STITCHY FINGERS: MAKING BY HAND IN THE FIRST DECADE OF ‘SPARE RIB’

by:
Alison Mayne , December 13, 2021

Spare Rib, published in the UK between 1972 and 1993, was a second wave feminist
magazine founded and edited by, amongst others, Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott.
This article focuses on its first decade of publication, and considers how the magazine
presented ways in which feminist womanhood could be constructed through agentic
choices in handcraft as consumer and maker. 

Greer (2008; 2014) first coined the portmanteau word ‘craftivism’ to celebrate the
agency of expressing personal, social, and political solidarity or dissent through
handcraft. Twenty-first century feminists are perhaps more familiar with the concept
of making by hand as a form of activism, rather than seeing handcraft as incongruent
with feminist values. Considering this, it is useful to think about how issues of Spare
Rib can be viewed as artefacts that have accrued heritage and social value (Withers
2016), with the capacity to influence how we understand the place of making by
hand in feminist practices and publications more generally. Exploring the place of
handcraft in Spare Rib provides some insight into how traditions have been used to
sustain feminist ideas and identities, what is selected or foregrounded and—over time
—what is removed. Using Withers’ (2016) concept, it is a valuable act of cultural
recovery to re-examine Spare Rib and historicise how handcraft has been represented
within it.

Feminisms have long had an uneasy relationship with women’s magazines, with the
Women’s Liberation Movement rejecting their perceived focus on women’s domestic
role and subordination. (Friedan 2010 [1982]) There is also a tricky balance
between consumption and anti-consumer culture frequently associated with feminism:
To buy a magazine supported by advertising, to see Spare Rib in WHSmith (a UK
national newsagent), to gather 100,000 readers, to inform, entertain and challenge in
a text which by definition indicates time for leisure (Forster 2016; Forster and
Hollows 2020) is to be implicated with consumerism and capitalism. 

In the pioneering Adorned in Dreams, Elizabeth Wilson writes:

 It is difficult to discuss fashion in relation to the feminism of today, because the
ideologies about dress that have circulated in the Women’s Movement seem never
to have been made explicit. This may be one reason for the intense irritation and
confusion that the subject provoked from the beginning of the Women’s
Movement in 1970 and still provokes. (1985: 230) 

Whilst her work focused on clothing, there are still challenging connections here:
ideologies of handcraft, such as sewing, knitting or embroidery were entangled with
associations of domesticity, oppression and a limited view of the feminine
homemaker. There are other parallels, as both women’s magazines and handcraft are
often considered frivolous ‘ephemeral texts and “unacademic”’. (Groenevald 2016:
13) Scholarship exploring the significance of feminist print and the culture of making
in handcraft is expanding, but there is still work to do in reclaiming the agency and
activism that both represent. Interest in feminist print culture can be seen in the
determination behind the British Library Spare Rib digitisation project from 2014, and
more recent publications such as Re-reading Spare Rib edited by Angela Smith (2017)
and Feminist Media by Claire Sedgwick (2020). However, very little work has
explicitly considered the place of handcraft in Spare Rib and the ways that the
‘irritation and confusion’ which Wilson discusses led to its unravelling in the
magazine. 

Handcraft & Feminisms

There is a long cultural history associating women and handcraft, frequently drawing
on essentialist ideas about nurture, hearth, home and care. This is often exemplified
by the image of an ‘angel in the home,’ with eighteenth and nineteenth century
samplers completed by young women and girls as part of their education in domestic
skills, perseverance and obedience. (Goggin & Tobin 2017)

However, literature and myth are also populated by women who use handcraft
subversively, for example to separate them from the world, as in Tennyson’s account
of The Lady of Shalott, or Penelope, who wove and unravelled her weaving for years
waiting for Odysseus to return, both ensuring her fidelity and obedience to her
husband, and subverting attempts at control by the men around her. (Canevaro
2014) Similarly, there are intriguing real-world examples of nineteenth century
women who rebelled against the use of handcraft as a tool of domestic oppression or
control. These include Elizabeth Parker of Ashburnham, East Sussex, who records
instances of maltreatment in her work as a nurserymaid ‘with cruelty too horrible to
mention’ by stitching in red thread onto a panel of linen she perceives to be as
comforting as a person she can trust. (Victoria and Albert Museum 2021) Lorina
Bulwer created three long stitched and densely embroidered ‘letters’ recounting her
experiences of abuse by doctors whilst locked in Great Yarmouth workhouse in the
1890s. (Norfolk Museums Collection 2021) Agnes Richter embroidered layers and
layers of dense text onto the lining and exterior of her straitjacket whilst incarcerated
at Hubertusberg Asylum, recording her experiences, fears and wishes with thread.
(Prinzhorn Collection 2021)

