With Her Own Hands

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Synopsis

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.

Synopses source: The StoryGraph

Review

Genre(s): Nonfiction, Feminism, History
HB&W Rating: 4 stars
View on StoryGraph, Goodreads
Buy on Barnes & Noble | Amazon

This is my pick for my 2025 Book Challenge for August: Yarn (better late than never!). For more recommended reads, see my blog post here.

I’ve always enjoyed textile arts. I learned to sew and embroider when I was a young girl at my grandmother’s side. I inherited my great grandmother’s crafting tools of sewing notions, knitting needles and tiny crochet hooks and it made me feel a connection with a woman I’d never met. When I started crocheting, it was just a fun new hobby to pick up but also a means of expressing love. I was expecting my second son and wanted to make each of my boys a blanket they could cherish for years to come. Not long after that, I received my cancer diagnosis and crocheting was an outlet, a way for me to process my feelings and emotions, a way to pass time when I was too ill to get out of bed, and a way to make myself feel pretty again by making many new hats to warm my bald head. All of this to say that textile and fiber arts have been a huge part of my life and these are just a few of the ways textile arts are able to impact the lives of the people, most commonly women, who craft them.

When the author’s PR people asked if they could send me a copy of With Her Own Hands to review, I gladly accepted. The timing was right to have it be my pick for my August book challenge prompt: Yarn. It came in a cute PR package that included a cross stitch bookmark pattern, which I had hope to have completed to present you with at the same time as this review, but alas, being only my second cross stitch attempt in my lifetime, I’m sad to say I didn’t have the patience to finish more than about 50 stitches on it. Still, I absolutely loved its incorporation with the theme of the book.

This is definitely more of an academic book, but the author’s passion for the topic and for the people is evident. She draws you into the stories of the women she’s met and the art they have created and relays how that art has enabled them to leave abusive partners, become economically independent, and to help others. She shows how women have used textile arts to say things with their work that they can’t with their words, working through grief, trauma, and more or to express celebration at happy occasions or immortalize a moment in history. She explains many cultural significances dating back from early civilizations to present and explores the sociopolitical influence textiles had on women’s suffrage and civil rights. It took me some time to read this one because I wanted to take my time with it. I have so many tabs in this book for moments that stunned me, inspired me, or galvanized me.

This book may be a bit scholarly, but the stories are the heart of this book and the women are the soul. Nehrig, a knitter herself, expertly combines anecdotal evidence with solid facts and statistics to illustrate the importance of textile arts not just in women’s live but in the broader tapestry of our global civilization. If you enjoy history with a focus on women’s untold stories, I think you’ll enjoy this book, especially if you’re a textile artist yourself.

Thank you Nicole Nehrig and W.W. Norton for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Until next time,

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