Peggy Orenstein: Knitting Together Our Lives
Peggy Orenstein is a celebrated journalist who is acclaimed for her insightful analysis of gender, sexuality, and identity issues. She’s written several best-sellers about the topic, including Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex. But that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. During COVID, Peggy took a right turn, and an entirely different type of book emerged, one that is actually just as radical. In Unraveling, she explores the depths of her grief and tackles societal issues through the process of making a sweater from scratch—including shearing a sheep and carding and dying the wool—ultimately discovering the power of creativity and connection.
While sharing her journey of making the sweater, which is actually riveting, she also unravels the rich history and culture of spinning and weaving while exposing the sobering reality of fast fashion and its detrimental impact on our environment. This is a book about something that sounds simple, yet is actually about everything, offering the potential for a genuine shift in how we perceive the world. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM PEGGY ORENSTEIN:
Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hook-Ups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape
Don’t Call Me a Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex and Life
Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of New Girlie-Girl Culture
Peggy Orenstein’s Website
Follow Peggy on Instagram and Twitter
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I think we're lost and I say this as a self-interested 43 year old, but still it's like, what are we doing? You know?
PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah. Well, I mean, there's that gradual invisibility with middle age, but I don't know. I'm like in late middle age, but I'm looking forward and just thinking, that doesn't look good over there. And then, you know, not to plastic surgery shame or anything, but you see part of, I think the, the fight with that is that it's so terrifying to age after a certain point for women that, you can't, I mean I totally get it. I totally get you have to or you will not be able to work or you won't be able to, you know, be seen in the world.
ELISE: Do you think that will change? Like do you feel like it's changing at all or do you have any hope about that? About a different fate.
PEGGY: No, not right now. I mean, I don’t know. I have an older husband. My husband's 10 years older than I am, so presumably, unless something happens, which of course it could, but the way that our lives will work is that I will take care of him as he gets older and dies, and then I'll be by myself, old, and I like look at that and think, huh, this is not a good deal. What, and, and we're not, you know, just like we're not set up for childcare. We're not set up for all these things. We don't take care of our young, we don't take care of our old, and in both cases it's kind of, you know, women who end up getting the short end of the stick on it.
But you also don't wanna write something that's so grim and depressing that nobody wants to pick it up. So it's like threading that needle of, and you don't wanna be, you know, stupid, joyful in a way that's not true. And all the, you know, what you were saying too about, it's not about longevity or fighting back against age or something. It's like, what does this mean to us and, and are there ways that we can approach it or go through it or, or think about it that would be radical and useful, that we're just not, and everybody keeps saying, you know, all my friends, cause we're all going through our parents dying now and you just think, oh, I don't wanna be like that, I don’t wanna go through it like they did, which is what my parents used to say. I'm not gonna do that. Like mine did, my parents were like, no way. Just shoot me. You know? But we're not really doing anything to change that.
ELISE: We refuse to engage with the inevitable demise. But I think that women, I mean intuitively, we understand all things must end and what decomposes recomposes, right? Like this is the cycle of earth and I think women inherently understand this in a much more profound way and then are cultured to try to stave it off. In part, it's almost like we've become complicit in this idea, this fear that like we'll just pretend like this isn't happening to us either, when really I think we need to be leaning into it. And then you think of like the, the maiden—what’s the archetype? The Maiden, the Mother, the Queen, and Crone. The etymology of crone is carion, the carcass. Yeah. But I think that if we stopped actually to question that we would recognize just that we're scared. We're just scared of older women, they are quite powerful.
PEGGY: Yeah, we haven’t had older women like we do now, either.
ELISE: Yeah, no, we've erased them and you know, we venerate older men as our presidents and judges and, women are missing, right? I mean, not to keep going back to Don Lemon, talking about Nikki Haley being past her prime, but what the hell? Right? I loved your book in a way because it’s I'll read anything that you write, Peggy, you know that, and I have obviously intensely read your work on kids and sex and sexuality, and so I was like, oh, this will be a fun romp. And it was a fun romp, but it's like a side door into a massive conversation about everything.
PEGGY: Yeah. Right. Who knew? I know. People say to me, you know how, like it doesn't make sense that I went from teenagers and sex to, you know, yarn. But I think it is completely consistent. It's not like I stopped being who I am as a writer or as a person. And that kind of curiosity about looking at the unexamined in everyday life and particularly as it relates to women and girls, it felt completely consistent to me. It was, you know, it looks at the radical nature of women's work which is all about this fiber stuff. It looks at the planet, it looks at our relationship to our daughters and our mothers and aging and all of these things, creativity. It felt, you know, like it was absolutely at peace with my other work, it's just a slightly different vessel for it.
ELISE: Yeah. No, I agree. There are many really powerful sections in this book. And of course my podcast is called Pulling the Thread, so I'm right there with you, which is when you go back and you write about this so beautifully, but when you start to understand fabric weaving stories, who was it? I don't know if you specifically mentioned this, I'm thinking of Mary Beard and Penelope weaving and the Odyssey, but also this idea that women taking it right to sexuality, if they claimed to have been sexually assaulted or raped, whose tongue was cut out, but she wove the whole story of her.
PEGGY: No, I didn't, I didn't. I didn't know that because textile metaphors are so woven into our culture that they would've taken over. So I made this kind of decision, like, I'm not gonna do the weaving metaphors because I'm not weaving and there's just too many of those. But I do a kind of riff on some of the language, the ways that it's in our language and even, I mean, you can just go on and on. But when we send those little things on our phones to our friends, those iMessages, what do we call those? We call those texts, and that's the same route as textile. And the little answers, answers, answers, back and forth, we call those threads. So even when we go into the virtual world, we take this tangible memory of how important fibrin cloth is. You know, when we're born, the first thing that happens is we are wrapped in cloth and when we leave this world, the last thing that happens is we are wrapped in cloth and in between we spend a lot of time in cloth. I mean, every book is a braid, right? And the part that I knew was that I was gonna do this kind of thing of shearing a sheep and processing fleece and spinning and dying yarn and knitting up a sweater. But I didn't know all the other strands of the braid, the multiple strands. And so one of them was this idea of it turns out you can tell the whole history of the world through fiber cloth dying. I mean, it blew me away that I went down so many rabbit holes of fascinating research. It was the most fun I had.
ELISE: Yeah, I mean, so take us there. And I love the idea too, that you talk about, this as things you learned from your mother, but the way that craftwork is typically handed down, but what was the genesis of this book? Did you know what you were, we'll just keep going with the weaving threads, but did you know all of the threads you were going to pull on.
PEGGY: Not at all. Boys and Sex had just come out and I had been, I probably talked to you back then, I had been going around the country with that. It was January, it came out in January, 2020. And I was making the transition after a couple months from book tour to more formal speaking events. And I had three events in Los Angeles I was gonna fly down for, and I was on my way to the airport in my car. It was like March 11th or something, and I just thought, I cannot do this. And I turned around and went home and canceled them. And the event coordinators were like, but we're gonna have hand sanitizer at the event. It's gonna be fine, because that's what we thought, right? And I couldn't do it. And so a couple days later, the whole world shut down. My family, like many of ours, I was very lucky, we could be home. We were okay, we were healthy, but also terrified in not knowing what was gonna happen or how long things this was gonna go on. And so I would sit and knit, which I'd done since I was, you know, maybe 11, 12 years old, my mom taught me and I’d talk to my mom who was dead for four years.
I would just have these conversations with her in my head and wished so desperately. You know, all these things were kind of coming crashing down when I stopped moving because I was traveling so much about being, you know, in later midlife, my daughter leaving home, going to college, my husband retiring, you know, all this, what was I gonna do with my life? What transition was I gonna make? And my dad declining, my mom dead. And I wish that I could talk to her at the age that I was then, and that she would be that age too. You know, that doesn't happen. So, I had learned to knit from my mom. The acronym I use as S L H F M, she learned from her mom, cause so many people that I met, so many of the women and it's very much a women's story, did learn from their mothers. But that was a whole set of metaphors too, of like, what we learned from our moms that we're happy about what we learned from our moms that we wish we hadn't. I never taught my daughter to knit. She, I had somebody else teach her because, I knit in a kind of a quirky way and I thought, Ugh, that's just gonna, that's not gonna serve her. But that became something I didn't want my daughter to learn from her mother. And, you know, there's all those things too, right? That we don't want our children to learn from us, particularly our daughters, that we hand down that we want to, that we hand down, that we don't mean to, that we don't hand down.
So there's a lot of those metaphors. But I was sitting there and doing that and I had this long held fantasy that I can't really fully explain, about going from sheep to sweater, learning to sheer sheep, and doing this whole thing to go off to the sweater. And I thought, well, I'm just sitting here. Maybe this would be a time to do this and it would be really fun to write about it. So I knew that. But everything else that I wrote about, no idea, I think that’s the value in some ways of doing something you know, nothing about once in a while that you just do on a whim because you never know what it, where it's gonna lead to. And I mean, I never could've predicted all these things that I never could've predicted. It would've been so much about climate change that it could've been so much about creativity, that it would've been so much about the planet, that it would've been so much about my parents, you know, all of that. I couldn't have predicted that.