This article is not the place to rehearse the complex history of craft being placed in
opposition to, or as a poor cousin of, more artistic endeavour. Nevertheless, it is
useful to reflect on how handcraft—particularly that engaged in by women—is
denigrated with a steady ‘drip of condescension’. (Hutchison & Feist 1991: 6)
Scholarship on craft has been affected in no small part by its implicit and explicit
connection to gender, with deliberate use of the masculine label of ‘craftsmanship’ in
works by Crawford (2009), Frayling (2010) or Mytting (2015). This focus on
masters and ‘the things men have made’ (Frayling 2001: 93) reaches its orgasmic end
in phallic descriptions of ‘arousing’ tools (Sennett 2009: 195) and the ‘sublime
screwdriver’. (195) Women’s handcraft, especially undertaken in domestic settings, or
for such mundane practices as clothing the body, appears beneath consideration, its
precarious position in the already contested field of amateur and hand craft being
‘impacted by multiple legacies of gendered exclusion’. (Luckman, 2014: 48)

Adamson, one of the leading current scholars on craft, expresses concern about the
work of an amateur handcrafter—making in a way that focuses on personal
gratification rather than on professional quality—which appears to him an activity
which is socially passive in simply purchasing commodities to facilitate ‘sewing in the
living room’ (Adamson 2007: 140), or other such mundane pastimes. Handcraft,
especially in the production of domestic or personal objects to adorn the body has
been—and in contemporary popular media remains—considered to be of low social or
artistic status ‘at odds with intellectual life’. (Parker 2010: 214) Lippard suggests that
such interests may have been ‘engendered by isolation within a particular space and
by the emphasis on cleaning and service’ (1978: 486) of domestic settings, although
she values the potential for remedying this by forging important connections through
sharing handcraft with other women as they work to rehabilitate, patch, and fix the
broken things they experience. 

Within the Women’s Liberation Movement, there has also been ambivalence about the
place of women’s handcraft, which is often perceived as ‘bound up with the
superficial, the solely decorative and transient values’ (Dalton 1987: 32) of a closely
proscribed life which focused on femininity and family. Dalton, writing for Virago in
a volume on women and craft (Elinor, Richardson, Scott, Thomas & Walker, 1987) is
uncomfortable with the lack of professionalism shown by amateurs who create for
leisure at home, identifying in particular that women’s reliance on magazines leads to
limited imagination, skill and creativity. This view is challenged by Hackney (2006;
2013) where magazines aimed at women from the 1920s through to contemporary
examples are imagined as windows upon, as opposed to barriers to, creativity, as they
offer handcraft support which means that women can engage with exciting ideas
about art and design with a like-minded community.

However, in her germinal text The Subversive Stitch, Parker (2010) delights in
exploring the metaphor of the textile needle as a ‘weapon of resistance (ix), used by
women to craft their own meaning ‘in the very medium intended to foster polite
effacement’. (201) In this reading, Parker draws on the work of Louise Bourgeois in
her justification of handcraft as a powerful tool for creativity and reparation:

When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I’ve
always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The
needle is used to repair damage. Its claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive,
it’s not a pin. (Bourgeois cited in Parker 2010: xix)

Parker develops her argument that there is unity rather than ambivalence in women’s
use of handcraft as a way of challenging patriarchal subjectivity, where the craft of
activities such as sewing, embroidery or knitting in a domestic space move from
symbols of oppression to the means of self-expression, agency and protest.

More recently, textiles scholarship has explored these ideas, in the wake of political
and social activism communicated through handcraft, from the banners of Greenham
Common (Clarke 2016), the Names Project which created memorial quilts for AIDS
victims (National Aids Memorial 2021) to the Pussy Hats worn by those in the
women’s marches protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the
USA. (Derr 2017; Black 2017) Here, handcraft is acknowledged as a ‘strategy to
examine and challenge contemporary issues’ (Black & Burisch 2010: 610), engaging
with social activism or community building (Bishop 2006) in a way that
simultaneously reclaims handcraft as a feminist act. (Chansky, 2010) In some
settings, this can be part of public provocation to challenge ideas about shared public
spaces or an embodied engagement with cultural resistance, where handcraft opens up
a ‘mutable, creative and negotiated space that is a political activity in itself’.
(Springgay 2010: 112) Most recently, this may be observed in community handcraft
projects which record personal and political responses to the Coronavirus pandemic
through quilting (Stalp 2020), stitching solidarity in lockdown (Fountain & Burchill
2020), virtual ‘rage knitting’ (McCracken 2020) or gathering in new ways to grieve.
(Schulte 2021)

