The Social History of American Knitting

On Thursday, I went to Half Price Books, mostly looking for stitch dictionaries. I didn't find any of those that I don't already have, but I did find another book that sounded quite interesting: No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting by Anne L. Macdonald. The copyright is 1988, so it doesn't cover more recent developments in knitting, but I thought that it sounded like a good read.

The place of knitting in the world today is a conversation that seems to be occurring all over the place. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (the Yarn Harlot) in her talk at the DFW Fiber Fest covered the ideas that non-knitters have about knitters and how the reality (obviously) is quite different. She also talked about what we as knitters can do to help correct misconceptions. A recent article about knitting (which spawned the #ANDknitting movement) stated that knitters are women with too much time on their hands and that the recent resurgence in knitting is due to celebrity knitters (and the article was not talking about the Yarn Harlot--it mentioned Kate Moss and Kate Middleton). Yes, I'm sure that the many knitters today are just doing it because Kate Moss does (I didn't even know that she did!).

Over and over it seems that articles about knitting mention this resurgence in knitting. But knitting hasn't ever gone away. What is has done is changed a bit: for example, knitting seems to be more about the process and recreation than a necessity to clothe a family and social media especially Ravelry has allowed knitters to connect even more than they have in the past.

With all of these current conversations in mind, I started the introduction to the No Idle Hands book. The author starts with discussing a questionnaire that she had knitters answer to find out their thoughts about knitting and she lists some of the responses.

One of those questions was "Why do you think more women than men knit?" I was interested to read some of these responses, especially as it still seems that people assume all knitters are women. In my local knitting group, we do have an active male knitter and he has often discussed the lack of patterns designed for men. In fact, in a recent Facebook post, he called out one knitting magazine in particular and chastised it for not incorporating any designs for men at all. And these survey responses highlight the stereotypes that have existed, and I think still exist, about men--not just for knitting but in general.

Here are some of the responses:

"Men are too restless to sit still."
"In this part of the country, boys play football; they do not knit."
"They can't tell their right hands from their left unless they are holding a screwdriver."
"Men are more comfortable in their workshops."
"They don't really think much about clothes."

Sadly, I think that if the author conducted her survey today, many of the responses would be similar. What a disservice this does to men! And what a disservice to knitting. If we are going to change attitudes of the public perception about knitting, perhaps we need to start with our own attitudes about knitting, which includes how we feel about who is doing the knitting.

Some of the other survey responses dealt with reasons why knitters knit. Some things again are very similar to what they would be today, but there are something things that I think have changed a LOT! For example, one respondent wrote, "I wasn't about to pay $350 for a sweater I could make for my $30!" Ha ha! It's seems quite the other way around now--a sweater in a store would be $30 and it would be easy to get in the hundreds of dollars for the yarn to knit a sweater. So there are some things that have changed!