Stories of Sewing

Why are there so few books about women and their stitches?

Where are the stories of sewing women? Where are the memoirs of stitchers and sewers? Thousands of women in this country sew, hundreds of thousands of us sew across the world, millions, surely.

Sewing connects women across generations, across continents and cultures and across time. One of the joys of sharing stories of stitchers like Mary Linwood, is seeing the way that the simple act of stitching is so understandable, so recognisable to so many people, most of them women. In my Connected Threads community project, I ran sessions with groups of (mainly) women across Leicestershire making wool thread cords, twisted and knotted together, demonstrating the interconnectedness of needlework across the ages. I spoke of the threads bringing us together, symbolising all the women stitchers who have come before us whose names are not remembered, whose stories are not told. Even the rich and famous like Mary Linwood get forgotten. Women’s stories of creativity and self-expression with needle and thread are not told enough. When I say that women’s work is not remembered, the participants nod, they know. They know their grandmother’s sewing was not valued, they know that their own is not always valued by their nearest and dearest, they know how our creativity has been suppressed, belittled and ignored. What is it that the patriarchy is so scared of? That tiny little needle and a wisp of thread are hardly terrifying weapons. Yet there’s something in this act of needle and thread and cloth which our society finds so challenging that it must laugh in the face of women’s creativity.

I’ve worked as a professional textile artist for 20 years. I have sewn for almost 40 years. I have seen huge changes in that time, mostly positive, but our stories are still not being told.

Looking at Clare Hunter’s wonderful Threads of Life on Amazon, the recommendations of books like this adds up to 11 books. ELEVEN books about textiles and women’s lives. There are more of course that don’t get picked up by the Amazon algorithm, but how are we to know about them if they don’t pop up here at the very least?

Every time I visit a bookshop, new or second hand, I look for books about textiles, about sewing, biographies of women who sewed, memoirs of a life in textile making, books that speak my language, that reflect my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of us that sew. I could take my pick of books by men writing about wood, about how working with their hands has changed their lives, their outlook, their understanding of the meaning of the world. I can find books about clay and pottery but I cannot find books by or about the millions of women who sew. In a recent foray into biographies and memoirs in the second-hand bookshop heaven of Hay-on-Wye, I finally found a memoir about the transformational experience of learning to sew. By a man.

Nearly two decades ago I was commissioned by the Guardian to teach a man to sew a button on, so he could write about it. I had 20 years of sewing experience by then, a couple of years of trying to make it as a professional textile maker and plenty to say, but it was his story of lack of skill that was the ‘feature’. I’m not suggesting my experience then was anything exceptional or worthy of an article, but my point is that women’s stories of sewing just aren’t being commissioned, aren’t being written, aren’t being seen as important cultural histories. Clare Hunter’s book as mentioned is so important, as is Barbara Burman’s The Point of the Needle, less well-known but still really significant in the stories of sewing and its importance in our culture. The more recent With Her Own Hands by Nicole Nehrig is a huge step in the right direction too but there’s still space for memoir and biography about textile making.

We’ve looked at several of these in my Textile Book Group, a bi-monthly discussion about a book exploring some aspect of textiles. I have a list of 20 or so more books for us to read over the next couple of years, and more will slowly be published, I am sure. When I compare the number of books about textiles in general, not just about sewing, and the vast ocean of books about nature (which I LOVE) I am disheartened and disappointed. I want to read books about women who sew now, women who sewed in the past and the cultural significance of sewing. I recently read a wonderful book called Why Women Grow – I loved this exploration of the many reasons women today grow plants, but all the way through I wished there was a book about why women sew. I’m obviously going to have to write it myself. I have touched on it with my Textiles in Lockdown research for Gawthorpe Textiles Collection in 2020, which I turned into a podcast about collective and group making and a small publication about individual experiences and personal stories of the power of sewing in getting through early lockdown. I explore why we make in my own podcast Making Meaning, talking to makers and stitchers, writers and researchers about their creative practice and what it means to them and to their audiences. I wrote about the care practices of making and research during my Cultures of Care project, some of which I shared in essays and conversations as well as my Making Meaning Journal. This is niche writing. Sewing is not niche though. 

There may be fewer of us doing it than in pretty much any previous generation, but it is woven through our lives whether we notice it or not. We all wear clothes. Clothes are made by human hands, usually women’s hands. They might wield a sewing machine rather than a needle but they are still made by hand. It’s still sewing, even if it’s in a factory, for 16 hours a day, for the sole purpose of making a paltry income. Those of us that choose to sew for pleasure or at least productivity, know in our bones how important it is, but we don’t often get to talk about that importance or have that importance acknowledged or valued by the wider world. Sewing is connection, those threads bind us to each other, the powerful and caring community of stitching. They bind us to women of the past whose stories may not be remembered, whose work may not have been valued, but we value them, the makers and their making. That’s why our sewing stories need to be told and why those stories need to be in bookshops in biographies, in memoirs, in cultural history, in the meagre craft and fashion sections where only technique books tend to sit. Textiles and sewing cross all boundaries of communities and cultures so we need to see and read those stories, to celebrate our connections and creativity and acknowledge the power of that simple needle and thread.

Me in my studio, photo by Geoff Broadway, 2019.

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