Knitting’s tangled history

By Matthew Sweet

A 1950s swimming costume, sagging with brine; a Scandi noir detective in her workwear; a showbiz gossip column reporting Russell Crowe’s fondness for the needles. The history of knitting is a tangled yarn. Hipsters do it now but not, like their forebears, out of economic necessity: it’s more about self-care than self-sufficiency. In the 20th century, knitting was seen as women’s work and recreation – and therefore used against them. When President Jimmy Carter appointed Barbara Judge as a securities and exchange commissioner, she opened us capital markets to foreign companies and negotiated American entry to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. “I got hate mail,” she recalled. “‘Stick to your knitting.’” Its sender, doubtless, had never read of Madame Defarge, the Jacobin revolutionary in Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities”, who encoded the names of her enemies into the pattern of her work.

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