ELISE: Yeah. And that makes it so fun, the going back and forth, for people who haven't read it yet, between where you are in the process, which is hilarious. You're a fun writer. Like it's such a fun read. And then dropping into the history of indigo or labor mills or all of these different places that you brought us where it's incredibly fascinating material. So let's start there. You know, showing up to shear your sheep and wearing, what did you call it?
PEGGY: What we call a fleece, which is not, and it's like my little, you know, trustee made out of recycled water bottles and realizing that that was the equivalent of waving a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread at a bar mitzvah.
ELISE: Yeah. A triumph of Orwellian marketing. This idea that polyester fluff. Yeah, we call it a fleece. Can you tell us about, cause this was fascinating to me about the way that people have insinuated that shearing sheep is somehow inhumane or cruel when it's essential to their survival, and the environmental implications of how we have replaced this, how we've replaced wool thinking sometimes that we're making a superior choice.
PEGGY: Yeah. I mean yes to both of those things. I mean, I kind of knew fast fashion was bad. Like you kind of have that sense, but not really how bad. It is really important to say that sheep need to be shorn. If they are not shorn, they'll die. We've bred them over millennia to just keep growing, so they just get more and more, and there's been sheep found in the wilderness that have kind of gone rogue with 70 or 90 pounds of wool and underneath they're starving to death because they can't reach, you know, anything to eat. And it doesn't hurt them. It's like they don't love it. You know, anymore than your two year old likes to have their haircut. I mean, it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. It was so hard. The sheep weighs more than I do, it is really slippery cause they're covered with lanolin, which you know from your, like your lip balm and stuff, and they have hooves and they kick and they don't, you know, they're not excited about this thing and you have a hot worrying blade with no safety, so the sheep was totally fine.
I sheered three sheep. I think they told me that minute for minute it burns twice as many calories as marathon running. And my teacher, it took her, you know, three minutes to sheer a sheep. It took me an hour and a half, and there's a very set way that you do it. And it looked like a crime scene. Not because I ever heard the sheep, but because I cut the tips of my fingers off constantly. So there was like blood everywhere. I was so exhausted by the time I was done and so proud that I actually got through it. But meanwhile, I was at this ranch that was, doing regenerative farming, which is like one upping sustainability. It's like making the air and the land and the water better, instead of just like keeping it at the way that we've degraded it. And so we were talking a lot about the impact of wool on climate and how the wool industry in this country has collapsed, partly because of offshoring, but partly because of the rise of synthetic fiber, which I never really thought that much about, but has happened in our lifetime, pretty much like since the sixties, when our clothing used to be made of natural fiber and which degrades and, you know, goes back to the earth and all of that. Uh, and now 70% of our clothing is synthetic, you know, your yoga pants, like, it doesn't matter if it's high end or low end. Doesn't matter if it's h and m or it's like Lululemon.
It's got, synthetic, which is made of plastic. It's fossil fuel. So it never decomposes. It just goes into landfill. And even if you're recycling those water bottles, that's still gonna go into landfill eventually. And until it does, it's shedding. This is so depressing. It's shedding hundreds of thousands of these little invisible things called microfibers that are the biggest threat to the ocean now, and or one of the biggest threats, and I kind of compare it to again, with the Jewish metaphor, that when I was a kid, we used to, in Minneapolis, we used to throw our sins into the lake every Roshoshana new year, you know, three years in, start over. And I would imagine this like tarry mass at the bottom of this lake that my congregation I've been throwing since into for a hundred years.
Microfibers are like that, but real. They are destroying the ocean and wildlife and I mean, I'm already recycling and driving a Prius and composting, and because I live in California, I don't flush if it's only pee and like all these different things. And to then be confronted with what my clothing was doing, I just wanted to like, you know, take to my eco certified bed. I just wanted to buy a damn pair of pants. But one of the things I talk about, and I wrote a piece for the New York Times about this after the book came out, is that those of us who do hand work, particularly, I mean all of us, and I asked why we don't think about our clothing, the way we think about our food. Cause we're so conscious, right? Of sustainability and ethics and labor and all this with our food. We don't think about it very much with our clothing. And those of us who, who have had the experience of making and value our fiber and our materials and know what it takes to really create a garment are kind of ideally situated to be on the forefront of pushing for better policies, laws, regulation of the fashion industry, so that they can be compelled to change their really horrific ways, both in terms of the planet, in terms of labor.
