Knitting, Masculinity and the Value of Craftwork

The emergence of Etsy “the place to buy and sell things handmade” and other online communities have made people’s skill available to the world to purchase. You can sell your knitting, your altered t-shirts, your 1000 paper cranes, to someone who will want them. In some ways this seems like the best sort of mix of capitalism and patronage. People who want to own the handmade things pay the people who want to make the handmade things, and everyone ends up happier. However it is not possible for the economy of Etsy to be self-sustaining because it depends on undervalued labor. As Sara Mosle writes in her piece, “Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy” the difference between younger women today and their work in handcrafts and their mothers and grandmothers, is that younger women want to “be recognized and compensated for their talents” (2).  There is no way to sell a knitted sweater on Etsy for a reasonable price given the cost of materials and the amount of time it takes to make it. As a result, hand-knitted sweaters become objects with a “priceless” worth. Worth so much that it is problematically valuable.

The problematic value of a handknit sweater plays into the most famous of all knitting urban legends, “the boyfriend sweater curse.” The story goes if you knit your boyfriend a sweater it will end your relationship, either by the process of knitting it, or by the boyfriend’s insufficient love of the sweater when finished. Books such as Judith Durant’s Never Knit Your Man a Sweater (Unless You've Got the Ring), organize their whole premise around the curse. Other publications mention the curse in their introductions. Guy Knits, a book of patterns for men to wear, bosts this introduction,

“Men who knit are still in the minority, but guys love knits--let's not neglect them. When we knit for a guy, it usually means that the knitter is not the wearer. So we need to understand what the guy is comfortable wearing.  Do this, and you needn't worry about that old boyfriend-sweater curse. As always, knit with love, but make sure that love is not blind.  After all, handknits should enhance, not complicate, a relationship.”

As a book full of patterns for men, the book assures the reader that these patterns are so excellent they are in no danger of the curse.

The introduction to Guy Knits also brings up an interesting question of gendered language. Although the introduction admits only a “minority” of male knitters, and that “usually “ they are not knitting for themselves, the author assumes that the reader, and therefore the knitter, is a woman. When publications do recognize the possibility of knitting men, the writers often congratulate those men for being man enough to knit with titles like Knitting with Balls. The tone of these congratulations often implies that knitting is something men need courage to undertake. Which is strange because although knitting is a female-dominated field, but it is also a powerless one, and one that men can enter if they happen to be interested in knitting, but they would have no other incentive to do so.

All of this is a big messy issue, but one which is close to my heart for several reasons. One is that my boyfriend is a knitter and a good one. He knits lace and cables, writes and designs his own patterns, he's even had a pattern he designed published in Interweave Knits, a widely recognized knitting magazine. When I tell people that my boyfriend knits most people are both very surprised and very impressed. I think people are impressed for two reasons: for one, I think people are impressed that he thinks something which is usually considered a female craft (at least at this point in history) is worth learning. They are impressed that he is interested in knitting as a craft, and interested enough to learn how to do it. The second reason people are impressed is because he knits astoundingly well. Not just because he chooses (or creates) really beautiful patterns, or because he uses very high quality materials, but he knits very evenly and carefully with an admirable attention to all the details of weaving in loose ends, and fixing all the mistakes he makes along the way. He doesn't just knit. He knits really well. And this is the reason I think all of our crafting is worthwhile. Even if none of us make money on Etsy. Even if Linden and I have spent hundreds of hours doing craftwork for All's Well, this work is important not just because our work has given value to those objects and costume pieces, but because our work has given value to ourselves. We have and are building some really exciting skills. Both of us have been learning a lot through the experience by learning new skills. We've both become much more creative and capable with paper as well as with fabric. Learning from Jenny McNee of the American Shakespeare Center has been lovely in part because she is a good teacher and a good sounding board for our ideas, but also because she is incredibly skilled. She knows how to make fabric do incredible things. I think that skill itself is a thing of value, worth learning, worth possessing in oneself and worth preserving for the future.

Writing and Sewing - Women's work then and now

In her beautiful work, Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early Modern England, Susan Frye writes about the instabilities of gender constructions and how women in early modern England created much of their own identity as they worked with textiles and with text. Some of her book re-evaluates some of the misconceptions held by many today. She writes,

“The first misconception is that only women were associated with the needle and only men with the pen—a misconception held despite repeated attempts to complicate this binary by scholars as well as by early modern people themselves. The second misconception is that the needle was only associated with drudgery, while the pen was only associated with intellectual work. To a certain extent the needle represented women’s obedience to a rigid insistence on sexual difference, but it is an unstable signifier and, as an object, it is small but phallic, penetrating as well as penetrable, conveying activity, even violence as well as creativity. The needle conveys the potential for active, thinking feminine, without precluding women’s use of the pen in paintings like Alice Barnham and her Sons Martin and Steven” (16).

She then discusses this remarkable painting and the stories it can tell about women's agency with a pen as well as with the more traditionally accepted needle, and it strikes me that this semester Linden and I are sewing and creating work with our hands, but also writing. We get to use these two expressions of feminized power together, to put on a play. And tonight as I'm typing up quotations for a social history paper, all this seems beautiful and serendipitous, and much like a gift.   

For more on the painting: http://www.bergercollection.org/index.php?id=5&artwork_id=75

Blank Paper and Luxurious Textiles

Susan Frye’s excellent work, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England examines the many ways in which early modern women’s work in text and textiles re-defined femininity. In this passage she examines the ways in which Giacomo and Innogen speak of different material objects to symbolize Innogen and her body in Cymbeline.

“Innogen’s own language picks up on the extent to which textiles have become metonymic of her body when Pisanio shows her the letter in which Posthumus orders her murdered for her infidelity. But Innogen envisions herself as a completely worked garment rather than the blank sheet of chastity on which a man might write. Before she begs Pisanio to carry out her husband’s order, she castigates herself for having lost Posthumus’s faith in her, calling herself  “a garment out of fashion,” which, too “rich” to be translated into a wall hanging, must be reduced to rags: “And, for I am richer than to hang by th’ walls,/ I must be ripp’d:--to pieces with me!” (3.4.50-53). As a garment too elaborately made--too complete in its own identity to be cut up and translated into a wall hanging--Innogen must be ritually destroyed, ripped to pieces. To Giacomo, she may be the blank white of the sheet, but Innogen sees herself in terms of luxurious, colorful textiles, even as she imagines herself as that rich cloth ripped to pieces” (186).

In this project we’re looking at ways of re-defining the “blank page” of femininity, and it is exciting to see that redefinition happening as the texts are being written. What other characters use textiles as metaphors for themselves? Or for other characters? And what does it say about them?