they have attained it, but it has also provided a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity” (p. ix). The use of craft as a subversive ploy can be seen throughout history. The word craft is frequently connected with trickery. To identify someone as crafty is to recognize them as clever and sly (Bratich & Brush, 2011). The ancient Greeks would “spin” a plot (Nosch, 2014). In Dicken’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the French revolutionary, Madame Defarge, secretly encodes the names of those soon to be executed in her knitting. Instead of socks and sweaters, female spies during wartime knitted hidden messages or codes, which they then transmitted across enemy lines disguised as simple balls of yarn or knitted fabric (Bratich & Brush, 2011).
Even though contemporary women are welcome to perform needlework for leisurely or political causes, low-income and marginalized women often work in the garment industry as a means of economic survival. The vast majority of garment workers — approximately 80% — are women of color (Begum et al., 2010). Sweatshops are not exclusively an overseas problem. In fact, there is growing congruence between the conditions in apparel factories in the United States and developing countries, where women are exploited and harassed, and basic safety precautions are nonexistent. Employers take advantage of cultural stereotypes, which women are often compelled to follow, depicting women as passive and adaptable. Even though women are the majority of makers and consumers of clothing (Oakes, 2020) throughout the supply chain, it’s rare to see women in positions of power. These drawbacks result in isolation, exclusion from society, economic pressure, and “disability” in the broadest meaning. Fabric making is an urgent and crucial feminist issue at an industrial level that needs to be addressed.
HISTORY OF CLOTHMAKING
The first proof of authentic clothmaking began with weaving, occurring circa 7000 B.C.E.; however, some of the Venus figures (hand-sized carvings of plump women, dating to about 20,000 B.C.E.) are distinctly wearing string garments (Barber, 1994). These garments seem to signal information about marital status. Freud (1933) claimed that women were motivated to invent weaving because of shame; in his lecture on ‘Femininity’ ([1933] 1973), Freud said that women had made very few contributions to the development of civilization. Still, possibly one was the invention of weaving. Women invented weaving to hide their lack of a penis, to cover an absence, the site (and sight) of the narcissistic wound of their castration.
In the past, hypothetical reasons for the division of labor by gender have indicated that women perform only certain kinds of work for physiological and psychological motives. (Lewin, 2009). Margaret Meade (1949) suggested that women are psychologically better tailored for tedious work. She claimed, “Women have a capacity for continuous monotonous work that men do not share, while men have a capacity for the mobilization of sudden spurts of energy, followed by a need for rest and re-assemblage of resources” (1949: 164). Ethnographers have presently cited the relationship between women’s economic activities and child-rearing responsibilities. Judith Brown (1970) investigated pre-industrial communities and how much women supplied the food. She found that a community’s reliance upon women’s pursuit of labor depends upon “the compatibility of this pursuit with the demands of childcare”(1074).
Consequently, throughout the childbearing years, the jobs commonly assigned to women must be cautiously chosen to be “compatible with simultaneous child watching”(1074). Jobs, therefore, were monotonous, readily done at home, easy to start and stop at any point, and relatively child safe, including spinning, weaving, and sewing. Food and clothing became what societies worldwide have come to see as the core of women’s work (although other responsibilities may be added, depending upon the conditions of the specific community). Weaving became an essential skill for Neolithic people and was closely connected to the family unit, a tradition that would endure for millennia (Barber, 1994).
Weaving became the earliest educational system, as the transmission of weaving skills required contact between learners and experts over a lengthy period. For centuries, the most significant and constant element of women’s education was training in weaving and needlework techniques (Anderson, 2013). The introduction of a new weaving technical knowledge was transferred from one individual/community to another (Cutler, 2019; 86) The basic sewing/weaving-related practices were passed inter-generationally, primarily from mother to daughter and between other female weavers within the community (Buckley, 2017). In collaboration with family and community, women would gather to make fabric when the task was too much for one loom and one woman to complete a chore or to socialize, make their sewing work more efficient, or improve their final product (Ulrich, 2001, p. 16). In the Late Bronze Age, women were often captured and enslaved, prized for weaving skills. Other skilled weavers were often displaced by migration or exchanged between elites (Cutler, 2019; 87).
As their woven designs entered the commercial market throughout history, their art was often inspired by other cultures: Indo-European, African, Asian, and Native American influences and moved across the globe (Rheingold, 1994; Halbert, 2009). Since colonial times, this system would endure in quilting; quilting patterns were often traded, and designs were built based on others’ sample blocks (Halbert, 2009). Demoted to the realm of craft, made by women, and inhabiting a lower rank than the fine arts (Kristeller, 1990), this hierarchical division between fine arts and crafts mirrored women’s subordinate social position (Parker, 2010). It “is functional in the perpetuation of the myth of masculine creative superiority, and social dominance.” (Pollock 1983:40).
