Why you should make masks and how to make one
Another Spider Man? No, Spider Woman
Though the summer began with Wonder Woman, the first female superhero blockbuster, theatergoers have settled into more incarnations of Transformers, Planet of the Apes, and Spider-Man, all movies with mostly males trying to save the planet from the consequences of thoughtless human action. The Transformer movies embody our fear that the source of our ultimate destruction, "the Other," is hiding in plain sight. Planet of the Apes movies dredge up our fear that we are only deceiving ourselves that we are the superior life on the planet, that all of our sophisticated scientific knowledge only makes us more savage. We have to look to the animals we dominate to find our own humanity. All of Spider-Man’s superhuman agility and “Spidey” senses are still no match for adolescent hormones. All the heroes are fighting the unintended consequences of human acts of creation.
But, it is a story of a female who can both create and destroy the world that has my attention—Spider Woman. Her superpowers are weaving and storytelling. Among the First People of the American Southwest, she is the Creator, the Namer, the Wise One, the Weaver. The world she created is one of balance, harmony, and interconnectedness. Each person, each mammal and plant, each rock and river, each wind and lightning bolt is woven into the reality we experience, every thread in its proper relationship to every other thread in the weave. She teaches the Beauty Way to the people she created so that they experience the harmony of the world as she thought it into being.
So much of the body of Native American scholarship and media portrayals prior to the late 20th century impose a patriarchal interpretation of Native American culture. By doing so, these depictions obscure, denigrate, or discount the role of feminine power among tribal members. Recovering female deities helps us reinterpret not just Native American legend, but also helps us peel away the distortions of power that have shaped us all. Spider Woman is power. She is the source of all that is, at once life-sustaining and life-threatening.
Spider Woman, or Grandmother Spider, Thought Woman, or Old Spider Woman in some traditions, is a deity among American Southwestern First People. Her presence extends into South America, perhaps even as far as the Andes. Among the Navajo (Diné), she lives atop the tallest of two sandstone rocks that tower more than 750 feet from the desert floor of Diné tribal lands. She has lived there since before she created human beings. Among the Diné, Hopi, Kiwa, and Tewa tribes, she plays much the same role, though some details vary. For all of them, she is the source of Creation, creativity, wisdom, and healing.
Spider Woman chose the highest rock in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Elders told their children that if they did not behave, Spider Woman would let down her webbed ladder, snatch them, and eat them.
Through her weaving and her words, Spider Woman creates the world as human beings experience it. It’s that triangulation of the feminine, the text, and the textile at play again.
“It’s that triangulation of the feminine, the text, and the textile at play again.”
Spider Woman features prominently in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony. Silko narrates the process of healing for a young Laguna veteran returning to his tribe, shattered from World War II. One of the events that propels his healing is listening to the storyteller which Silko describes in a poem:
I will tell you something about stories,'
[he said]
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They're all we have, you see.
All we have to fight off illness and death.
You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.
Their evil is mighty,
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories,
but the stories cannot be confused or forgotten.
They would like that.
They would be happy
because we would be defenseless then.
[He rubs his belly]
I keep it in here,
[he said]
Here, put your hand on it.
See?
It is moving.
Why would stories be in his belly? Because, Spider Woman weaves the world into being from her belly. Just as woman creates life from her belly, so too must stories be born as they were first born from the Creator, the Namer. Lifeforce and words are inextricably interconnected in the world that Spider Woman wove into being. The storyteller must become a "woman-man." Unlike Eurocentric cultures that regard this kind of androgyny as weakness, the Southwestern American First People regard the "woman-man" as superhuman, a man with the power to create like a woman.
Spider Woman weaves us and the world together. The fabric she weaves is the interconnection among all of Creation. With the power to weave, she has the power to unravel. As the source of light, goddess of the moon, she has to power to wax and to wane. She breathed into the world life, and she can take that breath away. Her sister goddess brought her effigies of plants, animals, and spirits which Spider Woman’s thoughts brought to life. She gave women the “water of life,” menstrual blood that was held sacred. That blood was so imbued with power that lesser beings could not touch it lest they suffer grave consequences. As in the cycle of blood and birth, Spider Woman’s creativity is continuous. She continues to spin her thoughts in spirals like the threads on the Navajo spindle. She is the source of wisdom, teaching the proper harmony, the proper balance of all things. Silko's poem in Ceremony continues:
Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and what ever she thinks about
appears.
