Lace and Labor

Fear of automation, trad wives, and America First movements. None of this is new: it all happened in the history of knitting and crochet. For images, links and more, go toarticlesofinterest.substack.com https://articlesofinterest.substack.com Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I often get asked, like, oh, so you do it to save money? Like, how much money do you save? I'm not doing it to save money. Actually, it costs me money. Like, this is not an economic proposition. That's a reoccurring.

• 0:10Avery Trufelman?

  Have they not seen how cheap clothes are? They're so cheap.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Clothes are so cheap. Yarn is so expensive.

• 0:16Avery Trufelman?

  This is knitter and audio producer Elizabeth Comma.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  I knit a lot. Since I work in audio, I like to listen and do something with my hands.

• 0:23Avery Trufelman?

  Did you knit for a shirt?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:25Avery Trufelman?

  That was really good.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it became a bit of a compulsion.

• 0:29Avery Trufelman?

  OK, I have a confession to make. I'd been asked to make episodes about knitting and crafts before. And I was like, no, that's a hobby. I thought it was dorky. I thought it was twee. I was like, what is there to say about it? Do you know what I mean? Do you face this?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  I do. I feel like I'm often having to be like, no, like, this is interesting and this is cool. And like, here's why.

• 0:54Avery Trufelman?

  Because the story of knitting is, in a way, the story of my own demise. It is the story of labor and automation.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  You know, you look at a cozy hand-dited sweater and you probably just think, hmm, like, peaceful.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. Very relaxing.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  But that exact craft literally went to war with early automation.

• 1:14Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:15Avery Trufelman?

  I fear that what happened to knitting is happening to podcasting and to so many creative fields. Like, why would a company hire me and the hours of books that I need to read and the drafts that need to be written and rewritten and my angst and my pesky needs to eat and socialize and take bathroom breaks when an AI can generate this podcast about the history of knitting in five minutes?

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's such a fascinating topic because, I mean, the tension between preserving human labor and adopting new technology is something we are obviously still wrestling with today.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, definitely.

• 1:50Avery Trufelman?

  Elizabeth and I see it playing out all around us. Our industry is falling apart. And we have trained very hard for many years at this skill set, which is writing and making podcasts, a skill set which, at one point, was supposed to earn us an honest, steady living, just like knitting did.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Often in the winter, when there wasn't anything to do, you would knit socks for sale as a way to kind of be like, oh, we don't have any food, so how are we going to feed our family? We're going to knit. This is something women did and men did, actually. And often, they would be knitting while they'd be doing other tasks. People would knit on their way to the market, knit on their way back from the market. They'd, you know, carry things on their back. And there's an idea that on your way to the market, you should be able to knit one pair of socks on the way there and back. Um, if you were.

• 2:33Avery Trufelman?

  Is that possible?

• 2:34Speaker 00

  If you're very good, yes.

• 2:35Avery Trufelman?

  Knitting was how you made practical clothes, either to wear or to sell. And this is why, when the first knitting machine was developed in England back in 1589, it was actively suppressed.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  When William Lee, Reverend William Lee, presented the patent to Elizabeth the First, he's like, I can't give you the patent for this because too many of our poor people in England rely on knitting to survive. This machine will hurt them.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Were they just terrified of the tech? I mean, I'm picturing modern lawmakers trying to ban AI to protect white collar jobs.

• 3:04Avery Trufelman?

  Take it from the robo-podcasters.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Was this a case of, like, royal empathy for the workers?

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Not exactly empathy, no. It was more like self-preservation. They were terrified that thousands of starving, out-of-work hand knitters would start a peasant uprising.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  But the machines are made, and once it started, it can never stop.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  So you can delay the machine, but you obviously can't stop it?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Right. Hand knitters were constantly inventing new styles of knitting. They were inventing ferile. They were inventing these things that the machines couldn't do so they could still be relevant. And then the machines would hurry up and catch up. Um, and then it became men's work again because only men could own knitting machines. Only men were allowed to own things. They've invested a lot of money into it.

• 3:43Avery Trufelman?

  But then came new, improved knitting machinery that mechanized a lot of the expertise of the experienced knit machine operators.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  And all of these people who knit are suddenly losing their jobs.

• 3:56Avery Trufelman?

  From 1800 to 1811, weekly pay for a weaver and lancetshire dropped from 25 shillings to 14 shillings.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  And these people, predominantly men, would go around and they'd destroy all of, like, the new, improved knitting machines that didn't need them.

• 4:12Avery Trufelman?