Still, Turney (2009) expresses concern that handcraft activities such as sewing or
knitting have been marginalised from academic and cultural discourse because they
represent ‘a democracy of objects and practices so prolific, so mundane, that it isn’t
noticed, it’s taken for granted’ (5), resulting in the stigma of the complexity and skill
of handcrafts being overlooked as ubiquitous and anonymous. Not just on the streets,
but in the home, handcrafting is increasingly acknowledged as emerging from
complex motivations, and perhaps illustrates that the domestic interior is a ‘more
fragmented place than the frozen space of patriarchal mythology’. (Buckley 1999: 57)
Hemmings (2010) suggests that making for leisure rather than necessity means that
handcraft ‘appears in unexpected guises with intentions and meanings that stray far
outside the realm of the domestic and utilitarian’. (9) Such intentions may include the
relishing of a slowness hard to find in a fast-paced world (Black 2012) through to
the quiet activism of taking up space and time in handcrafting alone (Hackney 2013),
generating community identity (Prigoda & McKenzie 2007) or opening up
opportunities for creativity (Stannard & Sanders 2015) and experiencing ‘flow’.
(Lampitt Adey 2018)

In her work on domestic culture, Hollows (2013) posits that there is less scholarship
that explores the everyday, or what may be labelled mundane (although that in itself
belies a negative attitude to handcraft). This tendency has impacted the study of
making practices such as knitting, sewing and embroidery, and is further complicated
through attitudes toward feminism resisting handcraft as something which may be
construed as anti-feminist. Hollows’ (2013) work on consumption connected to
women’s domestic activity and oppression suggests that to separate from the domestic
is part of identification as a feminist, and comes with a rejection of associated tasks or
interests (Hollows 2008)—just as consumption focused on domestic space was
challenged by Friedan. (2010/1982) There remains a concern not to valorise
domestic handcraft as a source of fulfilment for women (Harrison & Ogden 2019),
and to seek liberation in disrupting the traditions and stereotypes of femininity in the
domestic sphere.

Spare Rib: The Early Years

Echoing Withers’ (2016) interest in what may be understood in considering the

heritage and cultural value gained by feminist print culture over time, Bruley &
Forster (2016) ask how communities and traditions of feminisms are revealed
through public facing cultural acts, including publications. Drawing on the expertise,
experience and contacts of the first editors, Spare Rib reached a wide audience through
huge print runs and retail in large national UK chains such as WHSmith and John
Menzies. (Winship 1987; Hollows 2013) Through its manifesto, printed as a press
release and on the first page of the inaugural edition, Spare Rib claimed its place as a
magazine for women, addressing the shortcomings of existing women’s magazines
which perpetuated a vision of women as ‘passive, dependent, conformist, incapable of
critical thought’ (Spare Rib 1972a: 1), focused on consumption as the answer to a
better life, and in which the domestic sphere was the only context for fulfilment.

While Spare Rib provided an alternative to what women’s magazines already

represented, challenging readers and the status quo with new notions of womanhood
and feminist thought, the earliest years of production still attempted to emulate
aspects of existing publications (Forster 2016; Forster & Hollows 2020) with features
on food, beauty, and clothing. Traditionally feminised interests were portrayed as a
celebration of freedom and collaboration, ‘Do-It-Together’ culture and subversion.
Where ‘domestic’ activities were featured, these were largely presented from a
‘feminist consciousness perspective, chiming with anti-capitalist feminism and the
anti-consumerist ethics of a 1970s lifestyle’. (Forster 2016: 823) This explored how
activities like handcraft could be part of personal expression and political commentary
on the traditionally ‘feminine’ or domestic. 
However, as Spare Rib became more established, there were editorial struggles in
moving away from traditional features on interests such as handcraft. (Rowe 1982)
The first few years of Spare Rib can be viewed as the magazine and its editors learning
how to ‘be’ a feminist magazine, but the balance of attracting sales, educating new
readers about the Women’s Liberation Movement, and satisfying the expectations of
established feminists proved challenging. Winship (1987) suggests that meeting these
complex and often contradictory goals was always an impossible task. Investigating
the place of handcraft in the magazine is a microcosm of some of the dilemmas faced
by the editors in encouraging women to see themselves, their personal practices and
the wider movement in fresh new ways. As Spare Rib moved through the 1970s and
away from an editorial structure to a collective, the approach towards handcraft
shifted from regular features focused on encouraging making and expression through
creativity to a more distanced historical perspective, before it unravelled almost
completely. 