European women had controlled cloth production from antiquity through the early Middle Ages. The word wife is associated etymologically with the word weave (King, 2006). These women’s identities as artisans were constructed internally, socially, and in embodied interaction with the material world as Renaissance and Early Modern European women contributed to many sections of urban economic life. However, weaving became a male occupation with commercial expansion in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Guild regulations and municipal laws prohibited weavers from employing females at the loom and robbed them of their membership’s political rights (King, 2006). Frequently matters of morality played a part. It was not considered appropriate for women to work side by side with men, travel, or be away from their homes for any period; therefore, women could not participate in long-distance trade. However, women worked in their fathers’ and husbands’ workshops or replaced them when absent or sick (King, 2006). Although it held little prestige, laundering was reserved for women. It was primarily work done for someone else, often obscured from view and unpaid.
In the 17th century, weaving eventually fell into the female domain of the American colonies as wood crafts became male-dominant, changing workers’ identities and transforming the nature of weaving production. European weavers were apprentice-trained artisans; their colonial replacements were domestics who borrowed and traded tools with their neighbors, creating objects for household use. Weaving had little commercial value in the colonial period as an extension of household work. The earliest American quilts were more functional than decorative, covering beds, windows, and doorways, and most probably created for colonists to survive the unforgiving North American winters. Initially, African men produced most textiles men. However, Western patriarchal standards dictated the division of labor when enslaved people were brought to the United States, and women took over the tradition. As enslaved people and textiles were traded broadly throughout the Caribbean, Central America, and the Southern United States, the arts and practices of each distinct region became intermixed.
In 1792, with the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Women by the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, the issue of women’s rights in the new American Republic became widespread. Aaron Burr called it a “book of genius.” (Wood, 500). Nevertheless, reconciling women’s rights with their traditional family roles proved difficult. Talk about women’s equal rights was acceptable, as long as those rights did not affect women’s traditional maternal role in the family. Some said that women’s rights were duties — the responsibility of taking care of their husbands and children. (502). Subsequently, the women’s domain was the home; the home became more significant than earlier in American history — a sanctuary from the crass violence that was increasingly coming to characterize the urban world (503). Women’s new responsibility was to transform the home into a haven for the men who faced the daily pressures and dangers of the workplace. Concerning Wollstonecraft, William Loughton Smith of South Carolina told a female audience in 1796 that nature had assigned women “valuable and salutary rights” beyond men’s control: “To delight, to civilize, and to ameliorate mankind . . . these are the precious rights of woman.” (p. 506).
Since the seventeenth century, domesticity has been associated with private spaces and has long been linked with the feminine and the mother (Scott & Keates, 2004). The “cult of domesticity” became an epitome of womanhood, nurturing women’s place in the home as men worked jobs producing goods or services. Men were the heads of households, with the role of women as caretakers and producers of goods, such as food and clothing. During planting and harvesting seasons, women routinely assisted their husbands in the fields, significantly contributing to the family’s success (Harvard Business School, 2010). Further, many women also provided sewing, knitting, and other services to supplement their families’ income. The first textile industries distributed materials to be processed by nineteenth-century rural women who took in these materials from local merchants to create cloth, clothing, and bonnets for cash and store credit. This form of industrialization became known as outwork (Harvard Business School, 2010), a common practice for women to supplement the family income in the northeastern United States. At the same time, women were morally responsible for raising dutiful children, preferably sons.
Although traditional, gender-based divisions of labor dictated women’s tasks, the contributions of wives and daughters were vital to the economy of pre-industrial communities. In the early American Republic, women contributed significantly to the national economy through their skill in needlework. In 1810 ninety percent of the $42 million in total textile production of the nation came from women’s households (Wood; p. 705). Women were kept busy creating goods to exchange in local markets — working with their children spinning cloth or weaving hats, making quilts, needlework, and lace. As early as the 1790s, Henry Wansey, a British visitor, had observed that housewives in every farming household were spinning woolen and linen cloth “in the evenings and when they are not in the fields” (Wood; p. 704). According to Bilger (1994), sewing became completely feminized in the 19th century, as women of all classes were required to practice what Kortsch (2016) calls “dress culture -any activity that includes the wearing, producing, purchasing, or embellishing of clothing and textiles and the regulating and interpreting both women’s and men’s garments.” Sewing took two broad categories: plain sewing (or plain work) and fancy sewing (or fancywork). Plain work consisted of creating garments, mending, and darning, while fancy work described knitting, crochet, embroidery, and lacemaking (Bilger, 1994).
In 1810, Elkanah Watson organized the first American county fair in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts, with exhibitions and prizes awarded for the best crops and livestock. Watson claimed he designed the fairs “to excite a lively spirit of competition” (Wood, 2009; 326). In 1812 “the female part of the community in a spirit of honorable competition” (325) was allowed to demonstrate quilts, needlework, lace, and other samples of domestic production. Nineteenth-century women frequently displayed their quilts at community fairs. Thousands of visitors admired them, and women began hanging their prizewinning certificates on the walls of their homes, where “they excite the envy of a whole neighborhood” (325). Indeed, said Watson, producing “some tincture of envy” was crucial in calling forth “more extended efforts” by the farmers’ wives. According to Gunn (1989), the entire point of the community fair competition was to display the best work, on the theory that “competition stimulated invention, and prizes helped people recognize superior quality and design which they could copy later” (107). Such claims teach us that women’s needlework offered a sense of active citizenship and a field for personal and artistic expression. By making a valuable item, the craft maker experiences a connection to the community, a way for women to reclaim, validate, and nurture their social roles on their terms (Johnson & Wilson, 2005). Colonial and Early American textiles, domestic or store-bought, were also an expression of wealth. Fabrics were so prized that rugs covered beds instead of floors, and tablecloths were more expensive than tables; these were also the sources of female inheritance.
