Stephen
John Taylor, University
of Otago
From fistfights
in the corridors to tractors
driven up its front steps, New Zealand’s parliament
has seen plenty of odd and unruly behaviour by sitting
MPs.
But a few other controversies have involved
something slightly less rowdy: knitting.
In the
latest instance, Labour MP Deborah Russell was spotted
stitching together a woollen vest during
parliament’s question time last week. Around half of
more than 43,000 respondents to
a Stuff poll thought it
unacceptable.
Russell’s defence? It helps her
stay calm and focused. She also described it as a way of
signalling displeasure with the debate happening in the
chamber.
In suggesting a political element, Russell
wasn’t pulling the wool. Knitting happens to have a
long and storied place in political protest in New
Zealand and around the world.
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A history of
needling
Knitting is often seen as a quiet hobby
for the home and hearth. And for good reason: research
suggests it can be calming, aid concentration and create
social connections.
But its quiet nature has also
made knitting an unlikely tool for protest.
During
the French Revolution, women known as tricoteuses
famously knitted while watching public executions. During
World War I, Belgian women reportedly
used knitting to record the movements of German troops
and artillery.
New Zealand has its own history of
knitting rubbing up against politics. An 1880
illustration depicts women knitting as they watched
proceedings from parliament’s ladies’
gallery.
Heather Nicholson’s history of New
Zealand knitting, The
Loving Stitch, contains a colourful anecdote from the
women’s suffrage debate of this period: “a ball of wool
rolled right up the Speaker’s chair”, while “a
half-finished camisole fluttered down to the feet of a
scandalised legislator”.
Whether this was simply
a knitting mishap or a political gesture is
unclear.
There was less ambiguity about Marilyn
Waring. The renowned feminist and former National MP, who
was the
first woman to knit on parliament’s floor, later
described her own knitting as a political act.
More
recently, former National leader Bill English accused
Labour’s Judith Tizard of showing “contempt and
arrogance” by knitting in 2002. And in 2021, then-Labour
MP Stuart Nash objected
when ACT’s Nicole McKee knitted during a tribute to the
Duke of Edinburgh.
Away from the halls of power,
New Zealand has plenty of other examples of disruptive
stitching. In 1955, women staged
a “knit-in” on railway tracks to protest the closure of
the Nelson railway line, continuing for ten days before
being arrested.
Overseas, the pink “Pussyhat”
became a symbol of the 2017 Women’s March in Washington
DC, where hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered
following Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Knitting
has also been a source of cultural innovation. Māori
women unravelled wool from imported knitted garments and
reworked it into korowai – an example of one culture’s
materials being adapted for another.
A common
thread
These examples show how something
associated with quiet domesticity can carry a very public
message. Knitting offers a form of protest that does not
need to be loud or confrontational to make a
point.
There’s also a clever term for this: craftivism.
In 2009, British activist Sarah Corbett founded the Craftivist
Collective to promote what she called “the art of
gentle protest”.
To better understand this
phenomenon, I interviewed
50 women in four countries involved in knitting for
social change.
In Australia, Christian social
justice organisation Common Grace invited
people to knit “climate scarves” for politicians, using
coloured stripes to depict changes in average global
temperatures over the previous century.
For some of
the women I interviewed, the project offered a way to
participate in politics when they might otherwise have felt
powerless. As one grandmother told me: “I’ve never
spoken to a politician… I’m a little ordinary person.
I’m sitting here watching the world get hotter. [Knitting]
gave me some agency.”
Another described the
scarves as a gentler way of communicating the urgency of
climate change.
In England, knitting was used to
show solidarity with survivors of church abuse.
Survivors in the Diocese of Newcastle had
adopted the strawberry as a symbol of resilience and
change, prompting church knitting groups to make more than
600 red and green knitted strawberries.
Many
carried handwritten messages of support and were displayed
inside the cathedral. One participant described the result
as “exuberant defiance” – a particularly potent
description given how abuse within religious settings can
involve the silencing of survivors. Here, their voices were
being made visible at the heart of the church.
Across these projects, I found knitting could give
people a sense of agency, connect those who might otherwise
feel isolated and make overlooked voices more
visible.
As amusing or irksome as it may have
seemed to many of us, Deborah Russell’s knitting was part
of a rich and meaningful tradition.
For
generations, women have taken an activity often regarded as
quaint and homely and carried it into public life –
sometimes for comfort, sometimes for community and sometimes
to make a political point.
Perhaps that’s why,
after all these years, a harmless pair of knitting needles
can still get parliament in a tangle.
Stephen
John Taylor, Research Affiliate, Centre for Theology and
Public Issues, University
of Otago
This article is
republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the
original
article.