Handcraft & Agency in Spare Rib

Handcraft takes its place in the very first issue of Spare Rib, with an article about the
achievements of Emmeline Pankhurst, which includes details of the ‘thoroughly
feminine’ elaborate embroidered banners of the Suffrage movement. (Raeburn 1972:
12) Whilst this is clearly set in its historical context, it is notable that feminist
practices and making by hand are connected in the magazine from the very beginning,
even if perceived tensions between such acts pull these apart later.

The next issue of Spare Rib saw the second and last feature on clothing, entitled
‘GARB’ (the first focusing on jeans worn by real women of the Portobello and
Edgeware Roads in London). Regardless of how short lived this fashion contribution
was, it is fascinating to see that the feature presented hand knitting as a celebration of
feminist agency. In ‘Patterns for the Woolly Minded’ (Hamilton 1972) knitting
patterns designed specifically for Spare Rib by Avril Highley of KnitMastery and styled
by accessories from Biba, were marketed through the image of three women, arms
around one another, relaxed, collaborative and joyful. It suggested using wool ‘of any
4ply you might have hanging around’ (36), which assumed existing interest and skill
in the readership, but adopted a deliberate tone of relaxation and freedom in getting
‘your needles out and seeing how good it feels to wear clothes you have made
yourself’. (36) Rosie Boycott, writing later for The Guardian, commented that this
feature was included ‘in the name of self-sufficiency’ (2007) and the team was
surprised and overwhelmed by the huge audience response of those wanting to order
these (free) patterns. She reflected that this feature was, like cooking, ‘wholly
frivolous and politically dangerous’ (Boycott 2007) in failing to offer something
sufficiently distinct from other women’s magazines. These early tensions can be
observed in the wording of the title ‘woolly minded,’ and its implications of muddled
confusion or triviality.

Making one’s own clothes took a back seat until a significant issue in March 1973.
The theme of this issue was the domestic work of making and mending—both literal
and metaphorical—with the cover image focused on the burden of domestic labour,
illustrated by a harassed, apron-wearing woman gazing at the viewer over close-up
images of an iron, a teapot, and a spool of cotton thread. She appears unconvinced by
the subheading reassuring readers that such labour ‘needn’t be a chore’. (Spare Rib
1973) 

Within the issue, an extended feature over four pages, ‘Stitchy Fingers’ aimed to
encourage ‘non-expert’ dressmakers with the tagline ‘Simpler than Simplicity’
(Sampson 1973: 31) referring explicitly to a popular home sewing pattern brand and
suggesting that makers may be freed from the strictures of paper patterns to
demonstrate their own creativity and agency. With text by Ellie Sampson and designs
by Ann Caddle, a 20-year-old fresh from the London College of Fashion, ‘Simpler
than Simplicity’ had straightforward, geometric diagrams and hints for taking
measurements to craft one’s own garments. This was celebrated as cheaper, more
satisfying, freeing and fun—in making by hand, women should not ‘let the rules get
the upper hand’ but instead ‘wear what you want, not what current trend dictates’.
(Sampson 1973: 32)

But this is not quite so straightforward a message as it may seem. The making relied
on much existing haptic, tactile understanding of how to sew by responding to
simplified diagrams and minimal instruction. The illustrations used throughout are
‘vintage’ images of women engaged in making and adapting clothing, either flapper-
thin or New Look-waisted. This is as problematic in the use of the same ostensibly
appealing and nostalgic references to the past regarding handcraft that can be
observed today. (Myzelev 2009; Harrison & Ogden 2019) Was this a parody, or a
subversive nod to associations of domestic craft and women’s suppression? These
contradictory messages about making one’s own clothes are not resolved in the
feature, and home sewing would not be discussed again in Spare Rib for another two
years.

