Pulling the Wool over Enemy Eyes

Once upon a time, that charming little old lady over there, knitting away on an innocent pair of socks, may not have been all she seemed to be.  Who knew but what she might have been a spy keeping track of clandestine behavior.  In the quiet rhythm of needles clicking and yarn looping, a hidden world of espionage once lurked.

During the Revolutionary war and the World Wars, women across the colonies, Europe, and Britain turned the inconspicuous skill of knitting into a tool of resistance. Beneath the guise of grandmotherly industriousness, these women encoded military intelligence into scarves, socks, and sweaters—turning wool into secrets and garments into reports.

After all, knitting is binary. The two stitches—knit and purl—are the same structure as Morse code, with knits resembling “V” shapes and purls forming horizontal lines. This made knitting an ideal medium for steganography, the ancient art of hiding messages in plain sight. A dropped stitch could signal a passing train. A deliberate bump or two might mark the number of enemy troops. To the untrained eye, it was just a sock—a little erratically done, perhaps, but just a sock. To the resistance, it was a lifeline.

The genius of this tactic lay not only in its technical subtlety but in its cultural invisibility. Women knitting were seen as symbols of domesticity, not danger. Soldiers and officers rarely suspected that the socks warming their feet might contain the coordinates of the next enemy attack. Even when messages were more overt—knots tied in yarn, patterns stitched into hems—they were dismissed as mistakes or decorative flourishes. The men in charge (in their underestimation of women’s determination) became unwitting accomplices.

Literature, too, has immortalized this way of record keeping. In Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge knits the names of aristocrats destined for the guillotine into her work, a fictional echo of real-world tactics. Though her motives are revolutionary rather than resistant, the symbolism remains: knitting as power.

Today, the legacy of the spies endures not just in museums or memoirs, but in the very act of knitting itself. Some modern crafters have revived the tradition, encoding personal messages, political statements, and even love notes into their work. What was once a wartime necessity has become a peacetime art form—a quiet homage to those who knitted in the shadows.

In the end, these women remind us that resistance need not be loud to be effective. Sometimes, it is soft and warm, wrapped around your shoulders, keeping your toes warm, and whispering secrets in the language of wool.