Wiktionary
n. A woman who knits; used especially of those who knitted at meetings and at executions during the French Revolution.
Wikipedia
Tricoteuse is French for a knitting woman. The term is most often used in its historical sense as a nickname for the women who sat beside the guillotine during public executions in Paris in the French Revolution, supposedly continuing to knit in between executions. Amongst the items they knitted was the famous liberty cap or Phrygian cap.
Usage examples of "tricoteuse".
She herself retained vivid memories of the one night she had spent in the prison of St Lazare and from time to time in her dreams she still saw the leering face of the woman known as La Tricoteuse who had tried to kill her only because she was young and beautiful.
Add to these the foul remnants of every popular insurrection and dictatorship, beasts of prey like Jourdain of Avignon, and Fournier the American, women like Théroigne, Rose Lacombe, and the tricoteuses of the Convention who have unsexed themselves, the amnestied bandits and other gallows birds who, for lack of a police, have a wide range, street-rollers and vagabonds, rebels against labor and discipline, the whole of that class in the center of civilization which preserves the instincts of savages, and asserts the sovereignty of the people to glut a natural appetite for license, laziness, and ferocity.
Later on, indeed, these are to become, at the Jacobin and Cordeliers clubs, the tricoteuses (knitters) who fill their tribunes.
I cannot express the horror I felt on hearing those women, since called tricoteuses, take a delight in the already homicidal doctrines of Robespierre, enjoying his sharp voice and feasting their eyes on his ugly face, the living type of envy.