Women's Work

You know you could buy socks cheaper from Walmart, right Mom?
 (Photo from agoodyarn.net)

     I just finished reading A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove by Laura Schenone and Knitting Ganseys by Brown-Reinsel, and I am currently knitting on a stealth project for a friend's wedding, a project which I'm endeavoring to make meaningful in subtle ways.   The two seem to come together to make me think deeeeep thooooooughts, so why not share, eh?

      To call myself a knitter always gives me a brief feeling that I am stating the obvious.   To be proud of myself for knitting a sweater, for searing a pork chop, for hand-piecing a quilt square, is a disconcerting feeling for a moment.   My great-great-great grandmother would not have called herself a knitter, a cook, a quilter, a cheese-maker, a pickle-maker, as though any of these were a hobby she chose to do lightly because she loved it.   I do not know which of these activities, or any other I didn't name, she took the most joy in, though it's certain she had some she enjoyed more.   I would suppose that she'd identify herself to me as a good Christian farmwife who took care of her family, leaving unsaid the fact that she had to take care of them by doing and making so many things.

       Frankly, I'd expect her to marvel a little at the many things I don't know how to do.   Send me back 150 years to when a relative of mine stepped off of a ship with her children, including a newborn she bore at sea, and I would be more useless than helpful.   This skill, knitting, that I cultivate for love of it, she learned so that her husband and children would be clothed.   Many women of that time and place knit as part of a cottage industry, to contribute to the family's financial stability.   I'm amazed they could, given what a single day required of them.   To eat cheese or bread meant that Mom had to make it, and the girls had to help.  To eat vegetables meant that Mom grew them right outside the back door.   Meat meant butchering, which Mom did.   Socks, mittens, sweaters all came from Mom's needles and spindle.   I, at twenty eight years old, have a fraction of the skills a girl half my age would have had, yet I am proud to wear the skills I have like a badge of honor.

      Yet, I cannot judge myself too harshly yet.   My great-great-grandmother would be at a loss faced with my morning, driving to work, using pipettes and machines to stain slides and a fluorescence microscope to assess the work, sending email and posting to this blog.   There is a good chance she might not even have been able to read it.   I know she was as intelligent as I am, and as creative.  She had to be, in order to meet the wide-ranging responsibilities heaped on her shoulders.  She could provide bread, cheese, potatoes to her family...I provide chicken tikka masala, sesame noodles, and baked ziti to mine.  

   When knitting became my passionate hobby, it felt new.   My mother knows how, and enjoys it mostly, but like most women of her generation, she likes to hike and travel and shop, and leisure time is precious.   Her generation embraced processed food and packages of socks as the willingly-paid price for that leisure time to spend with us kids.   Her generation finally got men to help.   Raised by them, women of my age felt "retro" and cool when we learned to knit and cook, making the "knitting craze" blaze around the western world in 2005, and we introduced the world to the "foodie" who marinates whole pigs in the bathtub, makes artisan cheese and fresh pasta at home.   We embraced what had been work for centuries before us and made it what we did outside our day jobs.

   My great-great-great grandmother, my mother, and I all share a sense of our responsibilities and a desire to love and care for family.   My great-great grandmother did this by taking on the massive task of homemaking, feeding, and clothing people when none of this was fast or easy.   As technology made these things faster and easier, my mother's generation did not become lazy or accept the reprieve, but instead pushed themselves to take on yet more, caring for and nurturing people outside of their family and community with careers.   Young women like myself continue to feel that tug of responsibility to the public world of career, but we are rediscovering how much joy and fun can be found in feeding people, clothing people in more traditional ways.   In a way, I am stating the obvious when I say that I am a knitter.   To say that I am a knitter is to say that I am committed to covering my loved ones in both physical and spiritual warmth...as women always have been.  It's our job.



Wait, Delores...the Kermis is next month.
Good, then I can finish this shawl.



No, check the TSA website.  If security had a problem
with these, would I be on the plane right now? I didn't think so.