Why not knit?
In a previous post I've mentioned that one of the reasons I've learned to knit so late in life is that I didn't know anyone who knitted. Actually, I still don't and that is also the reason I've learned it through the internet.
I was thinking about the reasons for this decline on the number of people who do, despite the claims that it is now fashionable. Which is true but only up to a certain point, knitters are still a very small tribe, no matter how many of them claim to be legion.
On my own I found a few reasons for this.
1. Technological progress aka. time and money
With the development of more and more efficient knitting machines, there is no longer a justification to spend so much time and money on something you can simply buy. The fact that knitting takes time is evident. The fact that it is expensive is not so obvious, but it is still true. Take the example of the sweater I'm knitting right now, I've spent more money on the yarn alone than I'd have spent in a sweater I'd buy in a shop. Part of the reason is that the yarn I'm using is very high quality, but that is not all. The main reason is that factories buy large amounts of yarn at a reduced price, compared to the one we knitters are able to get from yarn shops, and then go on producing the garments at extremely low cost due to both automation and the exploitation of 3rd world workers. So in the end, even if time is the main reason most people have stopped knitting, money does not provide further incentive either. I mention this because for thousand of years people knitted mostly because they couldn't afford to buy knitted clothes. Which leads us to the second reason.
2. Class
This is more subtle and I've not seen it mentioned elsewhere, but I believe it played a major role in the decline of knitting, even if not the main one. As I mentioned above, people knitted because they couldn't afford to buy finished knitted clothes. This of course was true of the low classes, but what about the high classes who could? Well, precisely, high class ladies did not knit as they didn't need to. Instead they spent their time with complicated needlework, often producing extremely beautiful but useless decorative pieces after many hours of labour. Useful work was left for the low classes and seen as degrading by the higher classes. With the enormous economical progress that our society has seen in the last two centuries, a great part of the low class ascended to the ranks of the middle class. This ascension led to an increase in the aspirations to the refinement of higher classes among the middle class and many of the old useful crafts, such as knitting, began to be seen as below the level of people who had previously practised them and, what is worse, a sign of low origins.
3. Feminism and sexism
In a possibly minor but still profound way, the misinterpretation of the principles of feminism gave a bad name to any activity perceived as solely feminine. Actually, not only activities, but anything associated with women. This actually is the other face of an old coin named sexism. Sexism created the idea that everything masculine is positive (intelligence, strength, etc, etc, etc) and everything feminine is bad (vanity, envy, etc, etc, etc). Feminism in many ways has not been able to free itself completely of this well established way of thinking and hence suffered (and suffers) from the erroneous idea that women should become like men and do as men. Knitting became the victim of this idea. if women wanted to take their rightful place among men, they had to stop performing the low activities associated with them and start struggling to succeed in the high activities associated with men. Feminists strove for high intellectual achievements (or physical ones, like excelling in sport like men did) and despised feminine one's, such as knitting. This was not entirely bad, on the contrary, it was mostly positive, but still it is pretty ridiculous to stop doing something you enjoy just because it is perceived as "feminine" and thus bad. Of course this is also the reason that men don't knit, with the exception of gay men which, of course, couldn't care less. Obviously there are some exceptions to this rule, but let's face it, they are exceptions and their rarity is only one more evidence of the extreme sexism that still dominates modern society despite the enormous achievements of feminism in the last couple of centuries.
I was thinking about the reasons for this decline on the number of people who do, despite the claims that it is now fashionable. Which is true but only up to a certain point, knitters are still a very small tribe, no matter how many of them claim to be legion.
On my own I found a few reasons for this.
1. Technological progress aka. time and money
With the development of more and more efficient knitting machines, there is no longer a justification to spend so much time and money on something you can simply buy. The fact that knitting takes time is evident. The fact that it is expensive is not so obvious, but it is still true. Take the example of the sweater I'm knitting right now, I've spent more money on the yarn alone than I'd have spent in a sweater I'd buy in a shop. Part of the reason is that the yarn I'm using is very high quality, but that is not all. The main reason is that factories buy large amounts of yarn at a reduced price, compared to the one we knitters are able to get from yarn shops, and then go on producing the garments at extremely low cost due to both automation and the exploitation of 3rd world workers. So in the end, even if time is the main reason most people have stopped knitting, money does not provide further incentive either. I mention this because for thousand of years people knitted mostly because they couldn't afford to buy knitted clothes. Which leads us to the second reason.
2. Class
This is more subtle and I've not seen it mentioned elsewhere, but I believe it played a major role in the decline of knitting, even if not the main one. As I mentioned above, people knitted because they couldn't afford to buy finished knitted clothes. This of course was true of the low classes, but what about the high classes who could? Well, precisely, high class ladies did not knit as they didn't need to. Instead they spent their time with complicated needlework, often producing extremely beautiful but useless decorative pieces after many hours of labour. Useful work was left for the low classes and seen as degrading by the higher classes. With the enormous economical progress that our society has seen in the last two centuries, a great part of the low class ascended to the ranks of the middle class. This ascension led to an increase in the aspirations to the refinement of higher classes among the middle class and many of the old useful crafts, such as knitting, began to be seen as below the level of people who had previously practised them and, what is worse, a sign of low origins.
3. Feminism and sexism
In a possibly minor but still profound way, the misinterpretation of the principles of feminism gave a bad name to any activity perceived as solely feminine. Actually, not only activities, but anything associated with women. This actually is the other face of an old coin named sexism. Sexism created the idea that everything masculine is positive (intelligence, strength, etc, etc, etc) and everything feminine is bad (vanity, envy, etc, etc, etc). Feminism in many ways has not been able to free itself completely of this well established way of thinking and hence suffered (and suffers) from the erroneous idea that women should become like men and do as men. Knitting became the victim of this idea. if women wanted to take their rightful place among men, they had to stop performing the low activities associated with them and start struggling to succeed in the high activities associated with men. Feminists strove for high intellectual achievements (or physical ones, like excelling in sport like men did) and despised feminine one's, such as knitting. This was not entirely bad, on the contrary, it was mostly positive, but still it is pretty ridiculous to stop doing something you enjoy just because it is perceived as "feminine" and thus bad. Of course this is also the reason that men don't knit, with the exception of gay men which, of course, couldn't care less. Obviously there are some exceptions to this rule, but let's face it, they are exceptions and their rarity is only one more evidence of the extreme sexism that still dominates modern society despite the enormous achievements of feminism in the last couple of centuries.
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