She thought of her sisters,
Nau' ts' ity' i and I' tcs' i,
and together they created the Universe
this world
and the four worlds below.
Thought-Woman, the spider,
named things and
as she named them
they appeared.
She is sitting in her room
thinking of a story now
I'm telling you the story
she is thinking.
Spider Woman continues to spin her thoughts in spirals like the threads on the Navajo spindle.
The power embodied in Spider Woman is foundational. The feminine is the power of Creation, the power of naming that Creation. To be touched by the feminine is to be touched by the organizing power of the universe. Native Americans legends recognize the same opposites as Eurocentric cultures, but they regard opposites as complements, not adversaries. If opposites like male and female continue to struggle in opposite directions, there is disharmony. They are in an unnatural state. To move within Creation as Spider Woman wove it into being, they move together as complementary forces like the tension between the warp and weft of the weave, threads moving along the four cardinal directions that Spider Woman wove into the world before she created male and female. The warp threads running up her loom fix the axis on which the world turns interconnect with the weft threads moving with the direction of the spinning earth, both holding in tension together as complementary forces, the fabric of the universe.
In the Hopi tradition, Change Woman brings the knowledge of weaving from Spider Woman to human women. Entering Spider Woman’s underground dwelling, she encounters her at the upright loom that her husband, Spider Man, has made for her from the juniper tree with its cross pole of sky and earth, poles that center the poles of the earth itself. Her warp sticks she uses to push the weft threads through the vertical warp threads are made of sun rays. The heddles (the bar that separates the warp threads for the warp stick to pass through) are formed from lightning and rock crystals. When the weft threads run through the warp, she uses a batten stick made of the sun’s own halo. The white-shell comb beats the threads, making the sound of a beating heart. Lightening forms the stick of her four spindles with whorls of black coal, turquoise, white shell, and abalone shell.
Few people now understand how fabric is sewn, much less understand how thread is spun or woven. Around the world before the 1700s, spinning thread and yarn was a ubiquitous activity. Spinning enough thread for weaving takes far more time than the weaving itself, so many hands were needed for spinning. Archaeological evidence suggests that spinning has been a technique for producing thread for at least 30,000 years. Spinning allows yards and yards of thread to be produced from short fibers either from plants like cotton or flax or from animals. The Southwestern First People first spun cotton but learned to spin wool after the Spanish introduced sheep. Both cotton and wool are incorporated in native weaving. Women of all ages participated in the process. Traditionally, when a girl is born, the shaman searches the area for a spider web. He builds a fire before the dawn after her birth and brings both mother and daughter outside beside the fire to keep them warm as they wait for the sunrise. When the first light strikes the spider web, the shaman takes the daughter's hand to pass into the web, thus imbuing her with Spider Woman's gift of weaving.
Unlike in more recent Eurocentric cultures, spinning and weaving were not means of confining women, nor is it accurate to say that they were means of empowering women. Rather, by engaging in the activity of spinning and weaving, women were the embodiment of power. The weaver, like Spider Woman, has the power to pattern and disrupt. From her thoughts she creates something where nothing was before. She brings opposites into harmony with her thoughts, her hands, and the fibers she spun. Tribes such as the Diné and Keres Pueblo Native Americans traditionally placed women at the center of the social order. They would not say that it was their doing, but rather Spider Woman's. Nothing comes into being without her thinking it into being. She is Ritual, and weaving is her ritual. This tribal world is gynocratic, but it is a world of proper balance, proper place, proper ritual, proper harmony. It is a world in which Spider Woman weaves the power of female and male in symbiosis, giving them stories that connect them within the fabric of the Universe.
I am, I am
In wisdom I walk
In beauty may I walk...
In beauty it is restored.
The light, the dawn.