ELISE: Yeah, I thought the book was a great service in that way. I mean, this is not a story that we're told or that I think any of us really know. You know, I'm a Montana kid. I own a ton of Patagonia fleece, and in my mind I've followed the need for things to catch your micro fleece and washing machines, et cetera, but in my mind I always thought, oh, it must ultimately be better to not be making clothing from animals and then to read the book and be like, oh my God, I have had this completely wrong.
PEGGY: No, it's not better. I think Patagonia is trying to do such fantastic work. I don't wanna insult Patagonia and they keep trying, they keep moving forward and trying new things as they realize what does and doesn't make a difference in trying to get close loop production and all this kind of stuff. But, I mean, sheep, not only do they make fiber that keeps us warm, keeps us cool, does all this stuff, but they are also, great for fire mitigation and they can do a lot in terms of climate justice and we have this kind of wrong-headed idea that using animal fibers somehow less good. It's really more good. It's really, I mean, done right.
ELISE: I always wonder too, some of what's happening and is this, which is understandable and it's highly, highly nuanced, but is almost this extreme guilt and fear of harming the environment. And so the instinct in some ways is to turn away from it and sort of disavow its existence, I think, in a way that we're not always conscious of, rather than leaning into it and then sort of sifting here, because what's interesting, not to go on a total tangent, but I work with a biotech company in the beauty space. And that work is really interesting, what they're offering is, you know, they take, they take a molecule, let's call it rose oil, and then they ferment it, they grow it like beer, they identify the molecule that's, that's wanted and then they grow it.
And it is actually significantly more sustainable than growing a bunch of roses and extracting rose oil and because right now within the beauty industry, there's this like desire for quote unquote natural, you know? But there's so much waste and there's so much petroleum, et cetera, a whole other story. But in that sense, it's like, okay, let's actually, we need to move away from our dependence on plants that are water intensive and land intensive and figure out how to be a lot more specific in the way that we're cultivating. And that's why supply chains in general are so nuanced. I think that sometimes instead of leaning into the complexity, we get just like, oh my God, I can't engage. I don't wanna take anything from the planet, rather than recognizing what we were talking about at the beginning, which is our intense connection to being of the planet.
PEGGY: Yeah. Yeah. And I get it. I mean, I ping pong all the time and I did feel like I went through a period when I first started learning about the extent of the catastrophic damage that the fashion industry does where I could not go into a store, I mean, any kind of store, not even like, just clothing. I would just go in and all I would see was landfill and things that, you know, plastic particularly, it overwhelmed me. And you have to work your way back to figuring out how you wanna live, how you can live, and also where you can, you know, join with others. So for me, this book really, affected my consumption, I have to say that I buy far fewer items of clothing now, far fewer, and I keep them longer and I try to pay more attention to what they're made of. And while I can't say I don't buy synthetics anymore, I try to really minimize and realize that, you know, this is not how we used to live. This is a new thing, you know, fast fashion, one of the things it did was accelerate our buying habits. You know, we used to buy clothes a couple times a year, probably when you were a kid. You bought clothes a couple times a year, and now people buy clothes every week and wear them once and throw them away.
And, I realize like with social media, this is also kind of a tangent, but that had kind of changed my clothing habits because it used to be when I would like go on a book tour and I had my book tour outfit and I would wear my book tour outfit. People were not taking pictures of me and putting them online, or I was not taking pictures of myself, so I did not appear to wear the same thing every single day. And I started seeing pictures of myself, you know, online on one of my book tours. I think it might have been Girls and Sex, where I thought, oh dang, people are putting pictures of me up and I'm wearing the same thing all the time. I gotta buy more clothes and I have to mix it up. And then with this one, I thought, you know what, no I don't. I can wear the same two things all the time. That's what I'm gonna do. Because now that's actually makes different kind of statement, but it makes me uncomfortable. You'll see, I'm almost always wearing either a purple and black shirt or a blue sweater if you look at me for anything having to do with unraveling. But I just thought, that's what I'm gonna wear. That's it. Put as many pictures of me up as you want.
