What's wrong with knitting? Surely it's harmless? It is enjoying a heyday at the moment and in 1916 there was a nationwide knitting frenzy (people, especially women, even knitted at the theatre and on public transport) as everyone knitted things for soldiers.
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But 100 years ago this week, in an angry essay in Melbourne's feminist, pacifist Woman Voter, Karen Hotson accused Australia's women of stupefying themselves with knitting when instead they should have been thinking.
"The attitude of Australian women to war ... fills one with sorrow.
"That there are serious, industrious women and some girls burning the midnight oil in the seclusion of their own homes, making respirators, shirts, pyjamas, and every variety of knitted goods, we know. And what could not women do if they were not doing these things? Many of.them say that they would go mad: that they could not exist if they did not work, work, and soothe and dull their brains beyond clear thinking!
"What an indictment of the world and its misgovernment! A world where women must not Think, but must stupefy themselves.
"No; the time has come for women to do more than knit and knit like Madame Defarge [harpy beside the guillotine in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities] while the heads fall, and Europe's casualty list gets larger. It is time for the women to say This is enough! This is the last time! We will have an age of reason, and put an end to the reign of brute force."
