“Join the Knitting Revolution”: Third-Wave Feminist Magazines and the Politics of Domesticity

Abstract: The mid-1990s saw the rise of a new sub-genre of political magazine in the United States: the “third-wave” feminist periodical. A key feature of these publications is that they promote reclaiming and repoliticizing activities traditionally associated with the domestic sphere, particularly knitting. This paper critically examines and historically contextualizes the discourses on the “new” knitting in the letters to the editor, editorials, articles, and advertisements of third-wave feminist periodicals and argues that contemporary feminist craft cultures sit at a politically ambiguous nexus of privilege, complicity, and resistance. By historicizing third-wave periodicals' promotion of knitting, this paper sheds light on changing ways in which the domestic sphere has figured within the broader history of US feminism and suggests that, despite their appeals to the “new,” these periodicals are very much in conversation with what is, to some extent, an imagined feminist “past.”