  They called themselves Luddites, after Ned Lud, supposedly a British knitting apprentice who was said to have rebelled against his boss by destroying a knitting machine with a hammer. But this was probably just a legend.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Now, Lud is a fake guy. It was just a name that they made up.

• 4:27Avery Trufelman?

  And the legend morphed to where they started calling this guy General Lud or King Lud.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  And they'd be like, we're doing this for King Lud, in the name of King Lud. But that's where the term Luddite comes from.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  And that brings us to the original Luddites.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Right, because we throw that term around today for, you know, anyone who refuses to use a smartphone or whatever.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  It wasn't that they were anti-technology for technology's sake. They were anti-technology at the cost of human welfare. The reality was that they were just trying to save their jobs.

• 4:55Avery Trufelman?

  Ain't that right, bots?

• 4:56Speaker 03

  It was a calculated fight for their livelihoods and really their identity.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  So, you know, to a listener, the next time you feel overwhelmed by the creeping automation of modern life today, like, think of those knitters.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were staring down the exact same existential dread centuries ago.

• 5:12Avery Trufelman?

  Well said, robo-pod. And you know the rest of the story. The knitting machine was perfected, and now you can buy a knit sweater for, like, 20 bucks. And thus, knitting met the fate of all activities that lose their economic necessity. When people no longer had to ride horses to get around, horseback riding became a hobby. When people no longer had to subsistence farm, gardening became a hobby. So too did knitting become a craft. And as any knitter will tell you, it is a money-losing proposition.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  The thing about making someone a sweater, the thing about making anyone a knitted garment, is it's hours of your time. It's so much attention. It's so much labor. It's so much care. It's also so much money. Like, yarn is expensive.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Which raises a really provocative question, I think. Did the Luddite resistance actually fail?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  I mean, the machines clearly won the commercial clothing war.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  True.

• 6:01Avery Trufelman?

  Hmm, well, not quite, robot. There is one tiny thing that the machines have not mastered, and it's knitting's strange cousin, crochet.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  There is no way to create crochet by machine.

• 6:15Avery Trufelman?

  For the uninitiated, what's the difference?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Knitting has two needles. With crochet, it is basically one singular hook, and crochet, by its very nature, has to be made by hand.

• 6:26Avery Trufelman?

  Crochet has survived automation. And that's not necessarily a purely good thing because no matter who makes a garment, we all are used to paying nothing for it.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  If you buy hand crochet, you can buy that at any fast fashion.

• 6:39Avery Trufelman?

  Really?

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Yes. I mean, I have photos from Target where you can see the crochet, and it was, what, $10 for this crocheted bandana? And it's like, that's not ethical in any way.

• 6:50Avery Trufelman?

  Now, probably the more ethical way of production is to use a knitting machine, one that imitates crochet.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Knitting machines can now imitate crochet. The issue is, most people don't have the textile literacy to be able to look at a garment and be able to tell, oh, is this actually crochet?

• 7:04Avery Trufelman?

  Here's a little tip to figure out if something is crochet. Just turn your garment inside out.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Crochet doesn't really have one side that looks different from the other.

• 7:12Avery Trufelman?

  With knitting, it's very obvious which side is the wrong side. It's clear when something's inside out. Not so with crochet.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  So if you look at a garment and you're like, is this imitation crochet? Try looking on the inside. Try seeing if it looks different.

• 7:25Avery Trufelman?

  So if you look at it inside out and it looks the same, that's real crochet? And don't buy it?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Don't buy it unless you're paying an exorbitant amount of money. The person's not being paid equitably.

• 7:35Avery Trufelman?

  Crochet, this humble art, is the last bastion of humanity, for better or for worse, because it's not really valued that way, certainly not in the United States, in part because of the way crochet became popular, which is essentially as a fake.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  It was, in many ways, imitation lace. I mean, it was kind of a knockoff.

• 7:58Avery Trufelman?

  But is it fair to say that we would not have crochet without lace?

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Yes, that's fair. Crochet exists before lace, but crochet wouldn't have been popularized or known the way it's known without lace.

• 8:08Avery Trufelman?

  Lace, the power of labor, and what happens when machines take your job? After the break.

• 8:19Avery Trufelman?

  Hey there, it's Robyn from PRX. If you're a longtime listener of Radiotopia, you may know that we had a podcast that ran from 2016 to 2020, discussing every episode of the show The West Wing. Well, I'm excited to tell you

• 8:31Speaker 04

  The West Wing Weekly is back. Joshua Molina, who starred on The West Wing as Will Bailey, and Rishikesh Hirway, creator and host of Song Exploder, have reunited to discuss the hit Netflix political thriller, The Diplomat. Just as they did in their original run, they're discussing each episode of the series in sequence, joined by special guests from the show and from the real world of diplomacy. Rishi and Josh will be wrapping up the first season with a special live taping at Union Chapel in London on November 14th. Subscribe now to The West Wing Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

• 9:05Avery Trufelman?

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• 9:50Avery Trufelman?

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• 10:34Avery Trufelman?

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• 11:13Speaker 05

  I would like you all to repeat after me. I forgive myself for all the mistakes I'm going to make.

• 11:21Avery Trufelman?

  I forgive myself for all the mistakes I'm going to make. But this was not group therapy. It was a lace-making class, led by esteemed lacemaker and founder of the Brooklyn Lace Guild, Elena Kenege-Lauks.

• 11:35Avery Trufelman?

  That is the sound of a bag full of bobins, essentially little wooden spools that we wound a thread around.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  Press down with your thumb, wind around.

• 11:45Avery Trufelman?

  There are a number of ways to make lace, but in this form, with the bobins wound around the threads, the threads are pinned to a pillow. And then, with these pillows on our laps, we proceeded to turn these threads into lace, or to try to.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  Cross, twist, cross. And that's it. That's how you make cross stitch.

• 12:04Avery Trufelman?

  It kind of reminded me of making a friendship bracelet when I was a kid, but like, maddeningly complex. Oh, I already messed it up. Elena. I'm so sorry. Yeah, of course. I still don't understand.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  Twist, cross, twist.

• 12:17Avery Trufelman?

  This is gonna drive me crazy. It was so hard to keep track of all the bobins jostling around the pillow on my lap. I don't even remember where I am now. I looked and I had an odd number of bobins on one side, and I was like, what am I doing? And I was only working with six bobins. Real lacemakers do it with like, a thousand. I'm undoing everything I've done. I can't figure it out. I was working intensely for four hours, and I barely cracked one tiny sliver of a rudimentary pattern.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  It's so hard. I'm a textile person. I thought it would be easy, and I was so humbled. You realize how mind-blowingly talented lacemakers were, historic and today.

• 12:54Avery Trufelman?

  Lace is so hard to make. And that was the whole point of lace. That's what made it expensive.

• 13:01Speaker 06

  They take immense skill, time, and expensive materials to make.

• 13:06Avery Trufelman?

  This is Emma Cormack, associate curator at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan.

• 13:11Speaker 06

  I am a textile and fashion historian who, for the last several years, has been totally enmeshed in lace.

• 13:17Avery Trufelman?

  Lace and forms of it exist all around the world.

• 13:20Speaker 06

  Literally all around the world.

• 13:23Avery Trufelman?

  Like where?

• 13:23Speaker 06

  Sri Lanka, for example, in Latin America, in China, in Nigeria, too. Truly all over.

• 13:30Avery Trufelman?

  But in all of its forms and methods, lace was valued and prized, because no matter what, it just took so much work to make.

• 13:38Speaker 06

  It's a highly valued textile, not only for its beauty, but for the work and expertise that goes into it. It's crazy.

• 13:47Avery Trufelman?

  So were they valued as the makers themselves?

• 13:50Speaker 06

  No, of course not. Lace was typically made by women, historically, and they were poorly paid. Girls would start from very young ages, like, five, six, seven, eight. And especially for poorer families that couldn't afford to support five, six children, you send your kid off to learn to be a lacemaker. They were working often in rough conditions, like, in basements. And it's dark, and they can't see. They worked for intermediaries who would pass on their assignments and then pay them extremely low wages. So of course, most, if not all, of these young women and girls couldn't afford to wear the things that they made. Now, every time I look at a painting of a king or a queen, and I see that lace, you can think about the people who made it, who, we have no idea who they are,

• 14:35Speaker 06

  but that was their entire life. Once you look at the thing and you see the handwork that goes into it, you can't forget the hands themselves.

• 14:43Avery Trufelman?

  The labor made the lace valuable, even though the labor itself was not valued. Which is why, all around the world, people looked for shortcuts for making lace.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  It's really gorgeous, really intricate work. It's actually done by my great-grandmother or my great-great-grandmother.

• 14:59Avery Trufelman?

  Elizabeth Kama inherited a bunch of lace-looking things. Is this lace?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  So this is, yeah, this is crochet.

