Needlework

[mrissa]

Oh, people. People, people, people, I am so tired of dislike of needlework being used as a stand-in for making a young female character actually interesting. I see this mostly in middle-grade fantasies, mostly. Not so much in YA, although I don’t know if that’s because I’m not seeing as much secondary world YA as I’d like. It sometimes goes

Comments

[sartorias]

Yes and amen.

[txanne]

SPINNING. SPINNING SPINNING SPINNING FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE, SPINNING.

You may have noticed that I've taken up the drop spindle. In six weeks of obsession, I've not yet made enough yarn for a child's sweater. Spinning finely and consistently enough for actual clothing is something that takes a lifetime of practice, by which I mean modern Andean production spinners start when they're about 3. Girls who don't spin aren't special, they're just selfish.

[mrissa]

And I mean--you could have a girl character who said, "Why can't $brother or $malecousin and I switch chores?" But "I would rather muck out stalls than spin" is a) very different and b) does assume that spinning, like all "girl work," takes no skill and can be substituted in at will. And I call bullshit.

[rikibeth]

Caddie Woodlawn preferred doing outdoor boys' chores with her brothers, and did... until a cousin came to visit, and as cousin Clara was trying to coax Caddie into learning a quilting pattern, and the boys decided, well, if CADDIE is going to quilt, we should too! and startled poor Clara something fierce.

And of course Laura helped her Pa with the haying -- but she also earned money for the family by sewing, and because she loathed making buttonholes, she did them VERY VERY FAST.

Note that these are both lightly fictionalized historical characters. :)

I once had an RPG character who was very handy with a needle when it came to mending tack or hawks' hoods, but had no patience at all for decorative work in silks.

[txanne]

Caddie Woodlawn was real? \o/ How I loved her.

[fidelioscabinet]

Excuse me while I strike a match and burn some incense in your general direction.

Also, that 'fancy' needlework? It was a treat for when you'd done your share of the mending, plain sewing, and so on that HAD to be done. It was a chance to be creative and inventive and do something besides darn socks and patch things and hem sheets.

Grr.

[oursin]

There's that scene in Little Women in which the March sisters deal with the boredom of hemming sheets by calling each edge the name of a different continent and using that as an educational opportunity. Also, but I can't remember where I read this (one of Charlotte Yonge's perhaps) having one member of the family reading while the others do their plain-sewing, but switching that round. (Though I wonder how poor myopic Ethel May managed sewing...)

According to the Journal of Saw It Somewhere Studies, girls' samplers were about demonstrating their mistressy of a range of types of stitching that were used for various kinds of mending and patching and making clothes, not just pretty embroidery display.

[mrissa]

Right, the sample was the "I will not ruin your stuff if you set me to actual work" display.

[rikibeth]

And cross-stitch wasn't an exercise in decorative futility the way it is now (I love the interesting stitches in crewel-work, but counted-cross drives me bonkers); it was the standard stitch used for putting initials and numbers onto shirts and so on for laundry-marking, to make sure those were worn in rotation so they'd wear evenly, and to tell family members' things apart when the sizes didn't make it instantly apparent

[alecaustin]

A couple of general responses/points

[mrissa]

I don't propose "I hate sums/household accounts" as the new "I hate needlework" spurning of girliness, though, because it won't read that way to a modern audience. It might well work to have a scorned elder sister good at girl stuff like math and sums, ugh, but I think that would possibly work best in a boy character--and also work best if the math and sums turn out to be useful.

[rikibeth]

And boy stuff on an education level is Greek and Latin, for prestige... potentially useful science was not rated as highly. It was boys who got the higher mathematics, too. I can't remember any instances of it being considered necessary for a girl to learn trigonometry. Boys in the upper classes would have had that and calculus for the mental exercise (though Greek and Latin still had more prestige); otherwise, if it was useful, it was useful to naval men.

(my Hornblower fangirl is showing)

[ellen_fremedon]

otherwise, if it was useful, it was useful to naval men.

Who, of course, would all have known how to sew.

[wshaffer]

And, speaking as someone who has done a bit of simple hand sewing recently, I can say that as domestic drudgery goes, it's pretty pleasant. You get to sit comfortably, and you can converse with people sitting near you, or listen to someone playing music or reading aloud. Your fingers may get sore if you spend a lot of time pushing the needle through heavy fabric, and you might jab yourself with pins and needles if you're a bit clumsy, but if you compare it to the physical discomforts of doing the laundry or scrubbing the floors in a pre-industrial setting, it's a treat.

Of course, the girls in these books very seldom seem to be asked to do the laundry or scrub floors, or even cook dinner. Because, as you point out, the needlework in these books is not actually a meaningful part of the domestic economy, it's an easily spurned symbol of girlyness.

[diatryma]

Needlework in books is treated like practicing violin: you have to do it alone and you can't do anything else at the same time. Which makes no sense. "I hate needlework! I want to be the kind of princess who stabs things!" "Darling, you have to do it or you won't be able to spend time in the solar with all the ladies of the court. If you don't keep up on the gossip, how will you know who to stab?"

Plus, it's not something you practice, it's something you do. I'd love to see more intermediate needlework in books or at least a bit of learning curve.

[mrissa]

Oh, I think this actually brings up one of the things that frustrates me. It seems to be assumed that if you can't immediately do whatever-fancy-stitch, you can never do whatever-fancy-stitch. You are Just Not Good At This. Which is, in fact, one of the most common geek fallacies about being smart in general--but if it was applied to sword-fighting in a similar type of stories, the same people would never stand for it.

Also: If you don't keep up on the gossip, how will you know who to stab?

OH YES.

[rikibeth]

Well, there are always the ones who stab their fingers and bleed on the linen, spoiling it so they have to start again.

I once helped teach the Pages' School at Pennsic. I did teach some basic embroidery stitches, to boys and girls alike, because it was a skill I had and could share. They all were fascinated at the process of making French knots, and could get behind the concept of embroidering designs on their gear so they could tell whose it was