A man may work from sun to sun, but women’s work is never done!
Knitting has been an ideal handwork for women over the past centuries. Knitting is portable, can easily be put down to rock the cradle or stir the porridge. Unlike weaving or blacksmithing, knitting does not require a woman to be stationary or strapped in to her work. True, it is inconvenient to interrupt a row or have to drop one’s work while turning a heel, but it can be done without much fuss.
The other side of the coin is that because of its portability and locking stitch structure, knitting can be done while doing other things. The historical record brings us pictures of women with loads of firewood tied to their backs, and women under the yoke of milk pails, knitting as they go. It is easy to see where a woman’s attention could be divided by competing needs: to see that her children’s feet were warm and that the milk was collected from the cows in the pasture; why not do both? Maybe they had to in order to keep up.
We might wonder, then, about the male shepherds of the late eighteen hundreds in France, knitting while on stilts, or Sarah Orne Jewett’s lonely old sailor in The Country of the Pointed Firs, knitting in his ship-shape cottage in Maine around the same time.
I would venture to say, and could be argued out of it, that it has been acceptable to society for men to do one thing at a time. In most of Judeo-Christiandom, social validation was won just by dint of birth as a male. With the inborn curse of original sin, Judeo-Christian women had to run to catch up.
As long ago as the first century, a virtuous Roman noblewoman was one who spun her own thread, even if she had slaves to do it. This connotation of virtue has come down to us over time. Women’s hands are not to be idle; even while sitting by the fire after a long day of tending to the domestic side of the economy, a woman had to be seen to make herself useful. For many (but not all) women, knitting has been a relaxing task and a calming respite from other labors.
Happy Women’s History Month!
Andrea Berman Price is the author of Knitspeak