• 15:06Avery Trufelman?

  Crochet is much quicker than arduous bobbin lace-making.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  Crochet lace is not that brutal, comparatively, which is why people started picking it up.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  When we look at crochet history, we can kind of divine two separate developments.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Emily Amaro is a professional crocheter and textile historian, and she's written a lot about the history of crochet.

• 15:29Speaker 05

  The colder, poorer regions of Northern Europe and the prosperous regions of Western Europe both developed different versions of crochet. So up in the North, the priority is warmth and practicality. We get a closed-work system, which is more of like, something to keep warm. Whereas in, like, Western Europe, we get kind of like a lace-making aesthetic tradition, which has a lot more openness to it.

• 15:58Avery Trufelman?

  The lacy kind of crochet was not hardy and practical. It was considered purely aesthetic, which, again, is only one kind of crochet. But nevertheless, in Western Europe, this became crochet's reputation.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Crochet is considered not even useful. Decorative. Decorative, very decorative.

• 16:15Avery Trufelman?

  Especially as knitting was replaced by machinery, crochet became the perfect hobby for wealthy women who suddenly found themselves with nothing to do.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Around the Victorian era, early 1700s, we start to get this emerging middle class, where the women don't necessarily have to do domestic labor. They have lower-class women who are doing the domestic labor. Suddenly, these women don't have anything to do. People who would have formerly had to spend their days doing specific types of labor no longer had to. And so, what do you do when your work is gone? One of the best points that I heard from sources was from Isabella Rosner.

• 16:54Avery Trufelman?

  Rosner is the curator of textiles at the Royal School of Needlework and host of the So What podcast.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  There was the general thought that the devil lurks in areas of idleness and boredom. And I think that there was a real connection in the 19th century between productivity and piety.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  And morality, if you were free of things to do, if you were just sitting around and doing not much to further yourself or humanity, it was easy for you to fall into temptation and to not be very moral or pious. There's actually a manners guide for women called The Frugal Housewife that was released in 1829 that says, young ladies should be taught that usefulness is happiness and that all other things are incidental. It's this idea of being productive. Victorians loved productivity and they loved being industrious.

• 17:45Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, women weren't allowed to like be a doctor or own a business, but they could stay at home and crochet pretty things.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Crochet was this thing that upper class women did, and it also gave use to crochet because crochet was often considered useless and not that important. So it's about being a good wife, mother, and also having time to make all of these additional handicrafts and gifts for your husband and your children and your friends.

• 18:10Avery Trufelman?

  Even the Queen of England was a proponent of this.

• 18:13Speaker 05

  There is one single photo of Queen Victoria in the act of crocheting.

• 18:19Avery Trufelman?

  Again, Emily Amaro, the crochet historian.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  Queen Victoria and Prince Albert wanted to display a sort of normal life. They wanted to be relatable.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Queen Victoria also, she had the publication that came out. She'd be like, oh, I'm knitting this or I'm crocheting this. And the idea is that her constituents, if you want to call them that, would be able to make the project with her.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  So you felt closer to her by engaging with this. So it's kind of like when you do a celebrity book club and you're like, oh, I'm just like Dua Lipa. I'm also reading George Saunders right now. But I think also there's this sort of building of a national woman's identity that's happening at this time. This idea of like the ideal British woman, her hands are busy, she's making something to beautify her home.

• 19:05Avery Trufelman?

  But it wasn't like a direct dictum from the Queen that associated knitting and crochet with piety and good wifeliness. A lot of this mentality actually came from lower class women.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  That whole claim that a good woman and a good wife is making a beautiful home. She's making doilies and she's industrious because we don't want a lazy woman. That was sort of a thing that was created particularly by women who wanted to profit off of rich women.

• 19:30Speaker 05

  It's an elite craft, but it's facilitated by this lower middle class women.

• 19:35Avery Trufelman?

  There was a whole new genre of books about how great and valuable knitting and crochet were.

• 19:42Speaker 05

  There was a real boom, and that was fueled by the publication of loads of books.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Eleanor Gilchrist is a crochet historian working on her PhD.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  And they were nearly all women who wrote those books. But for the most part, they were lower middle class women who are brilliant because in 1840, the crochet pattern as we know it today did not exist. By 1850, it did.

• 20:10Avery Trufelman?

  Crochet used to not have any instructions, used to be shown a drawing and be like, figure it out. But these books broke down the craft and made it available to so many more wealthy women and kind of defined how they should live and work.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  There was a bit of a change in the publishing industry so that by about late 1830s, it was suddenly possible for anybody, man or woman, to make money by authoring.

• 20:36Avery Trufelman?

  And a lot of the lower class women who wrote books about knitting and crochet and needlework ran yarn and craft supply shops with their husbands and they would sell these books there.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  And they'd be like, well, you can buy the yarn too. Often these were lower middle class women who would kind of put on airs of being upper class.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  In order to attract the right sort of female affluent clientele, the women who are running these shops have to project an image of, well, of course, I'm doing it for the love of it because my customers demand that I provide them with these instructions.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  The books were often framed as like, oh, like all of my like lovely patrons have asked me to write this book. It's not for profit. It's because I've been begged to share my skills.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  It's not because I need to earn my living, which of course is because they need to earn their living.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  They had to explain why these upper class women should care about knitting and crochet. So they were the ones being like, a good woman stays at home and makes her home beautiful. Meanwhile, they're not at home. They're working. They're writing their pattern books.

• 21:32Avery Trufelman?

  No, it reminds me of Martha Stewart, you know?

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. It reminds me of like Ballerina Farm.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  I don't know if you're familiar with the influencer Ballerina Farm, but these women talk a lot about gender norms and being, you know, a stay at home wife. But they're also working behind the scenes as influencers and they're pretending that they're doing it for the love of the game. But the reality is they're, they're doing it for money. I would say that modern people doing that are quite disingenuous. I think the women who were selling books in the 1840s, that was their reality, slightly disguising the fact they were working hard. I don't think anyone was fooled.

• 22:07Avery Trufelman?

  Similarly, in the vein of not fooling anybody, a lot of these pattern books advertised that crochet could be a fun way to make a little money, which was just patently false.

• 22:17Speaker 05

  You were not encouraged to factor in the cost of the supplies, the cost of your labor, the number of hours that you spent, none of that calculation that we normally do when we're pricing out how much our work is worth.

• 22:31Avery Trufelman?

  Emily Amaro tried to recreate one of the shawls from an old pattern book called Needlework for Ladies of Pleasure and Profit.

• 22:37Speaker 05

  It took me from start to finish sourcing the materials, wet blocking it, making it all of the necessary steps altogether. It took around like 40 hours.

• 22:48Avery Trufelman?

  None of these crafts were going to amount to an actual business.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  The book says, don't charge more than the standard shop price for this object. And when you think about like the differences between like the manufacturer of a petticoat that you would just buy at a shop and one that's hand crocheted, those are not the same. You were certainly not buying the book in the endeavor of making a profit off of your crochet. So the question is, who is this rhetoric being sold to actually?

• 23:19Avery Trufelman?

  Eventually, this rhetoric was taken up by the rich ladies who crocheted and delivered to people who really needed it. When a massive catastrophe gave crochet extreme gravity and an entirely new meaning.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  It associates crochet with the lower class.

• 23:36Avery Trufelman?

  The lacy kind of crochet.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Which it had never been associated with before.

• 23:40Avery Trufelman?

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• 24:19Avery Trufelman?

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• 24:46Avery Trufelman?

  So knitting and crochet have traditions all over the world. And you might be like, what the hell? Why are you focusing so much on English history? We're not Anglophiles here. Why are we focusing on UK knitting history?

• 24:58Speaker 00

  So the UK has been a huge center for wool in the world. Like their environment is just really well suited for sheep. And the reason why a lot of knitting and crochet history ends up being centered there is because so much of their economy is based on that. It's how they got their money and that money is how they colonized the world.

• 25:19Avery Trufelman?

  Including notably, Ireland.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  The potato famine happens in Ireland.

• 25:25Avery Trufelman?

  When was the potato famine?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  1845 to 1852. It was a long time.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  The famine is really difficult to overstate its importance in Irish history.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  I talked to Molly Claire Gillette.

• 25:37Speaker 05

  I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Galway in the Centre for Irish Studies. There is tons of debate about these numbers, but a conservative estimate would be that about 1 million people died and another 2 million. Emigrated in the decade following the famine, which would be really catastrophic numbers in any country. But in a country the size of Ireland is incredibly catastrophic.

• 26:01Avery Trufelman?

  And as Sinead O'Connor sings it, "There wasn't really a famine. England was intentionally starving people off their land to make room for those beloved sheep to graze. And that's why, in Ireland, it's not always called the potato famine.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  We would call it the Great Hunger, yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  I spoke to Myra Trainor. She is a lace historian and instructor.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  Irish crochet lace. Traditionally, it was made with very fine thread.

