February
2005
Getting
Crafty as a Feminist Statement
Book Review by Kari Tipton
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Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec by Jean Railla (New York: Broadway
Books, 2004). $15 paperback. 160 pages.
A few years ago I decided I wanted to learn to knit. Knitting hadn’t
become white-hot celebrity trendy yet, but I thought it would be something
that could give me projects with a beginning, middle, and end—something
I don’t get to see often as an engineer, where projects can last
for years and years. I asked a friend of mine to get a good “how
to” kit from her yarn store owner mother, sat down with it, stubbornly
learned how to cast on, and became instantly and totally obsessed.
Before long I was drooling over knit lace patterns, buying yarn on e-bay, and
joining email discussion lists. But the best thing I did was get involved with
the old message boards at getcrafty.com. It started casually, with some questions
about yarn substitution or maybe the best way to refinish a china cabinet I thought
I might be acquiring (but thankfully didn’t), and then escalated to real-life
meetings and even being included in a book written by the website owner.
Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec by Jean Railla is a thoughtful book about how to live.
In it Railla combines feminist manifesto with craft tips, instructions, and introductions
to many crafty ladies around the world. Railla drew much of the material for
this book from her website (www.getcrafty.com) and created a book that is part
personal testimony, part instruction manual: Jean steps the reader through quizzes,
journal exercises, and collages designed to develop a crafty sense of personal
style and to help focus on each person’s perfect craft.
If I had to choose the one way the getcrafty.com message boards most shaped my
life it wouldn’t be from the incredibly helpful crafty tips, but by introducing
me to so many smart and interesting women—women who weren’t afraid
to use the word feminist and who thought about the issues I was dealing with:
how to reconcile our need for community with our work and its demands on our
time, and how to craft our lives in the direction we wanted them to go. And maybe
it was being surrounded by so many strong and vocal women or maybe it is the
direction my growth would take anyway, but the longer I craft, the more I think
about societal issues. For example: crafting not only as a pleasant and rewarding
activity, but as an inherently political activity. What is more political than
giving homemade gifts during the holidays—avoiding Black Friday and conspicuous
consumerism in favor of items you make as you hold the recipient in mind?
One of the big topics that I carry around with me most these days is crafting
as a feminist statement. And Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec addresses many of these
issues. Railla writes, “Get Crafty is a manifesto for what I call the New
Domesticity, a movement committed to recognizing, exalting and most of all enjoying
the culture that women have built for millennia.” In the book she explains
the New Domesticity: recognizing traditional women’s work as a difficult
skill set that should be appreciated and can be learned by everyone, not treated
as a job for grannies and downtrodden housewives.
Basically: domesticity has been eschewed by people, including feminists, for
generations. The New Domesticity considers crafting as a way for women to stand
up and take back power on their own terms by valuing themselves and their work,
not devaluing it as it has been in the past. This is a wonderful counterpoint
to the suggestion that more women are picking up crafts and domesticity as a
return to a nostalgic 50s era and a feeling of safety. I would say that crafting
is not inherently safe. It involves a creation that can take a large amount of
emotional investment, and that can take a long time to complete. Crafting involves
walking the edge of consumerism, something that is a large part of American culture
today.
Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec creates a whole-life picture of a crafty person. There
are chapters on cleaning, cooking, and crafting. Recipes and instructions are
given for all manner of things, from Jean’s grandmother’s madeleine
cookies to ecological household cleansers, homemade beauty products, and knit
bikinis. But what ties the book together are the personal experiences drawn from
people of all countries and generations. I met many women in the book, as I did
on the message boards, who are struggling with the same issues that I am, issues
of consumption, politics, creativity, and the ever-stressful “what do I
want to do when I grow up?” Having a community of likeminded women is both
vital and rewarding. And even though lately I am more of the “think about
it constantly and occasionally make things” variety of crafter than the “makes
her own clothes, shoes, and handbags” type, I am a Crafter. By declaring
myself a crafter, I am part of the movement to take back the word and the act
and all it is associated with for all feminists, be they men or women. Which
I must say does make me feel better when I end up gifting my creations a little
bit late.
As Jean remarks in the afterward: “[being crafty] is about viewing your
whole life as one big craft project.” So don’t be shy to pick up
those knitting needles, crochet hooks, hot glue guns, or sewing machines, to
read a new cookbook, or take pride in your home. It’s a feminist crafting
revolution, and it’s about creating a better life for ourselves.
Kari Tipton is an environmental engineer focused on sustainability issues in
Pittsburgh, PA. She knits, cooks, sews, and dreams of mastering the art of growing
tomatoes in containers on her back porch.
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