Knit Your Bit! (Or Else)
Knit Your Bit! (Or Else)
by Katherine Sapienza
“Take Notice Everybody!” screamed the headline of an article that appeared in Vassar College’s Miscellany News on April 17th, 1918. What followed was a strongly worded appeal to knitters on behalf of the American Red Cross. The article sternly reminded Vassar students that women who used wool to knit for either themselves or for other civilians were “ robbing the soldiers and sailors of wool which they need in the trenches and on the wind-swept seas.” Recounting a letter from the Red Cross, the article explained that “many women, after knitting an article or two for the Red Cross or a soldier relative, knit…similar articles for themselves or for friends other than soldiers or sailors.” It went on to urge women to use alternative materials such as cotton, silk, or some other wool substitute if they wished to knit for themselves, employing verbs such as “exhaust” and “deprive” to elucidate the selfishness of knitting for one’s self.
During World War I, knitting was presented as a catch-all form of volunteering, something women of all classes could partake in. This endeavor operated under the assumption that all women already possessed adequate knitting skill. As Christopher Capozolla points out, “…the items that the U.S military needed required labor skills that recreational knitters often did not have.” This begs the question of whether necessity or social obligation was the true motivation for the Red Cross’s zealous campaign. Some women even questioned why the knitting had to be a personal undertaking as opposed to something “contracted out to large firms.” In the summer of 1918, only a couple of months after the publication of the directive in the Miscellany News, this question was answered. The government gave out contracts for the production of knit goods to factories and messaging from the Red Cross shifted to urging knitters to cease making sweaters, ending the obligation to knit and introducing the obligation to abstain.
The American ideal of femininity at the time was the Gibson Girl, an archetype of physical attractiveness and upper-middle-class social standing, as depicted by Charles Dana Gibson. Lynn D. Gordon asserts that “the college girl was simply a type of Gibson Girl” and consequently, “the educated female in the Progressive Era had traveled a long way from the “mannish” college woman of the first generation of graduates.” The aggressive knitting campaign targeting women during wartime was a clear example of the new ideal of strictly feminine college women. This sought to create an American woman who in the Gibson Girl spirit could now have “both higher education and social approval.” Education and voluntarism were two ways for women to move from the private sphere to the public sphere but knitting for soldiers (a domestic, thankless obligation) was the mode through which Vassar women achieved social participation. This pressure to contribute through knitting would prove ineffectual as evidenced by the eventual outsourcing to factories, suggesting that the knitting campaign was used more as a tool of social control. It is disconcerting to think that the students of Vassar College wasted time and resources participating in ultimately useless domestic labor disguised as a patriotic, contributory act. The coming of age of the second generation of college-educated women would seem a step towards more progressive ideals, but at this time female students were still expected to be conservative and play a domestic role not only in private but also in public.
Works Cited
Capozzola, Christopher Joseph Nicodemus. Uncle Sam Wants You : World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen / Christopher Capozzola. Oxford ;: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Gordon, Lynn D. “The Gibson Girl Goes to College: Popular Culture and Women’s Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920.” American Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1987): 211–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/2712910.
“Take Notice Everybody.” Miscellany News. April 17, 1918. https://news.hrvh.org/veridian/?a=d&d=vcmisc19180417-01.2.2&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN——-
Image
Women Knitting Socks for the Troops, 1914, Courtesy of Toronto Public Library
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Women_knitting_socks_for_the_troops_(16742518657).jpg