It is morning.
Navajo poet,
Luci Tapahonso
Though Spider Woman’s comb is made of white shell, mortal women’s combs are made of wood, but the weaver's comb still makes the sound of a human heartbeat.
Diné women in the Arizona/New Mexico area between 1910 and 1925. Library of Congress photo archives. The weaver sits at her loom while the woman to her left spins more yarn on a traditional Navajo spindle. The girl in the foreground is carding wool to clean and straighten it for spinning. The woman on the right is weaving a belt.
For more information on Navajo textiles, click on some of the links below.
Parts of a Navajo Loom. These looms have existed in the American Southwest since around 1100 AD.
Spider Woman
The cross symbol on the back of the spider appears frequently in Southwestern Native American textiles.
Navajo Spindle
Clara Sherman
See video of her demonstrating how to use this unique spindle below.
As Spider Woman taught Changing Woman, so have grandmothers, mothers, and daughters taught their daughters all through the ages.
Sources
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Open Road, 1992
Beverly Gordon, Textiles: The Whole Story, Thames & Hudson, New York 2001
Kathryn Sullivan Kruger, Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production, Rosemont, 2001
Jude Todd. “Knotted Bellies and Fragile Webs: Untangling and Re-Spinning in Tayo's Healing Journey.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2, 1995, pp. 155–170. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1185165.
Fabrication or Fact?
Betsy Ross 1777, a ca. 1920 depiction by artist Jean Leon Gerome Ferris of Ross showing Gen. George Washington (seated, left), Robert Morris and George Rosshow she cut the revised five-pointed stars for the flag. United States Library of Congress
In honor of Independence Day with flags unfurling up and down avenues, commemorating the graves of fallen heroes, and waving in the hands of small children watching parades in their hometowns, it is also appropriate to honor the women who made the first ones.
Betsy Ross is credited in legend as the first person to sew the Stars and Stripes. It is a lovely story. Young Elizabeth (Betsy) Griscom, born to a respectable Quaker family, was apprenticed as an upholsterer. The role of an upholsterer included more than just furniture in those days. She learned to sew bedclothes, drapery, Venetian blinds, and tablecloths. Betsy fell in love with John Ross, the son of the local assistant rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia who was apprenticed in the same shop. Knowing she would be disowned by her family and, indeed, “read out” of her Quaker congregation, she eloped with John Ross. Together they set up their own upholstery shop. However, not long after their marriage, John was gravely wounded in one of the battles for independence and died as she attended his injuries. She struggled to run the business alone, making supplies for the Continental Army such as tents and cartridges, and as we would expect, flags.
Quite the American success story. Some say none of it is true, that the story is a whole-cloth fabrication.
Heavens to Betsy
by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze
Grandson William Canby formalized the family's account in his paper presented to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1870 nearly 100 years after the events occurred. We have the affidavits from her daughters recounting what their mother told them about how she came to sew the flag. With this lack of contemporaneous formal documentation, however, the story is open to challenge. Thus, we have a familiar conundrum in searching out the truth of women’s work. Without contemporaneous documentation, historians cannot certify it as true. In the chaos of wartime bureaucracy as a new nation is born, few people are prioritizing documentation. We cannot know with certainty the truth of this story. If the story is untrue, the woman who did sew these seams—probability does suggest the maker is female—that woman is lost to us.
Myths and fables are as important as fact. George Washington's biographer knew that he never chopped down a cherry tree, but he knew that the country needed an example of his integrity as a trait he possessed all of his life. Reading William Canby's account of his grandmother, you can see how the story of Betsy Ross is used to hold up the exemplar of virtuous, industrious women. She was a woman of "pleasant and by no means unhandsome features." Though a woman of " patient industry and perseverance," she found it difficult not to fall into despair after the death of her husband John, she "yet she always rallied when she reflected upon the goodness of Providence who had never deserted her." Her neighbors admired her because "never had any time to spend in street gaping or gossip." Underlying his portrait of her is the insistence that she is virtuous enough as a woman to be maker of our country's first flag.
