Fibre Arts as Political Expression: A History of Protest, Art and Social Change

There is a tendency to describe craft as quiet. Domestic. Gentle.

History shows craft also has a long legacy of being loud, disruptive and impactful.

Knitting, crochet, weaving, spinning, felting, embroidery, quilting... These are not apolitical acts that occasionally brush against politics. They have a documented, continuous history as tools of resistance, documentation, solidarity and economic defiance. What gets dismissed as women's work has been some of the most strategically effective political work of the last three centuries. The reason it worked was precisely because it did not look like protest.

This is a piece about that history. Not the soft version where craft is a charming backdrop to social change, but the version where it is the mechanism.

The Daughters of Liberty and the American Revolution

Before the American Revolution, most clothing in the colonies was made at home. Needle arts were not a hobby but a necessity. When Britain imposed taxes on imported textiles to bind the colonies to dependence on British goods, women found themselves holding a tool that was also, suddenly, a weapon.

Groups known as the Daughters of Liberty organised public spinning bees as acts of economic resistance, producing homespun fabric to replace British imports. Women wore homespun as a visible declaration of independence, and the work of their hands became a public argument made in cloth that said, 'we can sustain ourselves without you'.

The Suffragettes and Knitting as Public Statement

In the early 20th century, women fighting for the right to vote used knitting as a form of visible, silent protest. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, suffragists wore knitted garments in suffrage colours, purple, white and green, to public rallies and in daily life. The clothing carried the argument when speaking it directly was not always safe or permitted.

The scale of the effort was not trivial.

In New York, Miss Helen Hill, who oversaw the 27th Assembly District of the Woman Suffrage Party, spearheaded a campaign to knit 3,560 garments for the battleship Missouri, with suffragists committing to an estimated 73 million stitches. She put it plainly at the time:

“Well, these are the women who helped get the signatures of more than 500,000 women of New York City who want to vote, women who did not let the grass grow under their feet until they had performed that arduous task are not likely to stop at a little thing like knitting winter garments for 712 sailor boys.”

The craft was the argument made tangible. It communicated discipline, capacity and organisation in a register that the political establishment could not easily dismiss.

Gandhi and the Khadi Movement

In India's independence movement, the spinning wheel became the symbol of an entire nation's refusal to be economically controlled.

Gandhi argued that India's self-rule could only be achieved if it became self-sufficient, and he urged people to take up spinning and wear only homespun clothing. Khadi, hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, was positioned not as a craft preference but as an act of economic and political sovereignty. Gandhi practiced what he preached, with accounts of his personal quota of spinning two hundred yards of yarn per day. He travelled with a spinning wheel, taking it with him for his landmark trip to Europe in the 1930s.

Gandhi organised khadi spinning centres across the country and branded khadi spinners as freedom fighters. Indians started replacing British goods with Indian products, even though they were costlier. The impact was strong with British sales falling twenty per cent.

The spinning wheel eventually appeared on the Indian National Congress flag as a statement about who controlled production, who controlled resources and what self-determination actually required.

Chilean Arpilleras: Documenting What Could Not Be Said

During Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, women created arpilleras, small embroidered tapestries depicting the atrocities being carried out by the regime. These were not protest art in a gallery. They were made in church-led workshops, under censorship, at real personal risk. If government representatives found them, they were confiscated.

What the regime could not confiscate was what they communicated. The Catholic Church's network moved the arpilleras out of Chile entirely, alerting people around the world to what was happening inside the country. The women who made them were, in most cases, women from poor and working-class families whose experiences of state violence would otherwise have gone unrecorded.

Due to the fact that the arpilleras were made from cloth, they could be folded, hidden and carried across borders to document history.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

The idea for the NAMES Project Memorial Quilt was conceived in November 1985 by AIDS activist Cleve Jones during the annual candlelight march in San Francisco. Jones had people write the names of loved ones lost to AIDS on signs, which were taped to the old San Francisco Federal Building. All the signs taped together looked like an enormous patchwork quilt, and he was inspired.

On October 11, 1987, the Quilt was displayed for the first time on the National Mall in Washington during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It covered a space larger than a football field and included 1,920 panels. Six teams of eight volunteers ceremonially unfolded the Quilt sections at sunrise as celebrities, politicians, families, lovers and friends read aloud the names of the people represented.

According to Jones, the Quilt was designed to provide a creative form of collective grieving, and function as a weapon to shame a government whose response to the AIDS crisis had been, to that point, silence.

Today the AIDS Memorial Quilt comprises nearly 50,000 panels and is considered the largest community arts project in history. It is also a piece of political evidence, a material record of a crisis that those in power chose not to see.

The Pussyhat Project

After the 2016 US Presidential Election, designer Kat Coyle created the Pussyhat, a pink knitted beanie with cat ears, to be worn at the January 2017 Women's March in Washington and at sister events around the world. The hat's design directly referenced political rhetoric that had been used against women during the campaign and turned it into a symbol of collective refusal.

