Mary Bethel is using her knitting needles to make a statement.
The Akron resident is a supporter of the Pussyhat Project, a movement encouraging participants in the Women’s March on Washington to wear handmade pink hats with cat ears as a show of support for women’s rights. She has turned out seven so far, and she plans to produce as many as she can — two for her and daughter Kazia, 10, to wear to the march on Jan. 21, and the rest to share.
To Bethel, knitting hats has been a form of therapy, a way of countering the angst she’s felt since Donald Trump’s election.
“I was very sad,” she said. “I felt like I just needed something to do.”
The project was started by Los Angeles residents Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, who want the hats to be a highly visible symbol of unity. Their goal is twofold: to turn Washington’s mall into a sea of pink during the march, and to give people who can’t attend a way of being involved by knitting or crocheting hats for others to wear.
The hats are also intended to turn stereotypes about women on their ear, the Pussyhat Project website explains. They’re made using traditional women’s crafts that are often looked down upon, but that can bring women together in supportive groups, the website says. Their feminine color represents caring, compassion and love, qualities that are sometimes derided as weak.
Even the project’s name is intended to undercut the power of a derogatory term associated with women. “We chose this loaded word for our project because we want to reclaim the term as a means of empowerment,” the website says.
Although the project encourages people to knit or crochet hats and provides easy patterns, anything handmade is OK because it shows the creator cared, the website says. The hat can be any color of pink, and it doesn’t have to have ears.
The Pussyhat Project encourages knitters to drop off their handmade hats at participating sites for distribution to the marchers. The only area drop-off site is Harps & Thistles Yarn Emporium in Cuyahoga Falls, one of two collection points in Ohio.
Owner Cindy Michael said the shop had collected around 50 hats as of earlier this week, although she said it’s hard to keep track because the store has been giving them away to marchers almost as fast as they come in. “We’ve had people as far away as Pittsburgh call” to request hats, she said.
Many of her customers have embraced the project, she said. On a recent evening, about five of the knitters gathered at the store were making pink hats, she said. One woman learned to knit just so she could make one.
Although she said the response has been overwhelmingly positive, not everyone is supportive. When Michael posted about the project on the store’s Facebook page, she said she got comments and email from people objecting to a business owner sharing political opinions or calling the project offensive or ineffective.
One of those taking issue was Firestone Park resident Ariana Barrett, who said she fears the hats are reducing women to caricatures.
Barrett described herself as a supporter of women’s rights, although she said she differs from some of her fellow rights proponents in her opposition to abortion. She doesn’t object to the name of the hats for moral reasons, she said, but she feels the movement is an ineffective way for women to assert power.
If women want to be seen as educated, articulate and equal, Barrett said, they need to find a better way to promote their rights.
“To reduce it to a pussyhat is actually devaluing what we’re bringing to the table,” she said.
Others have raised objections on social media to the hats’ vulgar association, particularly because children will be attending the Washington rally.
Michael, however, sees the project as a way she can be involved in the march, even though she can’t attend.
“It’s something that I can do as a yarn shop owner and a woman,” she said. “… We shouldn’t even be having to have this conversation. Women shouldn’t be fighting for rights anymore.”
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.