The woman credited with making the Star-Spangled Banner hailed in our National Anthem has a suitably documented identity. Mary Pickersgill was commissioned by Major George Armisted to complete two flags that would fly over Fort McHenry guarding the water entrance to Baltimore. One flag, the smaller storm flag, was 17’ x 25’. The larger one, designed to fly over the garrison, was an enormous 30’ x 42’. (Forty-two feet is the half-court line on high school basketball court.) From June through August of 1813, Mary Pickersgill, her daughter, her nieces, and her African-American indentured servant, whose name is lost to us, pieced and sewed by hand both flags cut from woolen bunting and likely linen thread. Machine stitching was not introduced until the 1840s. Even now stars are hand-sewn, often in China, on most cloth flags Mary Pickersgill and the women helping her did it.
During the War of 1812, on September 14, 1814, Francis Scott Key saw the flag stitched by these women as it still flew over Fort McHenry. He wrote the poem for “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the tune for “To Anacreon in Heaven” in mind. The smaller of the two flags is missing, but the larger one is on display in the Smithsonian Institute.
By George Henry Preble - Frank A. O'Connell; Wilbur F. Coyle (1914). National Star-Spangled Banner Centennial, Baltimore, Maryland, September 6 to 13, 1914. Baltimore: National Star-Spangled Banner Centennial Commission. p. 66., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11468994
Oh, say can you see
Mary Pickersgill's large flag that inspired Francis Scott Key is now enshrined at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
Whether or not Betsy Ross really sewed the first flag does matter. In all of my reading questioning Betsy Ross's role in sewing the first flag, I have seen no one question that George Washington designed it even though there exists no more contemporaneous evidence of that. I have found no credible evidence that she did not make the flag as her family claimed. But if Betsy Ross is not the first, some other person, likely a woman, is not receiving her due for creating one of the most important symbols in American life. Much of textile art is anonymous not because no one knew who made it but rather because no one thought she was important enough to remember. Women or their descendants trying to lay claim to their own work has often been problematic. Their claims have been dismissed by bureaucrats, historians, art curators, and others—gatekeepers all.
On this Fourth of July as you salute the Stars and Stripes, give a thought to the women who hand stitched flags that gave hope to soldiers, heartened the immigrants seeking freedom, blessed the coffins of our fallen soldiers and presidents, and inspired Americans to put aside their differences to build one nation.
Christmas 2014 Afghanistan War veteran, Arlington Cemetary, credit: EPA
President John F. Kennedy, funeral procession November 1963
World Trade Center Flag 2001 copyright The Record
Wonder Woman in Long and Short Stitch
Browsing my Amazon recommendations in the “Craft, Hobby, and Home” books category, I clicked past five or six books on embroidery and noticed Wonder Woman Psychology: Lassoing the Truth by Travis Langley. Two more clicks and I got Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine also by Langley. Right next to that one was a Wonder Woman coloring book. One more click revealed The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History by Hope Nicholson sandwiched between a beginner’s embroidery book and the Royal Society of Needlework’s book on blackwork embroidery. How could Amazon possibly know that I was working on an embroidery piece of Wonder Woman’s face? How did both Amazon and I get from embroidery to Wonder Woman?
Though I deeply admired needlework as I grew up, I didn’t learn much of it because it was “women’s work.” I was a modern female and eschewed roles that were forcedly feminine. Archaeologists, theologians, psychiatrists, or astronauts—all my early career choices—had no place for such feminine frivolity. By the age of three or four in the early 1960s, I understood that the feminine was inferior to the masculine. I didn’t want to play with dolls; I wanted to play with army men. I didn’t want to master a girl’s bike; I wanted to master a boy’s bike. I didn’t want long hair; I wanted short hair. I didn’t want to play house; I wanted to play war.
To embrace those feminine markers was to accept the inferior. I did not want to be the lesser. Even after 1972 when the Equal Rights Amendment debates wore on with the opposition arguing that we didn’t need an Equal Rights Amendment because women were equal already, I knew that part wasn’t true. Women were not equal. Needlework, woman’s work, had to be inferior.
