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Women Weaving Their Stories
by Nicole Nehrig
A rich and intimate exploration of how women have used textile work to create meaningful lives, from ancient mythology to our current moment.
In this captivating work, psychologist and knitter Nicole Nehrig delves into the myriad ways that art forms such as knitting, sewing, and embroidery were and continue to be liberating for women. Spanning continents and centuries, Nehrig brings together remarkable stories of women, from an eighteenth-century Quaker boarding school that used embroidered samplers to teach girls math and geography to the Quechua weavers working to preserve and revive Incan traditions today, and from the Miao women of southern China who, in the absence of a written language, pass down their histories in elaborate "story cloths" to a midcentury British women's postal art exchange.
Throughout history, textiles have been a way for women to explore their intellectual capacities, seek economic independence, create community, process traumas, and convey powerful messages of self-expression and political protest. With Her Own Hands is a celebration of women who have woven their own stories and created objects of beauty and significance to bring them through hardships.
"Nehrig examines textile workers' impact on politics, feminist movements, and economic independence; today, she has found, handcraft is the leading source of employment for women worldwide. Illustrated with color plates of women's creations. A thoughtful, deeply researched contribution to women's history." —Kirkus Reviews
"In seven eloquent and skillfully researched chapters, Nehrig traces women's needle and textile artwork across the world and through the centuries." ―Booklist
"Now that we archaeologists have shown that, for millennia, women were making those 'clothes that make the man,' a psychologist and avid knitter has gathered lively stories from around the world to show how the long, slow making of these textiles in turn affects and has affected the women themselves, often healing their emotional lives." ―Elizabeth Wayland Barber, author of Women's Work
"Unraveling commonly held assumptions of knitting as a pedestrian hobby requiring only basic skill and relegated to lowly female drudgery, Nicole Nehrig instead shows how this single act binds humanity, connecting women across generations and between continents. With Her Own Hands is a beautifully wrought anthropologic study, and necessary reading for anyone interested in the nature of creativity." ―Julie Satow, author of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue
This information about With Her Own Hands was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nicole Nehrig is a clinical and research psychologist, and a passionate knitter and textile crafter living in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology.
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