• 26:26Avery Trufelman?

  Irish crochet spread around the country right at the time of the Great Hunger, in part because of the efforts of a bunch of charitable, upper-class ladies.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  These philanthropist ladies, basically, in Ireland are kind of like, "These people are dying. They're starving because of the potato famine. What can we do?" And there's one woman in particular. I believe her name is Mrs. Roberts.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Mrs. Roberts. She was down in Kildare, sort of the middle of Ireland.

• 26:51Avery Trufelman?

  Mrs. Martha Roberts was the wife of a rector, but she really was always just called Mrs. Roberts.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  She knows that people can do crochet. Like, she knows how to do crochet. She's an upper-class lady. And she has all these beautiful pieces of true lace, like bobbin lace.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  And she just took pieces of Venetian lace, which at that time would have been antique. And she and her handmaid or whatever took it apart.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  And she's like, "Well, what if I try to crochet this? Like, make it cheaper?" And she does, and it looks really bad. She says it looks like spiders.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  The lace that she had started with looked like crabs and spiders, apparently.

• 27:23Avery Trufelman?

  Molly Claire Gillette again.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  And I've actually seen examples of early lace, and they totally look like crabs and spiders crawling all around in cream and white. And she gives credit to the local women in her area for taking this ugly lace and refining it so that it's more saleable and so that it fits the styles of the day.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  And they take the lace and they start crocheting it. And they make this really beautiful imitation lace. It's much easier for them because the way that Irish crochet lace works is you make individual little motifs.

• 27:54Avery Trufelman?

  Someone might crochet a flower. Someone might crochet a leaf or a shamrock. And then they'd pass all those shapes to someone else who would crochet the netting to connect them all.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  It accommodated many different levels of skill. So you could have, for example, a single family where the youngest daughter, who's just learning, makes some simple motifs. The slightly older daughter, who's been practicing for a while, makes the slightly more complicated motifs. And then the older sister and the mom make the really complicated motifs. And then they send those to a dealer to construct into the finished piece.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  In certain families, too, would be known for their motifs. Like, they would be like the Rose, I don't know, McLaughfes or like the Leaf McLean's or whatever. And they would be known for making those motifs. And they might sell those motifs to someone whose job it is to, like, put it together.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  I was telling you about Mrs. Roberts. And she sent teachers up round to different parts of Ireland.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  It was these kind of people in positions of colonial power, mostly women, associated with the English Church, teaching these people who were starving, more often than not, women, how to make crochet lace and how to sell it.

• 28:57Speaker 05

  You'll often hear people say that, you know, "In those days, you were lucky to have a lacemaker in your family." So it seems to have been effective as a relief measure during the famine.

• 29:08Avery Trufelman?

  And the meaning of crochet and crochet lace changes.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  This transition from the leisure activity to something practiced by working-class women.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  It became like sort of a, "Ooh, like, I'm such a good person. I'm buying Irish crochet. I'm supporting these poor people." From the English people who were buying it because they were like, "Oh, like, poor Ireland and this famine that we created."

• 29:27Speaker 05

  So, of course, this is an elite luxury product that's sold primarily to consumers in Britain, in London, for elite consumption, by aristocrats, even members of the royal family.

• 29:39Avery Trufelman?

  And so it was expensive to buy.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  It was expensive. I mean, if you wanted to buy a beautiful crocheted object, you were putting down a pretty penny.

• 29:45Avery Trufelman?

  And it became a bit of a flex to buy this handmade crochet lace, which was once a knockoff of bobbin lace. But as lace started to be successfully made by machine, crochet became more valuable and more authentic.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  In the 19th century, we have the development of machines that can really, really effectively mimic all sorts of different laces. But crochet lace cannot really be mimicked by machine. And so, all of a sudden, a woman could show her sophistication by showing that she was able to identify handmade lace. And lace connoisseurship became a really important way of showing good taste and showing sophistication and class.

• 30:28Avery Trufelman?

  And yet, still, as with bobbin lace, the actual makers were not compensated fairly.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  The middlemen made the money.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  The middlemen were able to educate their families. But the people that were actually making the lace, it's like nowadays, like, the people who make the stuff in the developing world, they don't get much.

• 30:46Avery Trufelman?

