Knitting Raveled Sleeves of Care

Non-digressive anecdote: I used to be a pretty good knitter. I worked in a multi-team environment where, during design phases especially, you could spend ten hours a day in meetings! Don't get me wrong, they were often astonishingly productive meetings that resulted in fantastic designs and strategies, but they did go on quite a bit. A lot of the techies learned to while away the time, and to suppress our often geek tendencies towards volubility, by knitting.

Now I arrived a bit late to the knitting scene, but it looked like a lot of fun so one colleague set me up with some needles and yarn, then another showed me how to knit and I did that for a while. But straight knit stiches, row after row (a.k.a. stockinette stitch) are useful for, well, stockings, I guess, but boring. So another friend showed me how to purl. And that's where everything started falling apart. Instead of easily creating rows of neat, loose, stretchy fabric I constantly struggled to knit murderously tight, crossed stitches.

So I talked to yet another knitter who looked at how I was doing it and said "oh, you're knitting wrong, do it this way." No improvement. Someone else said "you're purling wrong, do it *this way*"

Finally someone who I kept mentioning I was having problems else just grabbed me, pulled me into her office, and said "Ok, I'm going to be your instructor, I'm going to show you how to make your knits match your purls. All the people you're talking to aren't wrong, but they're not giving you *consistent* instructions." Half an hour later I was off to the races.

I bring this up because political blogger Kathy G (who doesn't count even though she's brilliant) of The G Spot points out some distinctions about feminism that have a fair amount of bearing on the various race/class/preference/Seal-Press/Clinton wars.

Tom S. at Rust Belt Intellectual has a lovely post up about the unfinished business of feminism. He argues that the right and the media have caused us to misunderstand feminism because they've focused a disproportionate amount of attention on feminist elites -- theatrical activists and the like. But he and says more attention should be paid to what's been called "the other women's movement," aka working class feminism:

These feminists defined their struggle primarily in economic, not cultural terms. They represented blue and pink-collar women who, by the mid-twentieth century, were entering the paid workforce in increasing numbers, despite the pervasive rhetoric about the normative family headed by male breadwinners.

For these blue and pink collar women:

feminism really mattered. Against the odds, working-class feminists raised their wages and undermined sexist hiring practices, even if both victories were incomplete. Working-class feminists demanded better benefits and affordable child care and fought for family-friendly workplace policies. The feminist workplace revolution is still unfinished. And in fundamental respects it has been rolled back in the last two decades by biparisan indifference to the issues that matter most for ordinary working people, male and female alike.

Read all about it here.

It seems to me the first mistake outsiders make is to assume (as I did while learning to knit) that "Teh Feminismism" is one thing that's done only one way. That's not necessarily the biggest mistake anyone could make since feminist interests overlap on oh, say, let's 80% of the issues. What's not so hot is that since it's never the *same 80%* of issues. Lesbian separatists have some pretty critical issues related to, well, radical consent. Elite and nominally "elite" feminists who are either born into the college/academia/profession track or test well into it have some other issues that are, especially, related to "glass ceiling" problems. There are issues that the one in four women (one in *four!!!*) who've been victims of straight-up sexual assault, rape, and incest hold some truths to be self-evident in ways that -- no matter how hard or well others imagine -- others can't imagine. Feminists in poverty or struggling to rise out of it, feminists who have to put up with the persistent din of "what's with the headscarf/dark-skin/second-language-dominant/"lookit she's crippled" don't have a lot of patience for condescension no matter how well-intentioned. And however many men there are who see feminism as pointing the way out of a pretty stultifying, sometimes horrifying situation for *everybody* and not just women have issues where they're not even sure what to call themselves, let alone necessarily comfortable trying to distinguish between all the other kinds of feminism.

But here's the thing. "The personal is the political" kind of demands that there's more than one way to do it. That's a big change from the days when rich women and poor women, native born and newly-arrived died in childbirth, were economically dependent on custodial males, were disregarded as universally second class, and were subject to extraordinary coercion whenever they bucked the system. Sure, some of those have changed and some have remained the same but circumstances for the class "woman" have changed enough that conditions of other classes are emerging.

It's not all stockinette stitch anymore. It's not all one color anymore. It's not one-size-fits-all anymore. And yeah, that's annoying if you're still going by the old patterns, and if you're still invested in the old way. But it's not *wrong* that there's more going on. Sophistication and success breed diversity so it's a good thing. Unless one lets it divide and conquer one.