From the 1690s into the Victorian period, marking on woven cloth, or a “sampler,” was an artistic practice and an educational tool that involved completing an embroidery sample. These relatively small textiles instructed girls to mend clothing and linens and became a symbol of women’s education (Remer, 2019). In addition to her embroidery abilities, children’s samplers highlighted a girl’s evolving reading, writing, and simple mathematics. 19th-century children’s samplers usually included the alphabet, the numbers one to ten, a quotation (most often a Bible verse or moral epigram), the creator’s name and the date completed, and floral or geometric patterns. Some verses gave thanks for education; others gave praise to God. Many referred to persons yet unborn. “Patience, submissiveness, service, obedience, and modesty were taught both by the concentrated technical exercises as well as by the pious, self-denying verses and prayers which the samplers carried” (Parker & Pollock, 1981; 66).
Samplers demonstrated the wealth of an embroiderer’s family, her mastery and literacy, and her future role as a custodian of fine textiles. The family often displayed them to illustrate the girl’s education, obedience, virtue, and skill, serving as an advertisement for possible husbands (Remer, 2019). The more complex and decorative the design and stitch work, the more the sampler mirrored the girls’ worth. As noted by the Sampler Archive Project, samplers “document the curriculum of early female academies, give evidence of familial relationships, chart the history of needlework, and support the expansion of female literacy” (Anderson, 2013). Sampler making became a part of the school curriculum for girls of all backgrounds in the Victorian era. The sampler trained girls for needlework, but their socioeconomic status determined the distribution and frequency of their tasks. A girl from the upper class may only make two samplers in her lifetime and not pick up a needle again because there would be servants to perform the mending (348). She might continue her embroidery to make household decorations or gifts if she enjoyed doing needlework. However, a girl from the working class would have learned sewing as a prerequisite to gaining employment in domestic service or as a seamstress.
While basic needlework was usually taught at home by mothers, grandmothers, and other females in the family, girls of privilege were taught at home by governesses or at dame schools. Throughout the eighteenth century, the sites of sewing education extended to schools, orphanages, and even apprenticeships that also used the sampler as a teaching tool (Remer, 2019; 348). Schools for the underprivileged, the so-called charity schools, primarily taught an elementary curriculum to girls that emphasized needlework. Seen as a charity, impoverished children were taught the skills to survive, as most school-aged children were working (Remer, 2019). As embroidery decorated clothing, furniture, and linens, the sampler offered a practical way to train for this work and prepare girls to support their families. Without the help of servants, working-class wives used these skills to maintain their household. Poor girls assisted their families by taking in sewing. Having less money suggested that clothes and domestic linens be preserved as long as possible. “While for a wealthy girl, her sampler served as a calling card, a display of her worth to suitors, for poor girls it was a resume, proof that she could perform a task to a certain standard for wages” (Remer, 348).
Throughout the early days of American history, women’s attitude to sewing and the needle arts emphasized enduring class and racial divisions. Even though middle-class and wealthy white women were welcome to perform needlework selectively and for leisurely or political causes, lower-income or marginalized women were provided a means of survival. The nation’s first small factories emerged in New England villages in the early 19th century, employing women and children as spinners and weavers because they could be paid less. A labor force based on age and gender avoided the problem of creating a permanent working class (Harvard Business School, 2010). Employers commonly paid women one-half to two-thirds of what a man doing the same job received. For seventy hours of labor per week, a woman made $2.00, and a child earned 20 cents (Taylor, 2016; 233). As textile prices fell, mill owners cut labor costs: workers were forced to tend more machines, and as the speed of the machines increased, women went deaf owing to the noise of machinery (Dublin, 1979). Accidents were frequent. Because the mills were unventilated, many women were stricken with brown lung disease caused by breathing in cotton dust. With long hours of factory work, women encountered societal expectations to sustain a standard of behavior imposed by religion, common literature, and the lifestyles of urban middle-class women (Dublin, 1979).
The urban garment trade exploited cheap female sewing labor by employing new work processes. Employers had tailors cut out garment pieces and then give them to needy women to sew together in garrets and cellars. They became known as “sweated” labor because the women were paid per garment and had to work so hard and fast to fulfill employers’ expectations. Earning 7 cents per shirt, a woman made less than $1 per week, barely covering the rent, leaving not enough to feed children and less than half the earnings of a male worker. Separated from one another, women could not come together to create a union. (Taylor, 2016; pp. 235–236). While paid work was considered debasing for middle-class women, needlework was among only several appropriate professions. The industrialization of needlework redefined the role of women in the home, simultaneously presenting new opportunities for them as industrial wage earners. Despite society frowning on working women, factory work offered them a means to support themselves if they chose not to marry or if their husbands died. Factory work encouraged women to pursue more opportunities and helped to promote the women’s rights movement. In 1837 and the 1840s and 50s, New England mill workers marched on the state legislature in Boston to fight for higher wages, shorter workdays, and safer working conditions. Historically, women’s integration into paid work has been one of the fundamental forces to emancipation and growing gender equality (Dublin, 1979).