ELISE: Yeah. I don't think you're alone. I mean, at the beginning of Covid and being trapped in my house with all of my stuff and I have a small house and I've always been somewhat aware of the energy of the things that I am collecting and surrounding myself with, and I'm pleased to say it's primarily books, like I'm a book hoarder and I'm okay with that, but I sort of had a dawning realization of how much clothing I had been buying and just stopped. I just went shopping with a friend for my book for needing stuff for a book tour and I bought a pair of pants, like we went all over town. I bought one nice pair of pants, but I really haven't bought any clothing in a few years, part cause I have a lot of nice things, but that compulsion to keep going, I recognized was just in my mind and I had been programmed.
PEGGY: Or to find it a source of self-care or a source of bonding. I mean, that's one big thing with my daughter who's 19 now, was that, you know, I sort of saw shopping as a bonding experience and I thought, well, if we don't do that, what else could we do? You know, like now we take hikes.
ELISE: It was this like cultural idea of quote unquote, what's fun. And there was this moment, I mean, you talked about it and I remember as a 20 something New Yorker working at a magazine, this was the rise of h and m, the rise of fast fashion and in high school, college, it's like I would order once or twice a year, as you said, like some things from J. Crew and maybe we didn't have a Gap, but if I went traveled someplace where there was a Gap, I'd get a few things from the Gap and that was it. It was exciting. Esperit, Benetton, like those were the brands of my childhood. And then that switch somehow where affluence for me, felt like it was represented in my closet and non-repetitive outfits. And this need to be, I mean, I worked in fashion, in magazines at Conde Naste, so this siren song of being quote unquote on trend. And I have a lot of shame thinking about what my closet looked like then, and this idea, and I think most people recognize this, it took me a few years before I was like, no one wants this. Nobody wants my old Zara, and it smells it. You can't wear those fabrics even, even with clinical strength deodorant. That's the other thing is I was like, oh my God, my, like, I'm like ramping up my deodorant because this smells so bad.
PEGGY: They just they trap it. Yeah. Yeah. So then it goes to the global south, it's dumped in mountains and it's called dead white men's clothes.
ELISE: Dead white men's clothes. Yeah. I went for summer in Kenya in college and yeah, that was another revelation of like, oh my God, nobody wants our stuff. Nobody wants our stuff. This is not wanted. So this idea of like, I'll give it another life. No, we are just polluting other people's countries with our crap.
PEGGY: Now see, now I'm depressed again. But yeah.
ELISE: No, it's okay. I think people know this.
PEGGY: And I think because, you know, I think if you and I kinda wanna be clear about it, I do write it with both as I always try to, as being a fellow traveler. Like, I don't have the answers. I don't know what to do. I'm just a girl, you know, who is like walking through this with all the, with everybody else. But also with like, with the humor and stuff, I feel like if you write a book about this and you're just saying, oh my God, this sucks you, it overwhelms people. And what I really wanted to do was write something that if I was gonna write about that, it was hard not to just go down and start going like, oh my God, we must stop. You know, but to find a way to talk about it that also is kind of funny and also, you know is clear that like, I'm as overwhelmed as anybody by it and dunno what to do.
ELISE: I didn't find the book depressing. I didn't find it overwhelming. I found it clarifying. I found it really helpful. And also, there's something, going back to this idea of threads and weaving, there’s something about sheep too, bringing us back to sheep. And you talk about Jason and the Argonaut. And you talk about the Bible and the importance of shepherds and sheep. There's something about the metaphors of which there are so many in this book, that it feels like it's gently guiding us back and you're on this journey with us, as you mentioned. And this idea, and we’ll get into women and crafting and aging, but it feels like you're reminding us or we're all coming back into this, like, oh, right, there's a lineage, there's a connection here. There's a long lineage and metaphor because this is important and we need to come back to this.
PEGGY: I mean the women, the aspect with women. Women spent so much time in the ancient world spinning, like they spent all their time, any spare moment. And spinsters were not a bad, it wasn't bad to be a spinster the way we think of it, spinsters were, you know, respected members of households, single women who didn't have the responsibilities of husbands or children, who could spin more, and make money. And, you know, you think about things like marauding around when they sailed across the Atlantic and their little hats and everything, but you don't think about the sails. You don't think like, who made those sails? Who made the thread that made all those sails? Who do you think did that? How many years did it take those women to make one lousy sail, you know, I mean, it took, it took like two years of women's labor to make a sail. So the kind of invisible labor of women in all of that and then the ways that they were credited, the three fates of ancient Greece are women. They come to you when you're born. The first one is the maiden, and she measures out your life, spins the filament of your life of thread, or she spins it and then the matron measures it and then the crone cuts it off when you're gonna die.
