Mom was always the instigator of the move—it would be a better house, a better neighborhood, we’d all be happier — but it must have been an prodigious amount of work, organizing and reorganizing, making new curtains. She prodded the vacuum like a snarling weapon, and her sighings, huffings, and puffings were audible throughout the house. If I was reading, which I did in my bedroom to avoid interruption, her sighs grew louder and the nose of the vacuum bumped my closed door. But if I was sewing in the living room, the vacuum left me alone. And if I needed help, she would turn it off, come sit down.

A Girl Couching with Golden Thread, 1826
(Oil on canvas, 81,3 х 63,9)
BY Vasily Andreevich Tropinin
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Even my father seemed not to mind my needle and thread. I could imbibe my parents’ talk in the evening while following the predictable rows of little x’s inked on white linen. All those cross-stitched roses, peacocks decorating borders of tablecloths that were never used and that I’ve long since lost. The silky threads of pink and peach, blue and green, lavender. Within the metal hoop that held my fabric taut, I could keep my own rhythm, make my own pattern on the soft cloth, while sitting across from their chairs.

Nobody else I knew embroidered. Not even my mother. It wasn’t until years later that I learned a proclivity for needles and thread may have been a family trait: Mom’s Aunt Fancy served as the Royal Broiderer, responsible for decorating Queen Mary’s evening bags and gowns with sequins, beads, and golden threads. But I knew nothing of embroidery’s historical place in women’s lives. I had no idea it had been a middle- and upper-middle class activity for women and girls who could afford to have their dresses made and mended by someone else. I did not know that in the nineteenth century it had been one of the skills taught young ladies, like watercolors, or the piano. I had not yet read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s scathing condemnation of embroidery as one of the useless, ornamental skills required of genteel women in the nineteenth century. I did not know how novelists like Brontë and Gaskell portrayed their female characters bending over embroidery hoops, enduring eyestrain and stiff necks, all the while straining to appear graceful and ornamental —dutiful yet desirable — while quietly listening to the conversations conducted by the men on whose survival they depended.

I didn’t know that my needlework put me in the company of all those women. That my mother probably encouraged my sewing and knitting because she had been encouraged by her mother. That this was a “suitable activity” for a nice young girl. There I was in the nineteen-fifties, like Jane Eyre in the drawing room, plying my needle while surreptitiously devouring the grown-ups’ talk. I’m sure, though, that, as a gawky, buck-toothed adolescent adorned in braces, glasses, crumpled shorts, and scufffed sandals, I bore little resemblance to those “nice young girls” of earlier eras.

I did not know how novelists like Brontë and Gaskell portrayed their female characters bending over embroidery hoops, enduring eyestrain and stiff necks, all the while straining to appear graceful and ornamental —dutiful yet desirable…

In Ronald Maxwell’s cinematic Civil War saga Gods and Generals, a Virginia mother and her grown daughters bend demurely over their sewing, charming a gentlemanly group of officers bound for the front. Gracefully, rhythmically, almost hypnotically, the women’s arms lift their shimmering threads. When their handiwork is revealed, we see that these female members of the Southern aristocracy have been quilting a Confederate flag, a gift for their menfolk to carry into battle. Their soft white hands are not sullied by practical necessities like mending shirts or darning socks. And swathed in the voluminous dresses of the era, the women bent chastely over their work are as seductive as members of any seraglio, and at least one of them during this subtle scene wins the heart of a young officer.

I’m afraid I never learned to use needlework seductively. I had no idea the very act of sewing could be viewed sexually, as it is, for instance, in seventeenth-century Dutch emblems, which provocatively describe the needle’s regular, repeated “strokes” in penetrating the yielding cloth. Yet I was determined to knit a pair of socks for my high school boyfriend, a project I worked on while our family watched TV after dinner. During one summer I also made him a shirt, a project so ambitious I almost gave up, especially when trying to insert the collar. Working on these pieces of cloth that would lie next to his chest and feet, I could dreamily replay our fondlings in his family’s Chevy. Not unlike the obsessed fan played by Sandra Bernhard in Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy who knits a sweater for the TV star she idolizes, I knitted and sewed to feel closer to my boyfriend.