The invention of the sewing machine represented “a longed-for and deeply desired better future” (Giles, 1993, p. 242). Working-class women were better able to clothe and fashion a respectable appearance for themselves and their families. Middle- and upper-class women, conversely, sewed to meet the feminine archetypes of the Victorian era. As social shifts allowed elite women more freedom with their time, women became leisure symbols; having a leisured wife reflected very favorably on a man. “Angel in the House” is the phrase most commonly used to define the values of a middle-class woman in the Victorian era. Naive and delicate, women would spend their days in the domestic world, dedicated to their husbands, docile, and whose activities revolved around social responsibilities and household management. Quilting and embroidery were made to flaunt their domestic skills; their needlework was related to civilized life; embellished, non-utilitarian display pieces. Usually, the parlor exhibited handicrafts where art, music, and women’s “civilizing” influences could be practiced and displayed (1987:25). Thus, women were discouraged from participating in “masculine” creative processes, such as writing (Bilger 1994:23).
Victorian mindsets linked needlework with feminine “purity and submissiveness” (Parker 1984:37, 82–109). Women needed to perform needlework as a means of “labor[ing] for male attention” (Bilger, 1994:22). As Finley (1929) suggests, male dominance meant that women had no control over consumer affairs: “In needlework only did women hold full sway” (1929:20). Needlework was “a covert means of negotiating the constraints of femininity,” offering women the chance to “make meanings of their own while overtly living up to the oppressive stereotype of the passive, silent, vain, and frivolous, even seductive needlewoman” (Beaudry 2006:5).
By the mid-20th century, sewing at home was an unremarkable and mandatory practice for most white, middle- and working-class American women, who were responsible for making or mending their own and their family’s clothes (Thompson, 2022). Even if they could not sew, they still provided clothes for the family (Gordon, 2009). Sewing was a domestic duty and crucial in constructing feminine virtues such as “thrift, practical creativity, and attention to appearance.” Middle or upper-class women sewed for their children to demonstrate their maternal “love and devotion” (Gordon, 2009). The unmarried “spinster” served as a legal title for women until well into the 20th century (King, 2006).
During the 1960s and 70s, handicrafts and home sewing declined, coinciding with economic, political, and social shifts. Women entered the workforce in growing numbers, and the cost of ready-to-wear clothes decreased. In 1963’s “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan claimed that although women often threw themselves into intensive home-making activities — making their draperies, baking bread, and sewing dresses — there seemed more bitterness than joy in these efforts. As second-wave feminism questioned women’s ‘natural’ place in the home (Thompson, 2022), enjoying certain traditional domestic activities performed by women began to be viewed as anti-feminist (Gillis & Hollows, 2009). Attention to women’s unpaid work at home and domesticity was deemed “a prison and a constraint” (Thompson, 2022). Some feminists opposed sewing and other crafts associated with domesticity, arguing they embodied the oppressive feminine societal values of being a good mother and wife (Gillis & Hollows, 2009, p. 1). The typical mindset was that being a feminist and a housewife was contradictory.
Nevertheless, the victories of feminism had not made all women happier or more fulfilled than women of the past (Stevenson & Wolfers, 2009). Certain women found joy in their home life, seeing it as a source of identity and self-worth. This is undoubtedly true of activities such as sewing (Gillis & Hollows, 2009, p. 5). Thompson (2022) claims, “Second-wave feminism created a paradox for those who want to engage in feminist politics and still spend time at their sewing machine.” Moreover, as Gillis and Hollows (2009) indicate, “feminism still encounters problems coming to terms with domesticity” (p 07).
Third-wave feminism, for the most part, rejected the idea that to gain power, women must assume masculine roles and renounce the joy that can be found in domestic activities (Robertson (2007). Unlike second-wave feminists, who refused sewing and domestic arts as tyrannical labor (Chansky, 2010), third-wave feminists adopted crafts as a form of power: the ability to act on political opportunities and tap into new methods of social activism (Bratich & Brush, 2011; Greer, 2007, 2014). Betsy Greer (2007) encouraged women to consider craft beyond women’s work” as “something that has cultural, historical and social value” (n.p.). Rozsika Parker (2010) claims that needlework can be ‘both an instrument of oppression and an important source of creative satisfaction (xii) and could be valuable for making ‘feminist statements’ ‘as a medium with a heritage in women’s hands’ (ix). Debbie Stoller of the Stitch’ n Bitch movement (2003) suggests that ‘[a]ll those people who looked down on knitting — and housework, and housewives — were not being feminist. They were anti-feminist since they seemed to think that only those things that men did, or had done, were worthwhile’ (Groeneveld 2010, 270).