Before I was old enough to read, I sensed that needlework was a way to keep women in an inferior state. Men built skyscrapers; women made dresses. Men painted frescoes; women stitched samplers to hang on the wall. Men preached the Gospel; women stitched Bible bookmarks. Indeed, by the 17th century, needlework was being used as a means to domesticate women to teach them what femininity was. Girls of all social classes were educated in needlework. Instead of Latin and mathematics like their brothers, girls from upper class families were taught needlework as an indication that they did not work like their lower-class female counterparts. Even those working-class women were soon deprived of the ability to earn wages from their weaving and needlework as the Industrial Revolution’s massive looms and mechanized embroidery machines displaced them from their looms to the brothels.
The generation of feminists ahead of me understood needlework as a means of domesticating women. Though Second Wave Feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem, did reject needlework as a means of controlling women’s power, they and other feminist artists did not reject the artistic power in the work women did. This is a point so very often misunderstood and, more often, purposefully distorted, a point I myself missed in their message.
As a statement of power, many female artists in the 1970s put down their paint brushes and picked up their needles. Feminist artist such as Beryl Weaver publishing in the British feminist magazine Spare Rib used the domesticated embroidery patterns to convey a fearsomely liberated message with two Victorian-clothed women. The woman carrying her bundle of flowers asks in a speech bubble, “And, how is little ♀ today?” The woman pushing a pram answers, “She’s getting stronger and angrier all the time, thank you.” The “flowers” along their pathway are all variations on the shape of the ♀.
Beryl Weaver's embroidery featured in Spare Rib
The closest I came to this nuance was embroidered jeans. The first time I tried to embroider anything was to experiment on a pair of jeans or denim jacket. I can’t remember which or whether I completed it or not. I understood the importance of applying this handmade stitching to a machine-made pair of Levy’s. But, I failed to connect the natural, human creative execution with feminine power. I was still trying to distance myself from feminine weakness.
My path to claiming my own feminine power as power itself has been a rather circuitous one. Coming to adulthood in the 1980s as we gave up on the Equal Rights Amendment reaching that magic number of 38 states ratifying it by March of 1982, we acquiesced to the ideas that we didn’t need it anyway. The feminist backlash was in full swing. I pushed on through graduate school, on to law school, being a mother, and being a teacher. I never doubted that I was equal. I always doubted that others believed it. Even as they proclaimed equality, it sounded a lot like “separate, but equal.”
As I sat in the theater a few weeks ago waiting for Wonder Woman to appear on the screen, I realized that I had been bracing for disappointment. Throughout the credits, I put up my usual defenses against the depiction of strong women as seen through the eyes of men trying to appeal to fourteen-year-old boys—the strong women who still need to be rescued by a man, the women whose power is undone by the touch of a man, the women who see other women as innate rivals for the attention of a man. In the opening scene of the movie when the girl Princess Diana steals away to watch the women warriors as they drilled, I felt the familiar sting in the corner of my eyes. Where was this coming from? By the time the woman Diana was drilling with other fierce women, wielding weapons with deliberate strength, stretching their bodies with measured agility, I felt and heard tears landing on my shirt. I am 57 years old, for heaven’s sake! Why did these tears fall when I saw Princess Buttercup, not in wispy layers of fabric, but in armor revealing her taught musculature while she commanded other armored woman around her?
When Diana scans the trenches bordering No Man’s Land taking in all of the suffering, she knows she has to fight to end it. Trevor gives her sensible advice, “We can’t save everyone in this war! It’s not what we are here to do!” Diana replied, “You’re right. But it’s what I am here to do!” Then, the woman sets foot in No Man’s Land and does what the men will and cannot. At this point, I was just hoping to not sob out loud. She was no man. She wielded her own power at her own discretion.
Before I even got home, I was already planning my next embroidery project. Wonder Woman needed to be commemorated with the power of needle and thread, a woman’s art. Perhaps Amazon’s algorithms on needlework and Amazons are more accurate than our first impressions.
By the way, Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment on March 22, exactly 45 years after it passed the Congress. And, sew it begins again.