The Women's March saw an estimated four million participants worldwide. Knitting circles, community organisations and individuals contributed tens of thousands of handmade hats, demonstrating the project's broad, grassroots reach. On Ravelry, over 160,000 individual Pussyhat projects have been recorded.

The hat is now held in museum collections as a documented piece of political history. What began as a pattern distributed through yarn shops and online platforms became one of the most recognisable symbols of a global movement, made by hand, in kitchens and living rooms, by people who could not always travel to Washington but could hold a pair of needles.

Image credit: C P

The Knitting Nannas Against Gas

Closer to home is one of Australia's own examples of craft as direct political action.

In 2012, a group of older women in Lismore, New South Wales joined an anti-coal seam gas campaign and found themselves being handed the minutes book and asked to put the kettle on. They responded by forming their own group, driving out to roadsides near gas exploration sites, setting up folding chairs and knitting while they watched and recorded the movements of mining company trucks.

What started as something to do with their hands while they waited became one of Australia's most recognisable examples of craft as direct political action. The Knitting Nannas Against Gas and Greed, KNAG, understood that older women with knitting needles do not read as threatening, and that this was an asset.

Their yellow and black colours, borrowed from the Lock the Gate movement, made them identifiable without making them arrestable. Their presence outside corporate offices and at parliamentary buildings was persistent, good-humoured and structurally difficult to dismiss.

The Sydney loop ran over 200 consecutive weekly knit-ins outside Santos's Martin Place offices. By 2020 there were around 40 KNAG loops across Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

The Knitting Nannas are a precise demonstration that the assumption that craft is not serious is the very thing that makes it effective, as demonstrated repeatedly over history.

The Contemporary Landscape: Slow Fashion, Provenance and Body-Inclusive Making

The political dimensions of fibre arts did not stop with organised movements and public protests. They have migrated into the everyday decisions of contemporary makers, creating a movement of cumulative protest.

Slow fashion sits in direct opposition to a garment industry built on volume, speed and the externalisation of cost onto workers, environments and future generations. Choosing to knit or crochet a garment is, structurally, a refusal of that model. It is also an act of radical transparency. When you make something yourself, you know exactly what went into it, where the fibre came from, how long it took and what it cost at every stage. That kind of provenance is almost impossible to access as a consumer of commercially produced clothing, and its absence is not accidental.

The question of fibre provenance has become increasingly central to the making community. Choosing yarn from farms with known animal welfare standards, from small-scale producers, from natural and biodegradable fibres or from local suppliers is not a niche preference. It is a position on who benefits from production and what the true cost of a finished object should be.

Body-inclusive making adds another layer. Commercial garment sizing has historically been built around a narrow range of bodies, leaving a significant proportion of people either excluded from ready-to-wear clothing or paying a premium for the privilege of fitting into it. Hand knitting and crochet patterns have, for most of their modern history, replicated the same exclusions. The push within the making community over the last decade toward size-inclusive pattern grading, toward designers who publish full size ranges as standard, is a structural argument that states that all bodies deserve well-fitting, well-made clothing, and the pattern is the policy.

Taken together, these are the contemporary expression of the same logic that sent women to their spinning wheels in colonial America and drove the Nannas to their folding chairs on the roadsides of northern New South Wales.

The Return to Making as Political Position

The most recent chapter in this history is less organised and more diffuse, but no less structural.

The resurgence of knitting, crochet, weaving, spinning and embroidery over the last decade is often framed as a trend: Grandmacore, slow living, cottagecore, Nonnamaxxing. And there is truth in that framing. But underneath the aesthetic is an argument about production, consumption and where value actually comes from.

When someone chooses to make a garment rather than buy one from a fast fashion retailer, they are making a decision about systems. They are opting out of a supply chain built on disposability, exploited labour and accelerated waste, and opting into something slower, more considered and built to last.

The Grandmacore trend sits in a longer tradition that includes the Daughters of Liberty, Gandhi's spinning wheel and the Knitting Nannas. In each case, the act of making with your hands was a refusal to participate in an economic arrangement that did not serve the people inside it. The aesthetics change across centuries, but the statement does not.

The History of Fibre Arts and Politics

Fibre arts have functioned as political tools because they exploit a persistent misreading that domestic, feminine, slow activities are not serious. Every movement in this history understood that misreading and used it deliberately.

The suffragists knitted in public because it was one of the few forms of visible, collective action available to women in that era. The Chilean women made tapestries because the regime did not take embroidery seriously enough to suppress it effectively. The Knitting Nannas sat outside corporate offices with thermoses because nobody arrests a grandmother with a ball of wool.

The assumption that making is not political is the very assumption that makes it effective as a political act.

What the history of fibre arts and activism shows is not that craft is secretly radical. It is that the line between making and resistance has always been thinner than the people in power preferred to believe.

Find out more information about the transformative power of yarn crafts by visiting www.yarnshow.com.au or www.fancyyarns.com.au