You know, I used to think of myself as a “crafty” sort of person — back when I was a kid and crafts meant needlepoint and sewing. Now sewing is obsolete, when the fabric costs more than the completed piece of clothing, and the crafts of the 2010s are scrapbooking and jewelry-making, neither of which suit me (I don’t have the eye for, or interest in, scrapbooking, and the only jewelry I wear is my wedding ring), but once a year I can still get the sewing machine going, and whip up something for the kids’ Halloween costumes: a lion, a soldier, Anikin Skywalker. At the boys’ school, the fifth graders write reports on saints and dress up on All Saint’s Day, so I’ve now twice managed to lead a kid into deciding to write about a saint whose costume could double as a Halloween costume — three years ago, a Roman soldier transformed into St. Martin of Tours the next day, and tomorrow, a prisoner will become St. Maximilian Kolbe. Sometimes, when the school PTO solicits donations for the annual auction, I think of donating a custom-made Halloween costume.
(Will the kids, when they’re adults, appreciate the homemade costumes? Or will they just remember being jealous of friends with generic screen-printed polyester jumpsuits with superhero patterns?)
Now, I don’t make the costumes exclusively from scratch — the prisoner costume started out as an adult-sized handmade costume from the Goodwill, a jumpsuit with snaps in front, which I cut in half to turn into pants and a snap-front shirt, then narrowed the sides, created a new elastic waistband, and shortened considerably. I was going to make a hat with the leftover fabric, but it kept getting jammed in the sewing machine. And Anikin Skywalker started out as a pair of girls’ knit brown pants, a large man’s brown sweatshirt, a woman’s extra-wide belt, and a light brown sheet, all from a thrift-store expedition a couple years ago.
But in our modern world, there are few opportunities to be “crafty” – a generation ago, or maybe two, sewing one’s own or one’s children’s clothes was a time-honored way to save money. Now it only makes sense for people who can’t find their clothes in retail stores, such as religiously conservative women who believe in “modest dressing” (e.g., long skirts), or women who have enough of an interest and skill in fashion to design their own clothing.
But it’s still satisfying to go through the sewing process (with a 60s sewing machine bought at a garage sale in 1991) and end up with a finished product that you can have a sense of pride in. It’s something tangible and useful, more so than a batch of muffins or an item of home décor, and certainly more than a facebook or pinterest post or even (yeah, I know) blogging. But even cooking, especially trying new bread recipes, is a form of “crafting” for me, and gardening (that is, before that point in the summer when my plants have all died) feels tangible and useful in a way that coordinating pension accounting doesn’t.
So that was the context behind my picking up the book Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, by Emily Matchar. And it doesn’t usually happen that I know before even making it beyond the introduction, or rather, beyond the first couple pages of the first “complete” chapter, that a book isn’t worth reading. Because, according to Matchar, women (and men) aren’t embracing knitting, and gardening, and other DIY crafts because of a desire for connection to the natural world or a connection to a tangible accomplishment but because of all the bad, bad things in the world:
- A renewed interest in gardening is due to distrust with the food system (and the government, as the ones in charge of our food system).
- A belief in attachment parenting, or, in general, an intensive parenting style is due to distrust in daycare centers, and the failure of government to provide high-quality, cheap daycare for everyone.
- And interest in all things associated with traditional homemaking is due to discontent with the corporate working world.
Or, skipping ahead to the conclusion (p. 248): “New Domesticity is, at heart, a cry against a society that’s not working. A society that doesn’t offer safe-enough food, accessible health care, a reasonable level of environmental protections, any sort of rights for working parents.”
Wow — I suppose this book is a companion to The Child Catchers, which I read last week: find a phenomenon, isolate the most extreme examples, and come up with a broader social statement.
Anyone read a good book lately?
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