And so it's this lifespan of women, but it's also the creation of humanity through spinning and spinning and weaving are so integral to creation. I mean, it makes total sense to me that so much more sense than a Judeo-Christian tradition where there's some like dude in the sky creating things that it would be women because women are the creators, you know, we women make something from nothing all the time, whether it's threat from fiber or bread from flour, or human beings from nowhere at all. It’s just, what could be more divine? So looking at the ways that women spinning and weaving and less so knitting, but mostly spinning and weaving were the basis of creation myths all around the world and how that aspect of women's labor came forward.
And then the overt politics that we don't hear about whether, I didn't know this, I think this is more known, but that, and this is a man of course, but Gandhi spun every day for an hour at four in the morning usually and encouraged all Indians to do the same. It was fundamental to his push for self-rule because the British destroyed the fiber industry there. They needed cotton for the industrial revolution for their mills. And so they, you know, tens of millions of Indians had died because of what the British had done with fiber. And Gandhi wanted to put a spinning wheel on the middle of the Indian flag, they didn't, they put a durable wheel, but that was his idea. And women in the American Revolution, similarly, the British had, you know, decimated the, the fiber and cloth industry for their mills and we learned about the Boston Tea Party, right? But we don't learn about women's boycott of British made cloth for homespun and these public spinning bees they would have in the sent in the town squares, which were just as important in terms of sparking the American Revolution. And all through history you see that women used fiber and fiber work as political voice for dissidents and for patriotism. I wrote something about this for the New York Times and somebody wrote to me and said, you know, the weekend that you published that, this group of women had made this crocheted piece that was like the size of my house. You know, like a two-story thing. And it had Lady Liberty on it, except it was bright pink with Lady Liberty, except that her torch was a uterus and it was in support of reproductive rights and they went and unfurled it in the New York State legislature and they've been taking this thing around the country. So I mean, even now, there's all these ways that women are using their fiber arts for political voice. It's incredible.
ELISE: Well, you write about this idea of like, oh, old ladies crafting, right? And then how radical, not only how essential it's been to statehood and empire throughout time, often being the driver of the economy, the just driver of seafaring and voyaging. Like essential for how we've moved around the world. But it feels subversive now. You know, you talk about sort of the, the pussy hats and women knitting post-Trump, but it's been like that forever. You even think about the AIDS quilt, right? Like this idea of women's handiwork, which is deprecated and then assigned to old ladies and made un quote unquote uncool. And yet, this is a thread, pun intended, that has united women across millennia.
PEGGY: Yeah. I would say to women, to people, you know, that handwork has always been really political, and they'd look at me kind of blankly and I'd say, okay, what's the first thing women did as an act of dissent when Trump was elected? And usually people say, well, they marched, and I go, Nu-uh, no, they didn’t. They knit, they knit those hats. And no matter how you feel about those hats, they were a very powerful statement and there is a long and venerable history of women using our handwork to have a voice and it, and it's a beautiful thing. And also, you know, there's the voice and there's also all the other things. Like I get so many stories with this book of these beautiful, ways that, that people use handwork for joy and connection and to express love and the ways that our memories get knit into, or woven into the things that we make. Just talking, just this second, like two seconds ago, my husband just texted me and went across my screen, he texted me a quilt, um, from Heart Mountain Internment in Wyoming, there's a collection of quilts that women made while they were imprisoned there. So I mean, it's just depth and breadth and meaning and the ways that it just gets dismissed. Both marginalized is something that, you know, a little old ladies do, and so what if that were true? Like, it happens, it's not true. It happens that all kinds of people do hand work you know, every gender, every age, every race. But what if it were just a bunch of little old ladies? What would be wrong with that? Why do we think that that's such a bad negative, you know, repellent thing. That too is something to examine.
ELISE: I think that there's something about it, I know how to knit, but I learned at school, I'm not a good knitter, but I embroider and I pull it out and people think it's odd, and I'm like, I didn't learn from my mother. I taught myself. I only know one stitch, but I, what I do is I embroider pictures and as a way in some ways of picking. because it takes me years to do one of what's important. Like what are these memories that I'm trying to, like really encode or what is worthy of this much labor. But there's something I think about that with myself, not something that I was taught, not something that it was passed down, but there's a pull there. I think that there's a pull. I think that we could all recognize this need to make things that are useful or not with our hands.
