WockenSolle

Helmer.
Ach was, schon?... – Gehört Ihnen das Strickzeug da?

Frau Linde (nimmt es.)
Ja, danke schön. Beinahe hätte ich es vergessen.

Helmer.
Also, Sie stricken?

Frau Linde.
Ja freilich.

Helmer.
Wissen Sie was, Sie sollten lieber sticken.

Frau Linde.
So? Und weshalb?

Helmer.
Weil es viel hübscher aussieht. Sehen Sie nur: man hält die Stickerei mit der linken Hand, – so –, und mit der rechten führt man die Nadel – so – in leichtem, langgestrecktem Bogen; nicht wahr –?

Frau Linde.
Ja, das mag schon sein –

Helmer.
Das Stricken hingegen, – das kann nur unschön sein. Sehen Sie her: die zusammengeklemmten Arme, – die Stricknadeln, die auf und ab fahren, – das hat so was Chinesisches an sich. – Es war wirklich ein glänzender Champagner, den man uns vorgesetzt hat.

Resistance against knitting. One of the books, Rett på tråden [Right on the Thread] differs from the others, not only with its slightly impudent title. In the introduction, sisters Birte and Margareth Sandvik quote the exchange of lines in A Doll’s House, where Torvald Helmer advises Mrs. Linde to set aside her knitting and take up embroidery instead, because knitting “can never be anything but ugly, “ “there’s something Chinese about it.”

Knitting has had several vocal opponents since Ibsen’s Torvald. In their book Crisis in the Population Question (1934), the married couple Alva and Gunnar Myrdal—both tone-setting Swedish social democrats, she winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he the Nobel prize for economics—were angered by the exaggerated petit bourgeois habits that had spread among the working class and minor civil servants. Family life in these classes was, according to the Myrdals, characterized by a fussy desire to entertain, an overly-ambitious interest in food and homemaking, with a penchant for public display. But it was, above all, women’s handwork that paid the price: “All this embroidery, this knitting, sewing, and lacemaking that has filled the walls and sofas, tables and shelves.”

Knitting became equated with a confined active mind and connected to married women’s having no right to work and the two-child family having become the norm.

Staying home with one or two children resulted in women’s having lots of free time—and presto, this is how Alva and Gunnar Myrdal explained the then-current knitting wave: Knitting and crochet were enterprise gone wrong. This energy should be used for something more practical for society and the individual.

At the end of the 20^th and beginning of the 21^st centuries, women are having even fewer children than did their grandmothers in the 1930s, and men’s and women’s lives have become almost exactly identical. The reduction in the number of childbirths is a major reason why the buxom female with broad hips and heaving breasts is no longer the ideal woman, instead the athletic, androgynous female body that exudes health and sex appeal is. The anorexic, boyish body has become the woman’s dream physiology, and she dresses accordingly.