For most women, sewing and needlework have become a leisure tradition, with opportunities to be creative. However, Thompson (2022) claims that today is still devalued due to its connection with “women’s work.” Many women continue to sew and make gifts from crafts to connect feelings of love and support friends and family members. These gifts and acts seem irrelevant to gender, but studies indicate they play a role in “the emotional labor predominantly done by women” (Thompson, 2022). However, the choice not to sew out of obligation and focus on sewing as a leisure activity can also be understood as feminist resistance. Betty Friedan and other second-wave feminists had neglected an essential element of knitting and sewing and other handiwork when they deemed it merely a component of women’s societal responsibility. They had overlooked that craft-making serves the craft maker to feel a sense of mastery, pride, connection, and accomplishment. Quilters create quilts to celebrate the birth of a new baby, acknowledge the cycle of life, increase well-being, and build a broader community of flourishing (McWhirter et al., 2014; Tepper et al., 2014). Creating a quilt, something of enduring meaning illustrates Erikson’s theory of generativity — accomplishing something that benefits future generations (Cheek & Piercy, 2008).
Research on emotions and creativity has suggested that women’s creativity is influenced by their emotional states (Conner et al., 2016). Ferrares (2018) found that needlework contributed to women’s well-being and encouraged flourishing through three main avenues: creativity, relationships, and positive emotion. Further, needlework can be beneficial for women coping with chronic illness, including alleviation of pain and a distraction from negative thoughts about illness. Researchers have found that craft-making may enhance the lives of women experiencing bereavement (Lodato, 2009), breast cancer (Öster, Magnusson, Thyme, Lindh, & Åström, 2007; Reynolds & Lim, 2007), mental illness (Reynolds, 2000; Van Lith, Fenner, & Schofield, 2011), or chronic disease and disability (Reynolds & Prior, 2003; Reynolds, Vivat, & Prior, 2011).
Engaging in needlework helps build a positive self-image, express grief, foster control and decision making, and offer a positive way to cope with overwhelming emotions encouraging freedom (Creek, 2008; Reynolds & Prior, 2003a). Meaningful activities are related to well-being; they restore a sense of value and purpose to life, especially for the elderly and women with limited employment prospects and life options (Musich, 2018). Csikszentmihalyi (1975) termed this effortless concentration and trance-like state of total absorption as ‘flow.’ He defined flow as “the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, p. 36). He noted that it was characterized by a strong correlation with personal well-being (Delle Fave et al., 2011), fulfillment with life, and overall happiness. Craft making is a universal vehicle for flow because of its impact on a person’s inner well-being and life experience (Piškur et al., 2002). “The calming or re-creating effect of craft…described as the jingling of knitting needles, the banging of the looms, the cutting-up of one’s sorrows into streaks of a carpet, crocheting lace or cross-stitch and petit point works, without any thought of matters preoccupied in the mind (Pöllänen, 2013).” Riley (2008), therefore, suggested that needlework brings flow through women’s enhanced sense of self and collective identity and is a deeply personal spiritual or psychological experience.
The rise in Covid-19 infections in 2020 and the subsequent social isolation led to an extensive surge in women’s interests in crafts. Living with home constraints certainly helped save lives and limit the spread of the virus. Nevertheless, it was highly stressful, frequently leading to women’s feelings of claustrophobia, loneliness, depression, frustration, boredom, anxiety, and insomnia (Hwang et al., 2020; Rossi et al., 2020). Additionally, easily accessible lengthy stretches of free time seemed somewhat demoralizing (Cellini et al., 2020). Therefore, strategies such as knitting served to preserve physical and mental well-being while avoiding adverse psychological effects.
ACTIVISM
Employing craft can challenge patriarchal hegemony, advocate for political and social rights, and promote the recognition of women’s traditional art forms (Markus, 2019). Craft activism sometimes referred to as “alternative craft” (Metcalf, 2008) or “craftivism” (Black & Burisch, 2011), is a grass-roots effort that works outside the conventional consumer society. It draws from feminist and other civil rights movements, sustainability, and do-it-yourself [D.I.Y.] activities (Garber, 2013). Through these actions, many women and men activists challenge gender hierarchy and the social status quo. Third-wave feminists have explored knitting practices and the intersection of knitting, feminism, and gender construction by examining knitted objects (Myzelev, 2009). Additionally, acts of protest were discovered using craft as an instrument of political resistance (Newmeyer, 2008). Bratich & Brush (2007) argue that the outcomes of craft activism are closely linked to how we understand gender in the current climate of rethinking communities, spaces, and labor.
The issue of craftivism through the lens of power and patriarchy is crucial to understanding how the arts have silenced women. Their exclusion and marginalization led to the application of craftivism (Greer, 2011), supported through the widespread use of social media and other online communications (Markus, 2019). The politics range from groups wanting to influence policies, raise funds, or increase awareness of a cause to those making cultural influences into daily life (Bratich & Brush, 2011, p. 249). The Stitch’ n Bitch movement emerged, where women met to knit, stitch, and talk (Minahan & Wolfram Cox, 2007). Quilters gather to create quilts for wounded veterans, preterm babies, and children removed from their homes. The Pussyhat Project (Black, 2017) prompted a social justice craftivist movement by organizing women worldwide to knit and wear the now-iconic pink Pussyhat for the Women’s March on January 21, 2016. The visually compelling and internationally recognized symbol of protest, the pink Pussyhat, followed the outrage of President Donald Trump’s venomous and violently sexist statement of ‘grabbing ’em by the pussy’.
