US women are embracing the knitting needle in an odd marriage of coffee-house culture and feminist politics. Anna Mundow reports
On a quiet night this summer in a hip New York coffee house a group of young women pushed a sofa and some easy chairs into a circle near the window, settled in for the evening and took out their needles. Some drank beer, some herbal tea. Most were pierced or tattooed. All were knitting. The conversation, ranging that night from Iraq to female circumcision, paused whenever somebody needed help with a dropped or difficult stitch. Invariably, a knitting-disaster story followed; everybody groaned and laughed, then it was back to serious discussion.
This was a weekly meeting of the local Stitch 'n' Bitch group, a nationwide sorority whose members have rediscovered a staid craft and transformed it into a feminist fashion statement. That's right, knitting is back. And this time it's political.
"It made me rethink my original feminist position," writes Debbie Stoller, author of Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook, describing the epiphany she had while finishing a sweater on a long train trip. "It had been 30 years since the feminist revolution . . . so why, dammit, wasn't knitting receiving as much respect as any other hobby?" Stoller should know the answer. Having earned a PhD in the psychology of women from Yale University, she co-founded the "third-wave feminist magazine" BUST. A few years ago, in New York City, Stoller founded the first Stitch 'n' Bitch group, which at the time felt more like a coven than a movement. Even in jaded Manhattan knitting drew stares. "I might as well have been churning butter on the crosstown bus," Stoller writes.
Since then, however, four million newcomers have joined the 38 million existing knitters in the US, fuelling a craze and filling knit cafés across the country.
Depending on which cultural commentator you read, knitting is the new yoga, the new golf or the new sex. Activists do it in public, challenging gawkers with T-shirt slogans that read "Take Back the Knit" and "You Ain't Shit if You Don't Knit". This is in-your-face knitting.
Self-absorbed yet attention seeking, the bold young (they always are) knitter might tell you that she is undermining the bourgeois construct of social conversation. Mostly, though, she prefers to say nothing. It is a bit like talking to somebody who is interminably tuning a guitar.
That's not nice. But that's the point: knitting isn't nice any more. This is not your granny making you a Fair Isle cardigan. This is women - sorry, wimmin - on the craft offensive.
Purl, the cartoon mascot of Chicago's Stitch 'n' Bitch club, wears combat boots and brandishes her needles as though she were Brad Pitt in Troy. Knitting In Plain English, by Maggie Righetti, has sections titled 'The dumb baby sweater', 'The stupid baby bonnet' and 'Buttonholes are bastards'.
Back in cave times we went to the wool shop (Miss West's in my case) because we knitted with wool and didn't know any better. But wool is not the whole story any more. There is yarn. There is fibre.
Today's radical knitters prefer tresses sheared from alpacas, hanks spun from hemp, silk recycled from Indian saris and hair combed from your dog, cat or girlfriend.
Supply stores have names such as Halcyon Yarns and ImagiKnit. Instead of using models who look like Butch Moore or Dana, chic knitting patterns have grainy, fashion-shoot photographs of androgynous youths who display that strung-out-on-heroin look.
There is another difference: when wool is called yarn or fibre the price doubles, just as it does when white coffee is called latte.
The next development may be the support group for compulsive knitters or, as Debbie Stoller calls them, process knitters.
"They look at sweaters in knitting magazines and think 'I'd like to knit that' before they think 'I'd like to wear that'. Complicated cable patterns, colour work and odd, angular methods are what get them going. Lots of garments made by process knitters are unloaded as gifts."
It is not all frenzy. Converts cite the calming, meditative aspect of knitting. In Stoller's group, for instance, there is "Marney, a meeting planner who learned to knit as a way to soothe her nerves after having escaped from the 79th floor of the World Trade Center" on September 11th.
It is not all women, although male recruitment is slow, and even flamboyantly gay men have told Stoller they would be too embarrassed to knit in public. Knit Pride, it seems, is overdue.