The complex and uncomfortable relationship between feminism and sewing one’s own
clothing is next observed in Elizabeth Wilson’s 1975 feature on homemade fashion.
She considers the fantasy of a cultural revolt in making one’s own clothes, to satisfy
self-expression and give the social signals to one’s ‘tribe,’ helping to address some of
the same points about waste, mass production and sustainability that are being made
today. She presents home sewing and similar crafts as a way to engage in the radical
act of demonstrating alternative lifestyles, and even makes a connection between the
twin gestation of the Women’s Liberation Movement and anti-consumerist creativity
in making by hand over the course of the 1970s. However, she discusses tension in
that same relationship, where self-expression of an individual may be at odds with the
cooperative political direction of the wider group. Readers are invited to consider
Wilson’s discomfort and ambivalence in the tensions between attitudes towards
textiles handcraft and the complicated act of ‘learning to be a woman’. (Wilson 1975:
32) Sewing a wardrobe may push back against consumerism and facilitate self-
determination and agency, but concerns about conflicts in feminist philosophy
remained.

Spare Parts: Using your Hands for Happiness

Other elements of making and crafting clothing and accessories came with an early
regular feature ‘Spare Parts’ in the final pages of Spare Rib, usually written by
Stephanie Gilbert. The very first of these, published in July 1972, set the context for
feminist DIY and empowerment in making shelves. (Gilbert 1972a) Initially
accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations, and later using photographic images, these
encouraged agency through one’s own fingers, whether making or fixing for the home,
mending possessions, children’s toys, or crafting simple gifts for friends. 

An early example connected closely to handmaking was ‘How to Repair your Clogs’ in
issue 3 (Gilbert, 1972b), which gave instructions on fixing the crumbling cork of
one’s platform heel. This feature generated the only complaint letter published in
Spare Rib about ‘Spare Parts,’ with a reader suggesting it was inappropriate to advise
mending when women should instead be exercising their consumer rights. (Spare Rib,
1972b) Part of the ethos behind ‘Spare Parts’ was set out explicitly in the December
1972 issue, in which Gilbert presented a double page on handcrafting Christmas
presents such as felted brooches, purses and fabric decorations. Such activity is
framed as anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist, avoiding the over-packaged and over-
priced ‘onslaught of material goods’ in order to find ‘satisfaction in making our gifts’
instead. (Gilbert 1972c: 39) Between features on fixing broken bicycles, dripping taps
and even self-defence, there were ‘Spare Parts’ pages which offered advice on making
curtains and blinds— ‘our windows, or covering them up and keeping ourselves in, is
an important matter to us’ (Gilbert 1973: 28)—and lampshades. However, the feature
became more sporadic, even accompanied by apologies for missed issues, ‘pitifully
reduced to promises, promises, of better things to come’. (Gilbert 1974: 38) ‘Spare
Parts’ was officially dropped from the regular feature list from issue 25 in the summer
of 1974.

‘Spare Parts’ sought to provide empowerment and agency through self-reliance in

fixing tap washers, car maintenance and self-defence, as well as making curtains or
soft toys for children. It challenged consumerism—including in craft retail—the joys
of Doing It Yourself or Doing It Together, and illuminating readers in what may be
considered traditionally ‘masculine’ handwork, as well as in textiles handcraft.
(Hollows 2013) Joanne Hollows’ consideration of Spare Rib points out that the
feature provided more than thrifty guidance on practical matters, but also joy and
personal satisfaction in developing skills including handcraft.

Pricked Fingers: Early Craftivism

There were also articles in Spare Rib which focused on women’s artisanal protest, with
subversion through domestic craft and folk feminism of embroidery and textile work.
In July 1975, a feature by the young Rozsika Parker was published offering an
exploration of embroidery, writing that ‘[t]his relationship has been mutually
destructive … the same characteristics were ascribed to both women and embroidery,
they were seen as mindless, decorative and delicate’ (Parker 1975: 41), and textile
scholars are still trying to engage with and reset these attitudes.

However, this did not stop the magazine from, in May 1978, using embroidery in the
design of their subscription appeal. A chain stitched scroll bearing the words ‘“May
Be” the month to subscribe to Spare Rib’ is embellished with delicate stemmed flowers,
musical notes, and the gender pictogram of cross and circle. (Spare Rib 1978: 47)
This design echoes, subverts and reinterprets the cult of domesticity often represented
through handcrafted stitch work to celebrate the feminist ideals of the magazine. It
indicates that the editors were confident in making the connection between the
political and handcraft, where embroidery could be used by women ‘as an extension
of their political voice when they could not risk the safety of their body, or did not
have political agency, to exercise their voice in public’. (Mandell, 2019: 3-4)