  Myra tells the story of one lacemaker who was crocheting furiously, trying to get Christmas orders into her local middleman.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  They would bring it into the man in the shop, and he would give them whatever they needed. And she worked and worked and worked to have enough money for the goose on Christmas Day. And he tottered up all the lace that she'd given in and then what she owed for different things. And then he said, "Yeah, that's enough to pay your bill, but it's not enough to buy a goose now." And they were so disappointed that they weren't going to get anything for all their work. It was just paying back bills.

• 31:19Avery Trufelman?

  It was barely a living, but in some cases, it was something.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  The level of poverty and hunger and need in Ireland at this time is brutal. And so they're making this imitation lace. And it is life-saving. And that money kept them alive. It also helped them get to America, which is fascinating.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  We also know that crochet enabled women to emigrate. So, in fact, Irish crochet, and by this I mean the technique of creating a whole bunch of little motifs and joining them with chain stitches, starts to be made in places like New York City, in Lebanon, in Japan, in India, in the Philippines, largely in places where Irish immigrants have gone to live or where Irish nuns have gone to teach.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  When they're coming to America, we have Catholic, Irish, and Italian immigrants coming. And there's a bunch of anti-immigration sentiment. That's when we get the Colonial Revival Movement.

• 32:12Avery Trufelman?

  Colonial Revival, sort of like MAGA-y? Like, bring back colonial values?

• 32:17Speaker 00

  It is very MAGA-y in the sense that it is like, things were better back then. Things were better in, like, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant colonial times. But they would often talk about, like, "Oh, the colonial women were so industrious. Like, they were so great."

• 32:31Avery Trufelman?

  And this is why the anti-immigration movement of the time prized the colonial art of knitting.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Knitting in America is so highly tied into this kind of, "We can do it. We can figure it out."

• 32:46Avery Trufelman?

  It's sort of bootstrapping.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Bootstrapping, the idea that, like, you are industrious.

• 32:50Avery Trufelman?

  In the American colonies, knitting had been a form of resistance against the British.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  The first regulation was the 1699 prohibition of the American colonies from selling or exporting certain textiles from all colonies. But that ties into why knitting was so patriotic because while people were doing, like, the Boston Tea Party, they were also knitting for America because otherwise they would have to buy from the British.

• 33:11Avery Trufelman?

  Domestic knitting was a point of pride in the United States.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  You don't have to rely on your colonial overlord of England. Like, what does it mean to be American? Well, it means to be industrious. It means to rely on yourself and to be able to figure it out.

• 33:25Avery Trufelman?

  But with all their nostalgic hindsight, the Colonial Revival Movement didn't quite get it right. They sort of mixed this actual American history of knitting with the values of the Victorian era, when wealthy women were doing all this crafting. They imagined that all this patriotic knitting would have been done by upper-class ladies.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Which is where we get this myth of Martha Washington knitting, that she was knitting socks at Valley Forge for the soldiers. There's paintings of it. People talk about it. And for a long time, it was kind of accepted historical fact.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  It speaks to her patriotism and her dedication as a woman to her husband and to her country.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  This is Susan Strawn. She's a knitting historian who specializes in American knitting history.

• 34:05Speaker 05

  When I called the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, they said she would not have been a knitter.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  It is not true.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  Knitting was considered totally utilitarian.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  She was too much of an upper-crust lady to ever knit.

• 34:19Avery Trufelman?

  It wouldn't be until way after Martha Washington's time that knitting would be considered a noble, domestic activity for pious ladies to do at home.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  She did have enslaved people who knit, and there were enslaved people who were forced to knit.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  And then they told me about Lane Peter.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Lane Peter was the dowered enslaved man. So he came through Martha Washington's family.

• 34:37Speaker 05

  And he knit the socks for them. And in the Washington paper...

• 34:42Avery Trufelman?

  At the Library of Congress, they actually refer to lame Peter as the knitter.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  There's other documents of enslaved people who were forced to knit. It was a thing that was often done. But it's interesting because they start talking about Martha Washington knitting in this colonial revival movement because there was a huge influx of predominantly Catholic immigrants, including the Irish immigrants.

• 35:03Avery Trufelman?

  Who crocheted, which was now, especially compared to knitting, the poor and lowly art. And crochet never seems to have quite shaken that reputation.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  I mean, the MoMA did an exhibition on knitwear and weaving as like art. And they refer to crochet as a low status domestic handicraft in one wall text. And this is like the MoMA's take on this.

• 35:25Avery Trufelman?

