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Auteur
Anne L. Macdonald was for fifteen years chairperson of the history department of the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. She was the author of No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting and Feminine Ingenuity: Women and Invention in America. She died in 2016.
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"Fascinating . . . What is remarkable about this book is that a history of knitting can function so well as a survey of the changes in women's rolse over time."-The New York Times Book Review
An historian and lifelong knitter, Anne Macdonald expertly guides readers on a revealing tour of the history of knitting in America. In No Idle Hands, Macdonald considers how the necessity-and the pleasure-of knitting has shaped women's lives.
Here is the Colonial woman for whom idleness was a sin, and her Victorian counterpart, who enjoyed the pleasure of knitting while visiting with friends; the war wife eager to provide her man with warmth and comfort, and the modern woman busy creating fashionable handknits for herself and her family. Macdonald examines each phase of American history and gives us a clear and compelling look at life, then and now. And through it all, we see how knitting has played an important part in the way society has viewed women-and how women have viewed themselves.
Assembled from articles in magazines, knitting brochures, newspaper clippings and other primary sources, and featuring reproductions of advertisements, illustrations, and photographs from each period, No Idle Hands capture the texture of women's domestic lives throughout history with great wit and insight.
"Colorful and revealing . . . vivid . . . This book will intrigue needlewomen and students of domestic history alike."-The Washington Post Book World
Échantillon de lecture
Introduction
 
 
A social history like this was considered beyond the pale of “real” history when I was growing up, and I well remember my father’s indignation when his only son, a Yale history major, enrolled in a distinguished professor’s course in American social history that was irreverently nicknamed “Pots and Pans” by the prankish students. In those Depression days, my father equated expenditure on such “twaddle” with money down the drain, and the message was not lost on his youngest. When I hit the college big time a few years later, I prudently matriculated in political science and history, and consorted with kings, presidents, prime ministers and emperors, with a dash of wars and treaties on the side. The virtual dearth of women’s affairs in historical texts struck me as deplorable, but in the thirties and forties I was not spurred to demand exhumation of “Herstory.” Nor could I have conceived that one day I would write primarily on women, especially about their knitting!
 
This book grew, not from a decision to “write women into history,” for knitting is certainly not the vehicle for elevation of their status, but from curiosity piqued by my own history of unflagging knitting. With no genetic endowment from a nonknitting mother (an architectural engineer/homemaker), an indifferent-knitter maternal grandmother (a proud college graduate whose unsolicited, pro-New Deal political comments kept the pot boiling in our Republican household) and a tatting but unapproachable paternal grandmother, my two sisters and I, impelled by some ancient urge, “took up the needle” and blossomed into dedicated sewers and knitters. To my knowledge, our brother (the aforementioned pots-and-pans fellow metamorphosed into bank president, horseman and knowledgeable collector of antiques) lifted a needle neither in anger nor in delight but luckily married a gifted and delightful stitcher.
 
Of my many questions about knitting, I kept returning to “Why don’t men knit?” I had heard that some men knit, but despite maintaining a vigil like an ornithologist scouting a rare species, I never actually spotted one until I had just begun this book—plain as day, right there on the subway! The preppily clad Capitol Hill staffer opened his cordovan briefcase, extracted a magnificent blue sweater on round needles and clicked away. From my briefcase, I plucked an article freshly duplicated at the Library of Congress, caught his attention and held up the headline: KNITTING IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH. Bursting with laughter, he held it aloft for craning passengers, and everyone exchanged knitting stories for four stops, parting as old friends at the transfer point—an auspicious beginning.
 
My research has since validated my previous observations that in America, where knitting has been assigned to woman’s domain, adult knitting males are stared at, fussed over, almost petted as daring, even darling, adventurers or avoided for being too “feminine.” In a current attempt to obliterate the latter stereotype and to cultivate increasingly unisex markets, knitting publications such as Knitters, which devoted eight pages to “Men Who Knit” in its Spring 1987 issue, hope to stiffen the resolve of potential knitting-men who aspire to knit without risking their macho image. Snickerers have always been among us. Even the Greek philosopher Lucretius, who credited men with weaving the first cloth (“[F]or the male sex in general far excels the other [women] in skill and is much more ingenious”), conceded that when “rugged countrymen” upbraided clothmakers for such domestic tasks, the clothiers capitulated and were “glad to give it over into the hands of the women.” After the Industrial Revolution, when European textile mills attracted both male and female workers, the exclusively male knitting guilds declined, and hand knitting endured as essentially a female household occupation, a tradition exported to America. Though it is generally accepted that knitting is not gender specific, with one sex no more qualified to perform it than the other, an 1888 American needlework writer traced sex differentiation to competition in the Garden of Eden: “Whether he was slower in the work, or made a bad job of it, we are not told; but for some reason he dropped out, and woman is now the admitted queen of needle-work.” Many “queens,” secure on their domestic thrones, jealously guarded the gates to their needlework sanctuary. One knitting manual editor wrote haughtily, “While it is true that there are men, notably in England, who knit, it is really a woman’s job.” I thought I’d better look into that!
 
To broaden and contemporize my research in American knitting, I interviewed dozens of knitting friends and knitters at knitting workshops, conventions and seminars, inserted author’s queries in knitting publications and asked for help from Pat Trexler, who generously published my questionnaire in “Pat’s Pointers,” her weekly column begun in the mid-sixties and nationally syndicated in over eighty newspapers. The response, particularly from Pat’s devoted followers, was so monumental that our mailman, exhausted from shoveling fat batches through the slot, rapped on the door and inquired, “Okay, I give up. What are you doing?” What I was doing was not very scientific. I was not quantifying responses by entering data in columns and categorizing replies to each question. Into what column would you put instructions for “Granny’s bedspread,” a “Cape Cod coverlet,” a “potato scubber” knit from nylon netting (it really does the job on Idahos!), a scrapbook of forty years of knitting projects, family photographs, a pair of comfy bedroom slippers, several pairs of hardy mittens, an audio tape beginning &ldquo…