PEGGY: I mean, that's what everybody did during lockdown, right? One of the reasons that I thought of doing this as a book was that all of a sudden everybody was baking sourdough and making a Harry Styles sweater and doing all these things with their hands that a), they never had time for, but b, it was because it is really therapeutic and meaningful and valuable, and we just get so far away from that in our current society. And even the ways that, you know, I mean, there's like a magic, I talk a lot about magic, but during the pandemic, this isn't in the book, but I made this blanket and it was a really hard blanket. It was a really complicated stitch. And when I finished, I didn't want it, it just reminded me of that year and it made me upset, but then I gave it to a girlfriend. And by giving it away, I transformed it and it became an act of love, and she wraps herself in it. She just had told me that her son was having a bad day and, she calls it blanket, she said he just wrapped himself in blanket and put it just over his head until he felt better because it had transformed from this thing that gave me pain into something that gave somebody else joy and reminded them that they were loved and that somebody had given them this gift that they had made themselves. So there's just like so much that's amazing about doing that sort of work.
ELISE: Yeah. And again, let's, you know, do talk about, you write: “I think it is precisely knittings benign reputation that allows its practitioners to subvert the very conventions we appear to uphold. After all, the proverbial “little old lady” could well be an unrepentant cackler, a fearsome crone. Her innocuous nest could be her superpower, allowing her to slip the bonds. A feminine constraint craft also evokes the witch in us. The secret lore pass from mother to daughter. Ancient sources of authority of authenticity, so dangerous, they could get women burned at the stake.” It's like we're holding on to and, and it's happening, I don't wanna suggest that it's not, but this idea of old ladies, which is Crohn's with their crafts and the way I think we've been dislocated from that as an enviable or desirable vision to realize in ourselves and how much we need to like let that be us.
PEGGY: I mean it's hard. I was just talking to a friend the other day about, as I think of myself, as I'm getting older and as I'm thinking about what it means to be an older woman, not just middle aged, but like heading towards like senior citizen-ness and how we think about that personally and as a culture. You kind of have to confront your own internalized revulsion is maybe too strong, but like, you know, desire not to ever be that and anxiety about that and ways that we've learned to, you know, be disgusted. Disgusted, I guess that's a better word. kind of like the way that we feel about, you know, fatness and all of these other things that we're taught that are not, if we aren't towing a very narrow line as a woman, we're useless and marginalized, age is kind of the big kahuna of that.
ELISE: Yep. And it is cultural programming. That's what I think is so interesting. Like at the very beginning you write: “When someone wrote in the New York Times that while she was turning 60, she still felt 20, I thought, yes and no, turning 60, I feel 60.” I think that there's sort of this veneer and I'm not turning 60, but there's this instinct in us that to be like, oh, I wanna be 20. And now I'm like, oh God, I would hate to be 20. I'd hate it. I don't wanna be in my 30’s either. I feel like we've been conditioned to believe that we all wanna be young and to look young. And I think it's actually a horrible myth and I'm not saying that it doesn't sort of hold some women by the neck. It does certainly, but I think when we actually dig a little deeper, it's like, no, I wouldn't wanna be that at all. I'm so happy to be here and I'm looking forward to getting older.
PEGGY: Yes. To a point. And then it gets scary again. You know? I mean, I don't know. I really wanna start thinking about and reckoning with. So, I don't know what I wanna say about it yet.
ELISE: But can you distinguish, with your fear the way, yes, we have an aging crisis in this country, for baby boomers, et cetera. We are not set up for this. We don't have caretaking and place for this. Can you separate that from getting older?
PEGGY: Yeah. If I separate that from just getting older, the getting older part is not a problem. But, you know, I mean, it is scary to think about being infirm or getting dementia, you know, watching my parents, I write about my dad, so I wrote about my mom, obviously, who had died already and had gone through a lot before she died. My dad at that point was 94 and had dementia and during l and I didn't know if I was ever gonna see him again because it was lockdown. And nobody was going to in or out and I couldn't go. He was in Minneapolis. And even my brothers who lived there, they didn't know if they were gonna see him again because you couldn't. So one of the things that was really amazing for me, just a huge gift of doing this book and going through this process was it just slows you down.
You know, I mean, you have to slow to card fleece, which you do with like two things that look like dog brushes and you just put a little teeny piece on and go back and forth and back and forth and until it's like nice and fluffy and then you roll it up and put it aside and you have to do that 579 of those I read to make the sweater. It took me 10 minutes to do one. So that's gonna be a while. And I would sit there and it was boring. So boring. And I would sit there with my dad on FaceTime and he could go in and out and he could, you know, sometimes he thought I was actually there in the room with him and sometimes he thought the twins were winning on the rerun of the game that he was watching because of something he was doing with his walker. And we would sing because that part of your brain degrades later than, you know, with dementia, than other parts of lyrics. You retain lyrics for a long time and we sang a lot and I feel like in normal life when I was running around getting on planes, doing this and that, taking care of my daughter, you know, doing whatever, it was really easy. Even if, despite my of best intentions I would say. I'm gonna call him every day. I'm gonna call him every day. But then I would think, oh, well it's getting late.