Craft has also taken on an essential role as a method of mourning as public activism. The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (figure 2) is the most significant piece of community art globally and was nominated in 1989 for the Nobel Peace Prize and continues to generate a conversation about the injustices surrounding the AIDS epidemic and different ways to fight it. (UNAIDS, 2014). Each panel, made by hand, is a narrative dialogue for the grieving to share stories of their loved ones’ life and death (Hedtke, 2002). The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt capitalizes on socially aware works, reaching people in their public environments and confronting them with social injustices otherwise easily ignored (Fee, 2006). Feminist theorist Elaine Showalter explains that in the AIDS Quilt, “we see the continued vitality of the quilt metaphor, its powers of change and renewal, and its potential to unify and heal” (174).
Craft making in a community setting serves as a tool for connecting with others to make, process, and cope with traumatic events and opportunities for financial independence. Further, craft communities, such as quilting, often available in rural areas lacking access to mental health services, can function as a significant part of a woman’s support system when other resources are unavailable (Kelly, Cudney, & Weinert, 2012). Community crafting also serves as an outreach program for a sick member, a place for essential medical, grief, and crisis support, and HIV/AIDS education. It can also serve as a therapy group, providing a setting for members to share their life stories, especially their sorrows and struggles. Through their creations, artists can convey ideas, thoughts, and feelings to represent what they know, feel, and understand about their world. This visual dialogue bridges differences in race, age, and socioeconomics and sparks conversations.
Confrontation exists between feminism and craft today. Third-wave feminists who focused on intersectional issues of identity — sexuality, race, and class have accused craftivism, particularly the Pussyhat, of the embodiment of White, liberal feminism (Gokariksel & Smith, 2017). Critics have even called the Pussyhat “the confederate flag for white feminists” (Gordon, 2018, n.p.). Derr (2017) writes, “The infantilizing kitten imagery combined with a stereotypically feminine color feels too safe and too reductive to be an answer to the complex issues facing women today.” For example, while the March claims intersectionality as central to its platform, and the Pussyhat Project claims to be speaking for both cis- and transgender individuals, the latter’s conception of what it means to be a woman is remarkably narrow (n.p.).
Further resistance still exists between feminism and craft regarding the commodification of craft and emphasizes the possibility of exclusion concerning access to time and affordability (Bratich & Brush, 2011). For many women worldwide, such work continues to be underpaid and undervalued, and the creation of craft materials such as yarn can have a significant environmental impact. As Turney notes, ‘[k]nitting is not always ethical, environmentally friendly, or political in its intent. Frequently it is just a hobby, something to do, a time-killer, which requires no form of aesthetic or ideological motivation’ (2009, 215). While this does not make it problematic, it is essential to recognize these tensions.
Women’s economic empowerment is central to realizing women’s rights and gender equality, including women’s access to decent work and control over their own time, lives, and bodies (UNWomen, 2018). The feminist movement means supporting women all over the globe. The fashion industry is part of the feminist movement because it is a female-dominated industry. According to Labor Behind the Label, 80% of garment workers worldwide are women, producing t-shirts with feminist quotes, such as “Girl Power,” found in stores all over the globe. However, garment industries exploit them as a cheap source of labor, due to a lack of technical knowledge and training (Begum et al., 2010). Historically, whenever needlework activities are commercialized, the men commonly take up the more lucrative part of the work. Globally, tailoring, the best-salaried job, is performed by the men in 90% of the cases (Dhamija, 1981). The more laborious but lowest-paid work, such as hand-stitching, finishing, and stitching of buttons, is given to women. The majority of the women work in low-paid and less skilled jobs, where, consequently, they are exposed to different types of hazards and harassment. In 2019, Oxfam reported that 1% of Vietnamese garment workers and 0% of Bangladeshi garment workers earned a living wage (Begum et al., 2010).
Handicrafts can increase income for women in some settings, but only under certain conditions since crafts are specialized activities with limited markets and offer limited potential as a means of employment (Dhamija, 1981). In some cases, crafts are a reliable source of income and can also provide women with a link to their cultural heritage. In most instances, however, crafts production concentrates women in a labor-intensive and exploitative area, providing a meager income for long work hours. If we investigate these crafts, we will see that their traditions linked to “femininity” lie primarily because they are time-consuming, offer little income, are not easily upgraded to generate a higher value and present the slight possibility for upskilling. In most communities, crafts seldom become a bridge to a small-scale industry that could offer women better incomes. Therefore, the organizational structure is needed to support women’s handicraft projects.
Nevertheless, there are some successes. Women living with HIV/AIDS on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, have formed a crafting community called Kopanang that provides medical, familial, and spiritual resources while learning skills in embroidery, bead-making, quilting, and textile design. Each week they are assigned designs and fabric, hand over products for quality assessment, are trained in new skills, and work from home for the remainder of the time to care for their children. Literacy lessons are also offered to Kopanang members and their children and proceeds from the sale of the items made by the women provide economic support. Similarly, Life Stitches (Global Health Partnerships, 2019) also trains HIV/AIDS mothers in Northern Uganda with sewing skills to earn income and find economic empowerment. The mothers acquire marketable sewing skills and are assisted in selling their products, which provides a better quality of life and options to overcome the AIDS stigma they face daily.
