Anne L. Macdonald has certainly done her research. No Idle Hands brims with the voices of women–and men–from the past four centuries of American life. But her chatty voice and anecdote-rich chapters bely the fact that this book is, unfortunately, a bit of a slog, at heart a compendium rather than a history. She’s essentially telling a story of continual nostalgia, that knitting, in all but its earliest days, was always perceived as a return to some sort of essential femininity that modern women were in danger of losing. Even that minimal overarching narrative, however, is missing from the book, making its 350 pages an endless repetition of the same story: women like to knit, especially during war, except when they don’t.
This lack of narrative is one way in which the book seems to be a historical relic as much as a history. Although published in 1988, it’s situated in a theoretical world of several decades earlier. Aside from some tenuous conclusions in the very last paragraph of the book–essentially, that knitter has become a creative pleasure rather than a tiresome duty–Macdonald leaves untouched a host of unexplored and uninterrogated assumptions around women, work, and domesticity. (Another reason to look forward to reading Emily Matchar’s Homeward Bound.)
More troubling, perhaps, is Macdonald’s absolute silence on the black slaves whose voices are notably absent from her chapter on Confederate knitters. “Negro” women pop up occasionally in the chapter, but only in nostalgic invocation of white women about their “faithful” slaves who kept on knitting for the Confederacy; she even drops a regret that Southern knitters were unable to organize with their Northern sisters’ efficacy. This deafening silence (if not tone deafness) also places the book in an earlier historical moment.
Devoted knitters–of which I’m one–will find a lot to like about this book, especially in its enthusiastic mention of latter-day knitting saints such as Elizabeth Zimmerman. Those looking for a “social history,” however, will have to keep reading.
No Overreading 