Did you know that if you lived just a couple of hundred years ago – and any time before that – and you’re a woman, you would have spent much of your life making fabric? Yes, we as women still do much of the cooking and cleaning in our families, though the men in our lives and households do much, much more than they did prior to the 1970’s. We still cook, and some of us even enjoy it.
Many of us still enjoy making fabrics by knitting, crocheting, or weaving. We might enjoy sewing, making quits, or even making our own clothes. But up until recently in human history, the making of fabric was no hobby. It was work and important work at that. And if you were a woman, it would have been one of your primary occupations.
As I’ve researched the history of knitting for my next book in The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, I’ve discovered these truths, and it’s changed the way I look at fabrics. In our current culture, we barely give a thought to the fabrics we wear, use to bathe, sit upon, or trod upon. Yet someone made these fabrics. The raw materials came from some place, somewhere in the world. Someone – likely other women, working in not great conditions and for low wages – worked at the factories that turn out the cotton, synthetic, wool, silk, and all other fabrics we likely take for granted.
In my novels, you’ll see characters knitting for solace, for quiet time, and as an aid to spirituality. Yet in real life, women also knitted to survive the cold, to keep themselves and their families warm. I hope to convey this reality in my next novels, and I hope you’ll take a moment to appreciate all those mechanized and digitized looms, yarn spinners, and dying machines that means we as 21st century women get to simply knit…for fun.
Interested in the history of fabric making? Here are my go-to recommendations:
The History of Fabrics and Cloth Making
Women’s Work, The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1995).
Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World by Victoria Finlay (Pegasus Books, 2022).
The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel (Basic Books, 2020).
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (Vintage Books, 2022).
Happy Reading! Cindy
Follow this blog for impending news of a new novel in The Prayer Shawl Chronicles!
Cynthia Coe is the author of The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, a collection of interrelated short stories about knitters and those they meet through knitting and sharing prayer shawls.
Be sure to check out my newly published A Prayer Shawl Handbook: Inspiration and Resources for Your Prayer Shawl Ministry, now available in paperback and e-book editions and included in Kindle Unlimited.
Sycamore Cove Knitting 