Cardigan Worn by One Woman of the Boeing Five, Tried for Entering the Boeing Nuclear Missile Plant on September 27th, 1983, Sentenced to Fifteen Days in the King County Jail for Defending Life on Earth

2011

Ellen Lesperance animates archives and feminist histories by re-creating the sweaters worn by individual women at protest events during the 1980s and 1990s. This work replicates the sweater of one of the “Boeing Five,” a group of women who trespassed at a Boeing cruise-missile plant outside Seattle in 1983 and urged workers to cease the production of military weapons. The cardigan and the painted knitting pattern, which invoke the traditional category of “women’s work,” memorialize this act of civil disobedience and position feminist and antiwar causes as ones that can be readily taken up by current and future generations.