Stitch 'n Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook (3 page)

I wasn’t a clumsy child—I had learned to do cross-stitch, and I could even sew dresses for my Barbie dolls on a mini sewing machine—but I just never seemed to be able to get the hang of knitting.

But unlike my grandmother, I didn’t
need
to know how to knit. And soon the world began telling me that I’d
be better off not knowing how. I was only ten years old when I first became aware of “women’s libbers,” but as Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” blared from my transistor radio, I became completely swept up in the ideas of the women’s movement. Taking their cue from Betty Friedan’s influential book
The Feminine Mystique
, feminists were claiming that anyone who spent her days cooking and cleaning and her nights knitting and sewing, all in an effort to please her husband and her children, was frittering her life away. Women were made for greater things, they argued, so why, in a world of dishwashers and ready-to-wear, hadn’t their time been freed up to pursue loftier goals?

I quickly became convinced that being a housewife was a dead end. After all, wouldn’t my mother, with her careful attention to detail and great storytelling ability, have made a wonderful writer? Wouldn’t Aunt Hetty, with her exceptional visual sense, have made a great decorator or graphic designer? I saw the limitations of their lives as a great tragedy, one that would never befall women in the future, least of all me. So my needlework and crafts went the way of my pink frilly dresses.

Yet, every time I’d return to Holland, my fingers would get itchy to do something crafty, and I’d pick up a cross-stitch project to work on in secret. When I lived in Holland for a year in my twenties, I had a particularly talented roommate who inspired me to give knitting another try. With a strange mix of excitement and trepidation, I asked my grandmother to reintroduce me to the ways of wool.

Under her skilled and patient guidance, I succeeded at making loops of yarn the way they were intended to be made, although my knitting progressed slowly—very slowly. By the time I finished the project I had started that winter—a Yohji Yamamoto–inspired boxy black number with punky holes purposefully sprinkled all across it—the damn thing was no longer in fashion. Besides, it looked terrible on me. I didn’t wear it even once.

Knitting just took too long. It required patience and an almost painful attention to detail. I tried another sweater a few years later and didn’t get past the first sleeve. That unfinished sweater and the remaining balls of wool stayed in my closet for years, mocking me and reminding me of my failure. I’d take the piece out and bring it with me when I’d go on long vacations—to the beach, to the country—hoping that, with some time and a change of scenery, I might have the patience to get it finished. But each time, I would only manage to knit another few rows before giving up.

Finally, in 1999, I was scheduled to go on a cross-country book tour. Since flying is not one of my favorite things, I had arranged to do a good part of my travel by train—including a three-day trip from New York to Portland, Oregon. Afraid that I’d be bored out of my gourd with that much time on my hands, I packed my bags full of things to keep me occupied: books on tape, a laptop loaded with computer games, cards, books, and, yes, that long-suffering half-made sweater.

On the second day of my trip, I took the sweater out of my bag. As I stared at the needles and yarn, I tried desperately to remember how to cast on that first row of stitches. With a bit of fumbling and a few glances at the knitting primer I had brought for backup, it started coming back to me. Then slowly, like some sort of sense memory, my hands began casting on stitches with a deftness and agility I didn’t even know they had. I took the needles in my hands and instinctively tucked the right needle under my right arm. I wrapped the yarn around my hand and started making tentative knit stitches. After a little while, the yarn was flowing from my finger
comfortably, and I found myself making perfect little rows of stitches in time with the rhythm of the swaying train carriage. I looked through the window at the passing pastures outside and felt a sense of exhilaration. It had finally clicked! My hands and my body and my brain and my eyes had finally gotten into sync, and knitting felt comfortable, pleasurable—relaxing, even. I couldn’t stop knitting. And each time I’d come to a difficult point in my work—when I’d have to increase or decrease stitches, for instance—I’d just walk up and down the length of the train until I saw another woman knitting in her cabin, and ask her to help me over the hump. By the time I arrived on the West Coast, my sweater was done.

