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.