Many women and girls in Kinamba, Rwanda, have been left widowed or orphaned from the genocide and forced into prostitution with little education and skills to secure other jobs. To help women earn a living without exposing themselves to HIV/AIDS through prostitution, the Community Vocational Training School (CVTS) in Kinamba, Rwanda, offers training in sewing and tailoring. The project’s goals include that every student can make clothes on their own, that the hygiene and nutrition of the women improve, that they understand the consequences of HIV/AIDS and that the participants learn to read and write. After graduating, they set up small co-ops to make uniforms for the local schools or start their own business.
WEAVING AND MASCULINITY
Sewing, quilting, embroidery, knitting, and crocheting have almost exclusively been feminine activities; carried out by and for women (Parker, 1984; Turney, 2014). Tepper (2000) found that 4.6 percent of men and 44 percent of women participate in textile arts among Americans. Recently, craft making has experienced a revival, with some men participating in these “feminized” activities, affecting re-negotiations of masculinity. Although some research has explored the topic of craft making, most work examines the practice from a feminist perspective. There are still few studies that examine how men approach the tradition of needlework and how this practice affects their embodiment and performance of masculinity.
In 1992, one of the most influential art critics of the twentieth century, Clement Greenberg, stated, “Craft is not art,” revealing what he professed to be the fundamental differences between modern art and mass culture. For Greenberg and many others like him, popular crafts such as needlepoint represented concepts of femininity and their associations with amateurism, leisure, and domesticity (McBrinn, 2015). Needlecrafts, in particular, became entangled in a widespread moral panic about the erosion of American manhood by the perceived threat of feminization and, ultimately, homosexuality (Thomason, 2022), as needlework is “something that only really exists in relation to femininity” (McBrinn, xvii).
The consistent argument is that historically men and needlework are subversive and equated to effeminacy or homosexuality, with McBrinn (2022) arguing that “embroidery is the brazen badge of queer self-identification” (64). Subversive signifies “disruption” and “seeking to challenge the established systems or institutions.” The “established institutions” concerning needlework come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with women in the domestic sphere. Yet, prior to this, in medieval times, men took delight in their sewing skills, including embroidery, lacemaking, tapestry making, knitting, and mending their own clothes.
Historically, in the hands of men, needles and thread were used to break through the traditional views that only women could sew. Nineteenth-century sailors stitched gifts for loved ones. McBrinn (2022) contends that “hypermasculinity, then, could actively negate the feminizing actions of needlework. In the 1870 Elementary Education Act, working-class boys and orphans were taught needlework to calm them down; During World War II, Major Alexis Casdagli created embroideries as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany (Charney, 2011), embroidering became a subversive act as he sewed the Morse code messages “God Save the Queen” and “Fuck Hitler” into the ornamental pieces displayed in the camps; Boys adopted knitting to assist with the war effort, taught to knit at school for the Red Cross (Trowbridge, 2004). From a feminist perspective, however, the work of knitting was not relegated to the home, like women’s knitting is constructed, but was practiced openly in school and could be constituted as a tangible contribution to a national war effort. The boys and men exercising their masculinity by knitting for the war could be interpreted as a form of patriotism.
After the First World War, sewing was used as a tool for recovery when Ernest Thesiger’s Disabled Soldier’s Embroidery Industry was established to support disabled veterans returning from the war. Thesiger taught his fellow soldiers how to cross-stitch elaborate designs so they could create something they were proud of and improve their motor skills. This intimacy shows “sewing as a therapeutic activity” (89). Nevertheless, despite this comradeship, there were underlying contentions of “effeminophobia,” where there was a fear of the effeminate boy, and needlework contributed to this fear (85). The link between men, illness, and sewing was revived in the 1980s with the AIDS crisis. For some during this period, sewing was not only an act of defiance, but it was also an act of legacy in leaving something behind. This legacy is evident in the example of the 1985 HIV Quilt. The Quilt was seen as a paradox. It represented safety, homeliness, and comfort for those living with HIV instead of the connotation of HIV as associated with a homosexual activity in the media (125–131).
The hypermasculine examples of men performing needlework demonstrate how men challenge the traditional “sewing equals effeminacy.” R.W. Connell states that masculine gender is a social construction and a performance that changes over time (Connell, 1992; Connell, 1995) and is accomplished through social action and thus differs depending on gender relations in particular social settings (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Hegemonic masculinity is understood as dominant, with non-hegemonic masculinities as subordinate (Butler, 2011). Kimmel (1994) emphasizes the way homophobic attitudes among men help to uphold hegemonic masculinity, stating that “homophobia is the central organizing principle of our cultural definition of manhood” (Kimmel, 1994, pg. 131).
This concept of hegemonic masculinity works to legitimize men’s dominant position over women in society (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). It positions them “at the top of a hierarchy of historically specific masculinities” (Wedgewood, 2009, p. 335), devaluing anything less than. Therefore, men participating in textile handicrafts suggest that gender order relations are challenged. Turney (2014) claims that a man knitting intrudes on the activity of “intergenerational instruction, of behaving ‘like a girl” (23). His performance is queer, not only because of its strangeness but because it signifies other/ed knowledge previously inaccessible. His performance provides queer viewpoints and offers “essential counterpoints to the dominant heteronormative (and patriarchal) paradigm” (Aperture, 2015, p. 13).