After I returned home from the tour, I sought out my local knitting store and bought yarn and a pattern to make another sweater, which I completed on my next train trip a few weeks later. I couldn’t get enough of my newfound love—I would borrow every book I could find on the craft from my local library, then lie awake in bed late at night reading them. I found my eyes opening up to details I had never noticed before: the way that sweaters are constructed, the way that different fibers produce different knit textures, and the huge variety of objects that could be made from simple knit and purl stitches. I was hooked.

When I’d tell people about my latest obsession, I’d invariably get one of two responses. The first, “Can you teach me, too?” was a common and very welcome reply. But other friends responded with “Really?” or “How interesting,” both spoken with an air of disbelief, even a touch of disdain. After all, I had gotten a Ph.D. in the psychology of women and had started
BUST
, a feminist magazine—what was I doing knitting? Soon it occurred to me that if I had told these folks I’d been playing soccer, or learning karate, or taken up carpentry, they most likely would have said, “Cool,” because a girl doing a traditionally male activity—now, that’s feminist, right? But a girl doing a traditionally female activity—let alone one as frivolous and time-wasting as knitting—well, what were they to make of that?

It made me rethink my original feminist position. After all, it had been thirty years since the feminist revolution of the 1970s and housewives as we knew them had pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur, so why, dammit, wasn’t knitting receiving as much respect as any other hobby? Why was it still so looked down on? It seemed to me that the main difference between knitting and, say, fishing or woodworking or basketball, was that knitting had traditionally been done by women. As far as I could tell, that was the only reason it had gotten such a bad rap. And that’s when it dawned on me: All those people who looked down on knitting—and housework, and housewives—were not being feminist at all. In fact, they were being anti-feminist, since they seemed to think that only those things that men did, or had done, were worthwhile. Sure, feminism had changed the world, and young girls all across the country had formed soccer leagues, and were growing up to become doctors and astronauts and senators. But why weren’t boys learning to knit and sew? Why couldn’t we all—women and men alike—take the same kind of pride in the work our mothers had always done as we did in the work of our fathers?

I had a mission. It was time to “take back the knit.” Not only was I determined to improve my own knitting skills, but I also wanted to do everything in my power to raise knitting’s visibility and value in the culture. I began to knit in public. I organized the first New York City Stitch ’n Bitch group as an open forum where women or men interested in learning to knit could mingle and share their knowledge. I told anyone who’d listen how wonderfully relaxing and satisfying the craft was. I wrote about it, with no shame or ironic edge, in
BUST
. I firmly believed that knitting—a centuries-old craft that women had perfected—deserved to be as respected and honored as any other craft, and I wanted to make sure that it got its props.

I had my work cut out for me. Knitting had become such an arcane activity that doing it in public always elicited a response. It sent older men into fits of nostalgia (“My mother used to knit all the time,” they’d say with an air of melancholy). Older women would look at me with a knowing smile, as if we were both part of some long-forgotten secret society. And some young men and women would stare at me with openmouthed curiosity; as far as they were concerned, I might as well have been churning butter on the crosstown bus.

The fact that knitting was so gendered an activity also put people off. It was such a girly thing to do, in fact, that even a few of the flamboyantly gay men I knew—men who would have no qualms about, say, walking down the street dressed as Carmen Miranda—admitted to me that they were too embarrassed to knit in public. “Oh no, I would never knit on a plane,” one said. “I’d get too many stares.”

But it was exactly the gendered nature of the craft that drew me to it. Whenever I would take up the needles I would feel myself connected not only to my own mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, but also to the women who lived centuries before me, the women who had developed the craft, the women who had known, as I did, the incredible satisfaction and sense of serenity that could come from the steady, rhythmic
click-click-click
of one’s knitting needles. These women had experienced the meditative and peaceful quality that overcomes one’s mind while knitting; they understood the way that one’s thoughts get worked right into one’s knitting, discovering, as I did, that whatever I was thinking about when I last worked on a piece would immediately spring back into my mind when I picked up the work again later on, as though knitting were a sort of mental tape recorder. Betty Friedan and other like-minded feminists had overlooked an important aspect of knitting when they viewed it simply as part of women’s societal obligation to serve everyone around them—they had forgotten that knitting served the knitter as well.