With Her Own Hands

National BestsellerA 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, quiltingthroughout history, these and other forms of textile work have often been dismissed as merely womens 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 hadoften a needle and threadto 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 womens 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 storiesand a testament to their resilience.