Whilst the magazine happily focused on this type of folk feminism in the
embellishment of textiles through embroidery, its discomfort with the oppressive,
domestic associations of handcraft still leached through. In issue 67, writer Amy
Brackx (1978) interviewed Beryl Weaver, whose domestic, subversive, therapeutic use
of stitching was used to express solidarity with other women feeling confined by their
roles as homemaker and caregiver. The article was titled ‘Subverting Sweetness,’ and
presented these kinds of personal and political embroidery on to domestic, even
saccharine textiles like handkerchiefs and doilies, which may be more familiar to 21st
century scholars through projects like Tiny Pricks (Weymar 2019). It focused on
Weaver’s practice of embroidery, as well as crochet and lacework, to express her
frustrations at feeling restricted, having limited opportunity for a creative outlet and
finding handcraft a solace. 

Nevertheless, in describing the embroidery which communicates her frustration at

domestic drudgery, the maker herself denigrates the skill or significance of her work: 

I ask her if she thinks of herself as an artist and she half smilingly answers, ‘No,
I’m filling time, or maybe I am wasting time … I suppose I do use a box of
coloured silks like a palette and I like mixing and dabbing them around … but
I’ve never thought of myself as creative’. (Brackx 1978: 43) 

More recently, Springgay (2010) describes handcraft such as this type of subversive
embroidery as an embodied and tactile political engagement, where stitch can form a
new type of cultural resistance, ‘a mutable, creative and negotiated space that is a
political activity in itself’. ( 112) In addition to a defiant act of resistance, other
scholars recognise the quiet activism of making space and time for the self (Hackney
2013; Hackney, Maughan and Desmarais 2016) in social engagement or expression.
Handcraft and stitching, in particular 
 the action and movements of hands holding needle and thread looping back on
itself in a stitch, made through the folds of cloth, is one of the oldest, most basic,
most fundamental, most simple and most eloquent of forms of articulate self-
reflexivity. (Pajaczkowska 2014: 21) 

is not embraced here as a particularly feminist act. Brackx herself displays tensions in
attitudes towards handcraft and handcrafters in her dismissive tone, describing
Weaver as suburban, shrill, and ‘shrieking hysterically with a witch’s cackle’. (1978:
43)

Distance through an Historic Lens

The tension of this problematic connection between feminism and textile arts was
displayed in the remaining issues from the decade by exploring handcraft largely
through an historical lens. Addressing craft as examples of material culture from
earlier centuries provided a critical distance from the complexities of its place in
contemporary feminism.

Within this context, there were examples of early work by Grizelda Pollock writing
on the Women’s History Art Collective and the creative traditions of patchwork and
quilting demonstrated in places like Gees Bend, Alabama (1974). Here, Pollock
considered not just the finished crafted objects, often constructed from old clothing,
but by and for whom they were made. She celebrates the ‘autonomous creative
tradition’ (Pollock 1974: 35) of women designing, working and exhibiting together
and laments the lack of recognition afforded to their skill. She recognises the
utilitarian, familial and political value in stitching quilts which held enormous
emotional and personal significance for individuals, but focuses attention especially on
the work of the collective. In arguing against the ways such handcraft skill has been
treated so poorly, Pollock makes a powerful case for ‘a confirmation of women’s
autonomous creative traditions’ (37)—but quilting as a form of expression for
readers is never discussed in Spare Rib during this period. 

There is also a tantalising early article by Roszika (then known as Rosie) Parker on
the history of women’s hand stitched work in embroidery and textiles, including the
Holloway Prison suffrage handkerchiefs and banners, embellished with the names of
those who were force fed. The article signs off with a reassurance that this is a first
step in exploring historic textiles and embroidery, and it is intriguing to think that her
Spare Rib article was the beginning of work which would become The Subversive Stitch.
(Parker 2010) Parker discusses how, in contrast to embroidery in the art schools of
the 19th century, 

today it is grudgingly accepted as an art technique. But the basic values and the
class division within embroidery remain thoroughly fossilised. Embroidery,
practiced as craft, used on clothes, cushions, is still considered inferior to the fine
arts. The women who embroider at home, instead of regarding their work with
pride, refer to it deprecatingly as their occupational therapy, while outside the
low paid women workers machine embroider the back pockets of pre-faded
jeans. (Parker, 1975: 45)

