With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories

By Nicole Nehrig

My life was in transition as I began writing With Her Own Hands.  Without school or childcare available during the pandemic, it was no longer tenable to balance a full-time job as a psychologist and researcher at a VA hospital with being the parent of two preschool-aged children. Research, which had been my passion, was put on hold and I realized that I didn’t really miss it. I opted not to continue pursuing the 5-year grant I submitted a few months prior to lockdown or the tenure-track academic job I was in the running for.

With my entire career trajectory thrown into question, it felt like the only thing holding me together was my knitting. Knitting has long served a psychological function in my life. During graduate school, as I was first learning how to be a therapist, the tangibility of knitting countered the intangibility of therapy – I could see my progress, fix mistakes, and actually finish a project. The ability to have these grounding experiences in my knitting helped me tolerate the nebulous experience of being a new therapist. During the pandemic, knitting filled other needs – it offered me comfort, provided an outlet for the creative and intellectual energy that I had previously channeled into my research, and perhaps most importantly at that time, it was something I could do for myself while my kids played outside or fidgeted their way through the 30 minutes of Zoom school they had each day. It was the increasing importance of knitting in my life to meet these critical psychological needs that led me to write With Her Own Hands. 

The central question the book seeks to answer – how have women made meaning in their lives through making textiles? – united my professional training as a psychologist with the personal satisfaction I found in textile craft. I have always had many interests and enjoy finding connections between them. I changed my major four times in college before landing on psychology which seemed to offer a solution to my quandary because it is so interdisciplinary – my work incorporates philosophy, gender studies, sociology, history, literature, statistics, and empirical science. Similarly, the book draws upon many areas of study to explore the meaning of textile work for women throughout history as a form of intellectual expression, social connection, creativity, activism, and economic activity. 

Integration is often discussed as a goal of therapy – bringing together different, sometimes contradictory parts of the self into a cohesive feeling whole and connecting disparate experiences across a lifespan into a coherent narrative – the way remnants of cloth are stitched together to make a quilt. However, sometimes it is necessary for things to come apart – we can dismantle outdated ideas and systems that no longer fit just as outgrown clothes or worn-out bedding can be cut into pieces and repurposed. When we come undone, we have the opportunity to put ourselves back together in a new way. 

When I first conceived of With Her Own Hands, I imagined it being deeply grounded in psychoanalytic theory and mental health research. I was comfortable with my academic writing style, perhaps too comfortable. It enabled me to rely the fixed structure of a research paper, citations of experts, and the formal language of the field rather than having to devise my own structure, find my own words, and let my ideas stand on their own. But writing a book intended for a general audience required that I dismantle my approach to writing and bridge a divide of decades to reconnect to a voice familiar to me in my youth but unpracticed in adulthood. In high school I often stayed up late writing poetry, in college I took creative writing classes, and in my early 20s I was a singer/songwriter – I had total freedom to say what I thought.

I felt on shaky ground as I began integrating philosophical ideas with personal accounts of women’s textile making and extrapolating beyond historical accounts and archaeological findings to wonder about the meaning of this work for women in the past. I couldn’t make an outline for the book the way I had for research papers. I had to work it out on the page, and I discovered what I wanted to say by saying it – and deleting it if it wasn’t what I wanted to say. Writing began to feel physical, like my body was a vehicle for processing and synthesizing the material and translating it to the page. It even felt rather like knitting as I linked ideas and stories stitch by stitch, word by word to render a larger pattern. Experiencing the familiar feeling of knitting in my writing helped me trust the way I was putting the material together – I was just knitting with words instead of yarn. And like in knitting, I could always undo it if I didn’t like the way it was turning out which helped me to be playful and take risks. Knitting took on a new meaning as a metaphor for my writing process and for what was happening in my life as I shifted the course of my career. I was able to unravel parts of my life that were no longer working for me and knit them back together in ways that incorporated more of myself and feel more functional and beautiful than ever before.

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Nicole Nehrig is a clinical and research psychologist based in Brooklyn, New York, with a deep passion for knitting and textile arts. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology and is the author of the book With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories. You can follow her on Instagram at @nicolenehrig.

WITH HER OWN HANDS: Women Weaving Their Stories

A rich and intimate exploration of how women have used textile work to create meaningful lives, from ancient mythology to our current moment.

Knitting, sewing, embroidery, quilting—throughout history, these and other forms of textile work have often been dismissed as merely “women’s work” and attached to ideas of domesticity and obedience. Yet, as psychologist and avid knitter Nicole Nehrig wonderfully explores in this captivating book, textile work has often been a way for women to exercise power. When their voices were silenced and other avenues were closed off to them, women used the tools they had—often a needle and thread—to seek freedom within the restrictive societies they lived in.

Spanning continents and centuries, With Her Own Hands brings together remarkable stories of women who have used textiles as a means of liberation, 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. 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.

Heartfelt and deeply moving, With Her Own Hands is a celebration of women who have woven their own stories—and a testament to their resilience.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers