Many 'domestic' tasks/pleasures are very meditative, indeed. Elizabeth Gilbert spoke beautifully about aesthetics and creativity in the domestic sphere in a interview in On Being a few years back. Lost of nuanced and important stuff in your conversation that I will read and consider further. I believe pre-industrialized revolution that for working people the task division wasn't quite so pronounced. And the more we can explore the concepts of femininity and masculinity as unique categories of expressing humanity, separate from body parts, and in each person in different mixes, we can get out of the boxes of gender expectations that are prisons for all.
As a longtime knitter and sewer and a person who loves to make baked goods, I appreciate this so so much! I came up in the DIY, early-Etsy movement of punk craft shows ( I left my job to sell handmade yarn! I built a business!)…and it felt like an aspect of my feminism. (See: Bust Magazine and Debbie Stollar’s knitting books)
To see the tradwives/homesteaders kind of..colonize the world of craft/baking/gardening on the internet has been such a bummer.
(I would love to read a study of this timeline! Did early Etsyers become homesteaders? Is it the younger generation who grew up with their moms or older sisters stitching and bitching?)
This is such an interesting observation. When I was a teen/in college, the hipsters had taken over DIY culture and I actually think when this took off is when many Mormon bloggers ran w it!
"What sucks about trad wives is like, I am totally here for them to have those same pleasures, and I am here for them to make their life choices even to the extent that they wish to negate their own political power, or seem to perform that negation. But those women will never be there for me.
...And so many of these trad women actually defend their lives as “choice” but in actuality, they are committed to social and religious movements that seek to foreclose choice. So I want them to have their choices, and they don’t want me to have mine."
This is exactly what I've been thinking about for the last few days, and says it so well!
Many 'domestic' tasks/pleasures are very meditative, indeed. Elizabeth Gilbert spoke beautifully about aesthetics and creativity in the domestic sphere in a interview in On Being a few years back. Lost of nuanced and important stuff in your conversation that I will read and consider further. I believe pre-industrialized revolution that for working people the task division wasn't quite so pronounced. And the more we can explore the concepts of femininity and masculinity as unique categories of expressing humanity, separate from body parts, and in each person in different mixes, we can get out of the boxes of gender expectations that are prisons for all.
As a longtime knitter and sewer and a person who loves to make baked goods, I appreciate this so so much! I came up in the DIY, early-Etsy movement of punk craft shows ( I left my job to sell handmade yarn! I built a business!)…and it felt like an aspect of my feminism. (See: Bust Magazine and Debbie Stollar’s knitting books)
To see the tradwives/homesteaders kind of..colonize the world of craft/baking/gardening on the internet has been such a bummer.
(I would love to read a study of this timeline! Did early Etsyers become homesteaders? Is it the younger generation who grew up with their moms or older sisters stitching and bitching?)
This is such an interesting observation. When I was a teen/in college, the hipsters had taken over DIY culture and I actually think when this took off is when many Mormon bloggers ran w it!
"What sucks about trad wives is like, I am totally here for them to have those same pleasures, and I am here for them to make their life choices even to the extent that they wish to negate their own political power, or seem to perform that negation. But those women will never be there for me.
...And so many of these trad women actually defend their lives as “choice” but in actuality, they are committed to social and religious movements that seek to foreclose choice. So I want them to have their choices, and they don’t want me to have mine."
This is exactly what I've been thinking about for the last few days, and says it so well!
RIGHT?!
Nailed it 👍