It’s not so long ago that scenes of women sewing, presented in art or literature, were signifiers of industry and moral rectitude. The social expectation for women to confine themselves to the domestic sphere with their needlework is not an arrangement that we associate with the act of stitching for wellbeing today.
However, as we travel through history, there are glimpses of more empowering experiences through stitch. Hester Prynne in has a complicated relationship with her needlework, but the needle and thread are fundamental to the safe haven Hester inhabits as a seamstress in a seventeenth-century Puritan community in Massachusetts. In Tracy Chevalier’s book, Honor Bright, a nineteenth-century Quaker woman emigrating to America, hints at the calming nature of working with her hands – ‘she attributed her own fine sewing to the prolonged draws attention to the fundamental role of textiles, not just as political devices, or a means of autobiography, but as a source of comfort – ‘by 1569 Mary was much in need of the solace of sewing… without her embroidery she had nothing to do but “weep and pray”.’