In The Subversive Stitch, Parker (2010) went on to argue that the needle is a ‘weapon
of resistance’ (ix), subverted by women who use textile craft ‘to make meaning of
their own in the very medium intended to foster polite effacement’. (201) The same
themes which suggest handcraft is a complex activity, simultaneously representing
submission, powerlessness, pleasure, and empowerment are investigated in this early
iteration of Parker’s ideas, but are not expanded upon again. As the magazine
approached the end of its first decade, it had returned to perceiving handcraft as an
oppressive tool of history: Issue 91 was the last time handcraft—in its palatable
position as something from the past—was examined in the magazine with an article
about Anthea Callen’s new book on women in the Arts and Crafts movement, Angel in
the Studio (1979). Here, handcrafted embroidery was presented as a middle-class
activity designed to express and inculcate moral purity in the lives of women who
were confined to a small domestic interior. The message was now clear: for Spare Rib,
handcraft belonged only as part of historic context.

Dropped Stitches

In a reflexive editorial in July 1979, staff at Spare Rib looked back at how their
features on fashion, health and beauty in the early days were part of attempting to
find a place in the market for a new kind of women’s magazine. While they were
proud that their focus drew attention to issues of commodification and objectification
in women’s lives, there was discomfort. The editors explicitly signalled a shift in
perspective on feminist approaches in Spare Rib, concerned to avoid ‘trapping
ourselves with images which either exploit women or which give the magazine a
knitting book look’. (Parker 1979: 18)

Specifically citing handcraft as anathema to what Spare Rib should be is fascinating.

Regardless of the celebrations of agency and activism, features on Suffrage protest,
exclusion of textiles from the art world and important historic women’s practices, the
precarious place of making by hand in a feminist publication was too challenging to
balance. Features on knitting, sewing or embroidery were too typical of traditional
women’s magazines according to Beetham (1996), drawing on a feminised space but
insufficiently feminist for the collective editorial team which took Spare Rib into the
1980s. The first issue of 1982 saw a rare knitting pattern pull-out designed by
Luknitics of Perth, Scotland which invited readers to ‘Knit Yourself a Woman’s
Woolly’ (Spare Rib 1981: 28-29) decorated with gender pictograms, but there is very
little reference to handcraft in the magazine from this point onwards.

Hollows (2008) explores this challenge further in her work on feminism in domestic
spaces, where handcraft can be seen as problematic in both creating and perpetuating
gendered inequalities. In particular, she celebrates how nurturing the self and others
through craft can play a part in challenging patriarchal values and building a society
based on collective community and care, but that this is often built on an essentialist
view of what roles women may play. Spare Rib, as a second wave feminist publication,
was caught uncomfortably in the tension between these readings of activities such as
handcrafting, as they replicated ‘the assumption that domestic practices are of little
social or cultural value’ (Hollows 2008: 69) and therefore of negligible political value.
Similarly, Hollows suggests that the historic lens used in Spare Rib to present ideas
about clothing and handcraft was a way to decommodify interest in the domestic, and
place it in a more cerebral art history discourse at least ‘partially divorced from a
notion of practice’ (Hollows 2013: 280), and certainly from leisure and activity for
pleasure. Handcraft played an early role in the editors’ attempts to forge Spare Rib a
place in feminist publications, but this could not be squared with its ongoing attempts
to challenge patriarchal privilege.

The Spare Rib Manifesto (1972a) sought to provide a publication for women
frustrated by the limitations of existing magazines which drew on perceptions of
women as passive and confined to traditional roles. This included a commitment to
women who ‘remain isolated and unhappy’ (Spare Rib 1972a: 1) and even though
there were features—about Suffrage embroidery (Raeburn 1972; Parker 1975) or
Beryl Weaver’s domestic activism (Brackx 1978) —which explored how handcraft
could be used to alleviate or communicate some of that distress, the editors were not
supportive of such messages moving forward. Hollows (2013) suggests that while the
editors of the magazine were conscious of the potential of domestic practices like
embroidery or knitting to communicate with their readers, they reproduced the
binary opposition of a critically aware feminist and the ‘housewife,’ whose interest in
handcraft appears as a betrayal.

Conclusions

21st century feminist readers are perhaps more likely to embrace the idea that
handcraft may be a salve to women’s isolation and unhappiness identified in the Spare
Rib manifesto (Parkins 2004; Hollows 2008), or for non-conformist, anti-
consumption, critically aware thinking to be expressed through its practice. (Mandell,
2019) While it is frustrating to view negative attitudes towards handcraft as a lost
opportunity to explore feminist thinking (Hollows 2013), it is also possible to view
the work of Spare Rib in paving the way for other publications as they represented
pleasure in handcrafts disentangled from perceptions of domestic oppression.

