Elizabeth Pellerito

Weaving a Politics of Radical Care: Crafting Community at the Loom

“We want enough good food, useful work, decent housing, communities with clean air and water, good care for our children while we work. We expect equal pay for work of equal value.

We want health care which respects and understands our bodies. We want an education for children which tells the true history of our women's lives, which describes the earth as our home to be cherished, to be fed as well as harvested.”

In 1980, two thousand women of the Women’s Pentagon Action  issued these words as they wove the doors of the Pentagon shut to protest nuclear proliferation and demand funding for mothers and families instead of money for war. Forty five years later, and these words could remain a rallying cry for activists today. These are not the “gentle protest” actions of craftivism, a movement that encourages participants to “shop with purpose.” The history of weavers’ activism is far from gentle, in either sense of the word: neither mild or moderate, nor attached to a notion of gentility that excludes working class and poor women. Instead, this form of activism is more closely aligned with what Premilla Nadasen  calls “radical care - care that is collective and antihierarchical, sits outside capitalist profit-making structures, and contributes to long-term social transformation.”

History is full of weavers who practice radical care and radical bravery: Philomela, who threatens to tell the world the story of her rape and, when her tongue is cut out to silence her, weaves her story into a tapestry. The women and girls in the Lowell mills, where I now live, who fought the system of slavery that provided their livelihood even as they fought for safer working conditions and shorter working days in their own workplaces. The immigrants speaking 40 different languages who came together to walk out of the Lawrence mills en masse and (probably apocryphally) sang “Bread and Roses” in 1912. The generations of women who have fought for justice in sweatshop conditions and those who rescued their fellow workers from the rubble and continue to fight for justice in the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2013.

Weaving, in other words, is and always has been political. As artist in residence for Gist in Spring 2024, I set out to think through the problem of how to bring this history and practice together in my own community. I decided to develop a community workshop using techniques of  popular education, the pedagogy that brings a group full of people together to analyze their social conditions and then decide together how to take action to create justice in the world. Using funding from Gist along with a grant from Mosaic, a Lowell-based organization, I bought a stable of small frame looms and rigid heddle looms in multiple sizes and shapes. I sourced textiles from my own closet, from my friends, and local thrift shops. Participants had the opportunity to think about color, stretch, and pattern, to create simple plain weave textiles using 8/4 cotton as warp and anything and everything as weft. 

In creating these workshops, I had two goals. First, I wanted to create the space for people from every background to have an opportunity to weave. Much of American weaving culture (our guilds, our shops, our exhibitions) suffers from a lack of diversity - in race, in socioeconomic status, and in a myriad of other ways. I wanted to share the joy of mixing colors, experimenting with textures, and creating something with my hands with as many people as possible. Creating community spaces for creative exploration is an important part of radical care, because it allows for exchange of ideas, planning for change, and the rest that is vital to avoiding burnout.

Second, I wanted an opportunity for us to understand why fabric matters and explore its political realities. You only have to look around my home base in Lowell and Lawrence to see the skeletons of an industry - one that relied on the labor of enslaved people and the poor treatment of women and immigrants to create a finished piece of cloth. I wanted to create a through line from that history to the clothes we buy and wear and discard today, and a shared understanding of why that matters. These workshops were hosted in a variety of venues - from the Lowell National Historical Park to a community event for the Bread & Roses Heritage Committee  and a weekend educational event for the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development  for women in unions and worker centers.

To start, we discussed the multiple meanings of the fabrics we surround ourselves with. I’m no fashionista - comfort is my main objective when choosing what to wear, particularly given the arthritis in my spine and feet. But clothing is not just about making a fashion statement: as participants were quick to point out, it’s how we share our cultures, express our gender identity, explain to others who we are and where we come from. Fabric matters deeply.

We also put stickers on a map of the world to show where our clothes were made and asked ourselves why it is that so many of our clothes were made in a few clustered parts of the world. To answer that question, we looked at a massive timelineexploring how fibers, people, and industry traveled around the world. From the roots of the Industrial Revolution to NAFTA, we talked about how clothing companies are able to get away with hopping from country to country to take advantage of tax loopholes and processing zones that are light on labor and environmental regulations. Threaded throughout this discussion was how the experience of making and buying clothing has changed dramatically over the past few decades and what this means for us, and we debated the ways in which consumers can or should pick up the burden of enforcing ethical accountability on companies.

All of this can rightly seem overwhelming, so our next task was to talk about what we can do as consumers. There’s no one right solution,participants were quick to explain, but many smaller ones can add up. I learned that the spirit of buying less, buying used, making do and mending, all practices of radical care, are thriving in my community. 

Throughout this experiment, women shared with me stories of the beautiful blouses their mothers and grandmothers embroider and wear to show cultural and familial pride; the practice of learning to weave in a refugee camp; the connections to family members who worked in factories “before the mills closed” and moved across the globe as well as to family members who work in those same factories elsewhere in the world today.

Can sitting at my loom change the world? Perhaps, but it’s a lot more difficult when it’s a solitary action. Our goal as a community of weavers in challenging times should be to create more spaces where people - especially marginalized people - can come together and share our stories and our strategies for change across our looms. Like Philomela and the Women’s Pentagon Action, we can use our craft to speak truth to power, to name injustices, and to look for ways to turn our craft communities into communities of radical care.

All image credits: Daniel Bazarian