Jelisava

Let us seek to engage in the peaceful arts (if more men learned to knit sweaters in the round there might be less practice of the murderous arts) / Hand-knit patterned yoke sweater; icelandic geometric motif; 100% wool

“We delight to glorify the 'new woman,' the advanced woman. If, however, we study Prof. Otis T. Mason's book, Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, we find the 'new woman' to be only a revival of a very ancient type. Prof. Mason says that, for the highest ideals of civilization, in humanitarianism, education, and government, the way was prepared in savagery by mothers and female clan groups. While men were the inventors of every murderous art, women were the actual inventors of the peaceful arts, and excelled in weaving, pottery, agriculture, the preparation of foods, and the substitution of other forces to do the work of the human muscles. Woman made rough looms. She tamed the present domestic animals. The first empirical physicians were not the sorcerers but the herb women, who collected also the earliest materia medica. Savage woman founded all the modern crafts. She was the butcher, the cook and server, the skin curer and dresser, the furrier, tailor, carver, cobbler, the hat and dress maker. She it was who made possible the great modern textile industries. In weaving, dyeing, embroidery, molding, modeling, and painting, in the origination first of geometric patterns and then of free-hand drawing, primitive women elaborated aesthetic art.”

~ an excerpt from The "New Woman" and Her Debts by Clare de Graffenbried, 1896