No Idle Hands by Anne L. Macdonald

Author:Anne L. Macdonald [Macdonald, Anne L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77544-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

DAR Nifty Knitters Club, 1918.

Fighting “Sammies,” warmed both by their garments and the love that prompted them, would relate to grandchildren their elation at receiving those consecrated offerings.

12.

Flappers Versus the “Old-Fashioned Knitters”

When the armistice was finally signed in 1919 and families welcomed home their “soldier boys,” war-weary knitters discovered far-reaching cultural changes had occurred during the emergency. Young and newly independent women, their sisterhood sparked by entrance into the wartime work force, proselytized those whose chief objection to universal female suffrage was grounded in the “home is the place for women” canon by insisting that women’s wartime experience of combining home and business, of turning women’s “pink teas and frittering needlework” into war organizations committed to essential work, had brought about changes so profound that it was “hard to remember what it was like before.” Sharing this view, Mabel Potter Daggett, who had studied and written of women’s war work, exulted in Pictorial Review. “Have the American Women Made Good? Well, I guess Yes! … Every girl worth her salt today wants to earn her own living.… The strongest possible social force has been set operating and actively cooperating toward the economic independence for the New Woman.” Another feminist writer roused the New Women: “Now That We’ve Got to Reconstruct the World, Let’s Do It Right!”

At war’s end, hems rested innocuously six inches above the ankle, short-haired women were still associated with radicalism, cosmetic wearers were labeled “not well brought up,” garters attached to corsets securely held up black or tan stockings and ladies wore veiled hats for shopping trips. Within months of the peace, hems crept steadily upward and necklines plunged relentlessly downward. The Woman’s Home Companion’s editor smugly held last rites over the dress reform issue (“as dead as suffrage”) since in postwar fashion “[t]he neck of our dress is not extended up under our ears; and even the smartest blue serge from Saks Fifth Avenue’s most exclusive shop allows the waist of the wearer to take its rightful place in breathing.” Twenties women, like those of previous generations, hooted at visions of their grandmothers in trailing, dirty street dresses and congratulated themselves for replacing thick, shapeless sweaters (“a vulgar garment with a vulgar name”) with smart and “eminently comfortable” sports garments.

Despite many of the young’s denigration of knitting as “woman’s work,” those who had rallied their knitting needles for the war effort were called upon again by the Red Cross to knit for war refugees, to “express with your knitting needles that sympathetic love for those who suffer.” One chapter, recognizing that some faithful and industrious knitters were simply “knit out,” emphasized that knitting warm, sleeved sweaters, shoulder shawls, scarves and stockings for destitute women and children provided “a little variety” from soldier knitting. The Red Cross had considered sending yarn and needles abroad to give employment to refugee women but feared it might deter American women from knitting support. Throughout the twenties Red Cross magazines featured knitters such as octogenarian Lucy MacKenzie, of Portland, Oregon, who,

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