Knitting as a remedy: women’s everyday creativity in response to hopelessness and despair

ABSTRACT

In her 2008 novel The Knitting Circle, American writer Ann Hood identifies knitting as a form of prayer, with every stitch connecting her to her deceased daughter. In 2016, a Rotterdam-based knitting icon, Loes Veenstra, passed away. For many years, Veenstra knitted hundreds of jumpers that were not intended to be worn. She knitted solely to fight her smoking addiction. In 2010, hundreds of Peruvian women knitted together in a square in Ayacucho to commemorate their missing relatives, whose fate had remained unknown since the civil war in the 1980s and 1990s. The scarf they created served as a symbolic grave because these women knew that their relatives would probably never get a real one. The written and spoken testimonies of these women as well as the knitted objects reveal the significance of knitting as a remedy. This creative endeavour practiced in daily life becomes a remedy when it is the only activity that women want or are able to undertake while experiencing grief, trauma or addiction. Knitting is a cure for women who have no other recourse to action within their social or cultural circumstances. These case studies illustrate how being creative (as a woman) in daily life can be beneficial in difficult times.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative endeavour
• everyday creativity
• women’s creativity
• knitting in Ayacucho
• Ann Hood
• Loes Veenstra

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Marta Kargól

Marta Kargól received her MA in History (2007) and History of Art (2009) from Jagielloński University in Cracow. In 2013, she obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology for the dissertation ‘Tradition in fashion: Dutch regional dress in various contexts of the contemporary culture’. Her research interests include the history of women’s clothing and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, heritage of regional costumes, economic and gender aspects of home-made clothing, and socially engaged fibre art.