  That's reclaiming it.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  As art, and it's still denigrating it. And so I feel like for me, this is beautiful. This is art. This is worthy of study. This is worthy of attention.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  People think knitting is so fun. It's so nice and easy. No, it's very hard work.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Maggie Koluch is a hand knitter, a hand crocheter. I went to go talk to her in her studio.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  My real name, it's Magdalena Koluch, but for my business, it's Maggie Koluch.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  She works with a lot of high fashion brands when they need a garment that's crocheted or knitted.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  I work the most with Ulla Johnson, sometimes for Gabriela Hurst, too, and so many additional companies.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  They'll sketch it up and then they won't have the time to figure out how to make it work. She'll kind of try to reverse engineer how to actually make it. And a machine for knitted garments for crochet, they obviously have to get someone to do it by hand.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  Usually it's like two hours for regular sweater. Make calculation, correct calculation for everything.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Knitting and crochet is so much math.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  And so she's doing a ton of math, ton of problem solving.

• 36:30Avery Trufelman?

  For example, Maggie was handed a sketch for a design by Gabriela Hurst where a silk dress would be trimmed with big stones.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  The stones were very heavy and silk is slippery. And everybody say, no, this is impossible.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  Have you seen it?

• 36:45Avery Trufelman?

  No.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  I'll show you.

• 36:46Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, my God.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  Isn't it beautiful?

• 36:49Avery Trufelman?

  So it's. So it's a dress with gemstones sort of stitched. Into it?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Crocheted into it.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  I figure out if everyone is different shape. So I have to do everyone like one little project.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  It's funny, she kind of reverse engineered Irish crochet lace methodology, which is creating those little motifs and then creating a netting around it.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  So many people say this is impossible. So after a project is finished, I feel so good. I love a challenge like this. That's why sometimes hand knitters, it's angrier because machine make faster. So people sometimes think, why it's so expensive what you create? Because I sit and work for the hours. So it's price for whole week, my job.

• 37:37Avery Trufelman?

  So what lessons can, I shouldn't say we, but what lessons did you take away? For anyone who's worried about their job getting lost to new technology, what can we learn from the knitters who this has happened to?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Trying to think how I want to phrase this. Not to be bleak, but like you're never gonna out evolve technology, but you can always push technology. So like when the knitting machines were invented and people invented new ways to knit that the machines couldn't do yet.

• 38:05Avery Trufelman?

  But then the machine did it.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  The machine did do it, but in that time that they were doing intricate color work or lace, they were finding other ways. In the time that the famine was happening in Ireland with the crochet, they were getting themselves to America where they could get a job, where they're not under colonial rule. There's a way of kind of harm reduction, I think. It's not beautiful. It's not, oh, you can save yourself, but it's if you can figure out how to push the technology until you can get out of a situation where you're going to be overtaken by it. That's what you can do, and that's what they did. But also, I think the other thing that comes is even if mechanization happens, even if your job becomes obsolete, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. Knitting and crochet still have value. Well, knitting specifically still has value, even though there is machine knit.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  You know, I still do it, even though there's no economic gain from it. There's sort of a psychic disconnection currently between our needs versus what we can actually do about them. In the past, like, oh, you're hungry. You can knit a sock and sell it for money. Now, like, you're hungry, knitting a sock is not gonna sell it for money. But also, like, it's difficult to get a job. The economy is in the toilet. It's hard, like, something terrible happens. You can't really, like, you can vote, you can try to show up, but it can feel like the world is out of our control in a lot of ways. And I feel like knitting, at least for me, was a sense of creating control for myself. It's a sense of feeling productive even when I'm not. In the same way that I think those Victorian women, they had no control. They couldn't work, they couldn't own anything. And what could they do? They could crochet about it.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  And I think that's why we make things as humans all the time is, you know, the world is out of our control, the weather is out of control, nothing. We only really have what we can make with our two hands. And part of making with our two hands is crochet and knitting.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, because in a world completely dominated by machines and algorithms, taking the time to make something by hand isn't just a hobby.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  No, it really isn't.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  It's a tiny, quiet protest. And definitely something to think about the next time you see someone clicking away with a pair of needles.

• 40:03Avery Trufelman?

  Damn it, that's pretty good. Thank you so much for letting me dive down the rabbit hole with you, Elizabeth Calma. And thank you also to knitting experts Sandy Black and Esther Rutter. Sorry, this ended up being more of a crochet story. You were great. And thank you as well to Catherine Calma. Music, as ever, by Lelitone, Ray Royal, and Sasami. And Elizabeth wrote up a beautiful companion piece to this article, which you can find with visuals at articlesofinterest.substack.com.