Judith Butler (1990) defined gender as a social role performed/enacted by the individuals and validated and accepted by society. Traditionally, girls are more expected than boys to be introduced to the arts as children. Therefore, arts socialization is a more regular and natural part of a girl’s upbringing. On the other hand, a young boy socialized into the arts is more of an anomaly. Parents are worried about gender role conformity, which they see as connected to sexual orientation (Kågesten et al.,2016). Parents sports that help prepare their son’s body for masculinity (Kavasoğlu & Alakurt, 2022). Connell (1995) describes how, from a young age, boys learn to take on masculine performance by picking and choosing which aspects of masculinity they will reference and perform, such as playing baseball.
As society changes, so do how masculinities are defined. Masculinity is not one singular category; it differs across cultures, generations, one’s lifespan, and within society (Kimmel, 2001), and the standards of which are context-specific (Bradley, 2013). “Masculinity was no longer expected to be one thing; it could be many things, for it could now allow for diversity” (Seidler, 1994, p.116). The performance of masculine identity is a strategy established through men’s “complicit or resistant stance to prescribed dominant masculine styles” (Wetherell & Edley, 1999, p. 337). The new man is a term widely used to describe men who are softer and more caring (Bradley, 2013. p. 57), who are perceived as being more concerned with relationships, fashion, health, fitness, and appearance but still masculine, nonetheless. They are family orientated, emotional, and ‘embody an anti-sexism (Mackinnon, 2003, p.13). Mackinnon argues that a new man would seem to be a ‘middle-class professional, white, heterosexual and aged between mid-twenties and early forties’ (p.13). Despite such characteristics already being a form of hegemonic masculinity that connotes a gender-dominated power, the new man uses these physical attributes and emotionality to define this new masculinity.
Although alternative definitions of masculinity can be seen as a means to counter the stigma associated with crafting (Kelly, 2014), evolving definitions such as that of the new man work to construct alternative masculine identities. Also, these performances will likely gain social popularity as additional men begin to discover variations in masculine gender performance and masculinities once traditionally marginalized by hegemonic masculinity. Some of the attitudes once esteemed by traditional masculinity may no longer be valued, such as homophobia, misogyny, and stoicism (Anderson, 2009, pg. 97). Morneau (2015) claims men are starting to change their attitudes about male homosexuality, creating a space to re-negotiate masculine gender performance for themselves. This type of “inclusive masculinity” can be seen as a form of gender performance that no longer links masculinity with heterosexuality. It allows men to explore various aspects of gender performance previously unobtainable or unacceptable within their culture. Men might choose a more fluid space to experiment with masculinity and discover other choices that may have been formerly shut off. Olympic gold medalist Tom Daley was seen knitting in the stands at the 2020 Olympic games, learning the craft during the COVID-19 lockdowns and challenging the notion of knitting and needlework as a feminine craft. Beyer (2022) investigates the resurgence of needlework and how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the meaning of male knitting, arguing that the resurgence of male needlework is the result of seismographic shifts within popular culture that have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Beyer, 2022).
However, when participating in an activity deemed feminine, men seek to justify their participation by performing their most hegemonic traits. Thus, references to gender and masculinity abound within knitting, constantly reinforcing the internalization of cultural norms, such as masculine color choices and visual representations, and dominant behavior in online knitting communities (Morneau, 2015). Morneau (2015) found that male knitters most likely would not knit in public because they feared homophobic attacks. They also experienced “overpraising,” particularly from women knitters, attracting unsought attention.
CONCLUSION
Needlework often carries connections with the home, generations of older female relatives, and items made for their well-being and items of comfort. But their creation grew out of female-centered practices often linked with domestic oppression. The existing feminist movement often voices itself through needlework to influence policies, raise funds, or increase awareness of a cause. Reclaiming crafts in this arena does not simply restore these traditional art forms but instead uses historically undervalued means of artistic expression to examine contemporary issues in fresh new ways. Recent studies reflect on contemporary feminism as something one does and performs via practices of making. It begins from the belief that doing feminism and being feminist are not the same thing. What is meant by doing feminism and what kinds of actions come to represent it exposes some of the value-hierarchies and the unequal and irregular recognition and credit that specific types of making and specific makers achieve. This breaks down into evaluations of men makers over women and privileged white women makers over impoverished women of color.
However, men making textile handicrafts suggest that gender order relations are challenged. While crafting allows men to explore various aspects of gender performance previously unobtainable or unacceptable within their culture, needlecraft is still trapped in widespread moral anxiety about the loss of American manhood by the perceived threat of feminization and, ultimately, homosexuality. New definitions of masculinity can counter the stigma associated with crafting, with evolving definitions such as that of the new man working to construct alternative masculine identities. Men engaging in crafts will likely gain social popularity as further men begin to discover variations in masculine gender performance and masculinities once traditionally marginalized by hegemonic masculinity.
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