Groenevald (2016), writing on Bust magazine, focuses on the ways handcraft

activities previously associated with the domestic sphere and political or creative
oppression for women have been reclaimed—a shift entirely supported by Bust editor
Debbie Stoller’s own Stitch ‘n Bitch publications, which encouraged feminists to ‘take
back the knit’. (2003: 9) While there are still challenges and tensions in negotiating
representation in feminist or traditional women’s magazines, engaging with craft is
seen as part of connecting with a long heritage in publications (Groenevald 2016)
and political actions in riot grrl and cyberfeminist culture. (Minahan & Wolfram Cox
2007) The discomfort with handcrafting observed in Spare Rib shifts in third wave
publications, where a new generation is perhaps more open to the complex ways that
activities can be political or politicised, including the rejection of binary thinking
which portrays handcraft as either radical or complicit in patriarchal domesticity.
(Groenevald 2016)
Handcraft in feminist publication is still held in tension: it may be presented as
creative pleasure and leisure, a progressive feminist act, or a retrograde step to focus
on aesthetics and histories of feminine traditional domesticity. Deans (2010)
expresses concern about how feminism has become ‘domesticated’ in media
representations, from the confrontational, wild radical to taking up space in more
moderate, acceptable, docile ways through focus on ‘the domestic’—an idea similarly
present in McRobbie’s work examining the representation of feminisms in public
discourse. (2013) There is also greater awareness of the ways that class and status are
entangled in handcraft as a pursuit less to do with domestic need, and more to do
with choice, leisure, and privilege. (Drix 2014; Forster & Hollows 2020) Sedgwick
(2020) suggests that feminist magazines including Spare Rib consistently demonstrate
a problematic relationship with popular feminism and continue to be implicated with
capitalism as they walk a tightrope between representations which are perceived as
either excessively or insufficiently radical.

Fountain (2020), writing on the connections between queerness and craft, discusses
how the materiality and flexibility of craft processes and practices ‘offer particularly
fertile ground in which to “queer” narratives, imagery or materials’ (online). Drawing
on the work of Getsy (2016), Fountain suggests that the potential held in engaging
with craft offers opportunities to play with, investigate and reshape identities, power
structures and categorisation, and explore what may be missing in representations.
This may go some way towards explaining an energised attitude to handcraft in some
queer culture publications which embrace its potential from acts of progressive
activism to making for wellbeing. For example, the hugely popular online lesbian
culture magazine AutoStraddle (2021) has celebrated forms of handcraft since its
inception, and includes craft as part of its regular digital and in-person ‘meet-ups.’
Articles frequently include making ethical consumption choices through buying craft
supplies from independent companies, encouragement in body positivity by sewing
one’s own wardrobe, and enjoying the pleasures of crochet, cross stitch and knit.
There are practical guides to inclusive sewing for all genders and body shapes
(Shannon, 2017), handcraft with and for children (Rich, 2015) and cultural features
(Rios 2016). Commentary on activism through craft (Parker 2020) also embraces
the ways that queer communities have responded to the Coronavirus pandemic, for
example in making face masks. (Friedman 2020) The presentation of handcraft here
engages with both the traditional and new, suggesting that it is possible to participate
in the joys of handcraft and its supportive communities without entanglement in
oppression. 

In initially embracing then rejecting activities such as sewing, knitting and

embroidery, the writers and editors of Spare Rib were working to define feminist
culture in opposition to traditional activities such as handcrafts. For many, to be
feminist during the growth of the Women’s Liberation Movement meant leaving crafts
associated with the drudgery of domesticity behind. However, there is more to
handcraft than the oppression of the needle, as explored in its own pages in this first
decade of Spare Rib. The connection between these practices and traditions and a rich
cultural heritage in feminisms was used to sustain feminist ideas and identities in the
magazine, even though they were not fully articulated. The potential for agency in
being creative, the personal and political freedom of making clothes to fit one’s own
body, the activism of subversion through stitch, and the lauding of women’s skill
throughout history were all celebrated before being placed aside. 

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the work undertaken by the British Library digitisation project in
offering all issues of Spare Rib online, even though these are no longer available post-
Brexit. I would also like to thank staff at the reading rooms of the National Library of
Scotland and Glasgow Women’s Library for providing access to complete collections
in their physical archives. This article develops work first presented at the 2018
MeCCSA conference on creativity and agency, and has been honed through generous
conversations with Professor Fiona Hackney, Dr Claire Sedgwick and Dr DM
Withers.

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