But really beneath that was, it was really hard to talk to somebody who had dementia and couldn't hear, and it was really painful to expose yourself to it. But sitting there with him every day like that, I could just be and just like, let it flow. And he died last August. I just feel like those weeks together were some of the greatest gift of our life together, so I'm really grateful.
ELISE: Well, you think about that too. You think about this idea or this image of women. Circling, crafting together in circles, right. And doing their handy work and idly “chit-chatting.” And you think about the loss of that culturally. And you know, I have friend, a friend who leads women's circles.
This isn't a new thing. This again, is an ancient thing, but this idea of like handcraft and which to me always puts me in an almost meditative state to be occupied in that way. And then to be in conversation or with each other, without driving a conversation. But to just let it happen feels healing and essential to what it is to be a woman. And I also just have to wonder, being separated from that, separated from each other, what's been lost and what can come back if we were to convene and do this again.
PEGGY: Yeah. I mean, that's where fairy tales come from, the Grims and Paral and those men, they kind of went around and listened to women and wrote down what they were saying. And that's why there's so much spinning involved in fairy tales. Women were sitting there, there was no internet. And what could they do? They told stories to one another. I think book groups, you know that. I think that's one of the reasons that people like book groups or walking groups. And there's knitting groups too. I mean, people, I think that women have always convened and joined, whether it was, you know, they're spinning or they're having a coven or whatever the heck they're doing. And that we still do, that we need it, that we need that support. And, you know, new moms groups, you know, all these men don't really do that so much.
ELISE: Yeah. And it's showing up.
PEGGY: I guess they have sports, but so do we.
ELISE: Yeah.
PEGGY: I know so many women who, myself included, would say that, you know, of course our friends are essential to our mental health. Essential. But then our husband’s don't have very many friends, you know, they just don't, I remember my dad would always say, well, what do I need friends for, I have your mom. And I'd think, well maybe mom doesn't carry that whole weight. And also friends, you know. But I feel like that's true of a lot of, even in our generation too, of a lot of men I know as they get older.
ELISE: Yeah. And it's showing up in the mental health of men. It's a real crisis, certainly. And the sort of lacking the cultural standard or the means to convene and it's funny, it's like they should all take up an knitting because there's something about it being with someone, not having to maintain constant eye contact, being able to just be present without being able to be quiet with each other too. That's such an in invitation to intimacy. I think he's a British doctor who's trying to combat loneliness in the UK and I think that he would get people together, older people primarily, and you know, give them a community garden to manage a work shed with tools, and people would come and they'd have something to do and fall into relationship with each other. We need that. I think it needs to be an intervention.
Peggy, thank you always for your work. It's always what we need, conversations we need to be having. It's like this blurb on your book that is, “you're such a breezy, funny writer. It's easy to forget. She's an important thinker, too.”
PEGGY: I appreciate that, this book started out being nothing but pure fun. I thought, oh, this is gonna be just fun. But there was much that we need to know that was right underneath that surface about so many aspects of our life. It’s still super fun and I find that fun too, in a different way. But it was an incredible experience. Way, way more profound than I imagined when I first set out to do it.
ELISE: Well, it's a good metaphor for a handmade sweater, too. There's more in it than meets the eye.
PEGGY: It's true. Thank you.
ELISE: Unraveling, Peggy’s latest book, does hold so much depth and it’s a beautiful memoir just as it is, but as you pull it apart you see our origin stories, what it is to be a woman, what’s happened to us over time. And there is fascinating history interwoven with hilarious stories about shearing sheep and hand-dying and this experiment she went on over the course of the pandemic. And I feel like Peggy’s really onto something essential, somethings that’s supposed to be a primary metaphor in our life, and I can’t wait to see where she actually takes it. She writes: “It makes sense to me that the designers of life would be female rather than male, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and it seems especially appropriate that those goddesses would spin. Making something from nothing is the quinetessential magic of women, whether turning fiber to thread or flour to bread or engaging in the ultimate creative act: conjuring new humans from nowhere at all. What could be more elemental, more mystical, more divine, than that?” Thanks, as always, for listening. I’ll see you next week.
