New Domesticity

via thequietus.com

I just devoured this fascinating essay by UK-based author Meryl Trussler, on the rise of “cupcake feminism.” Cupcake feminism (a term I use in my book as well), as Trussler defines it, is the cute-ified new face of feminism. The opposite of the angry, hairy feminist stereotype of the 1970s, the cupcake feminist wears an adorable vintage cardigan while reclaiming baking, knitting, apron-wearing and the like in the name of women’s empowerment. As Trussler writes:

Twee and retro have been seeping into feminism for a couple decades now, gaining potency. It’s all about cute dresses, felten rosettes from Etsy, knitting, kittens, vintage lamps shaped like owls, Lesley Gore. And yes – a lot of cupcakes.

It would be hypocritical to dismiss cupcake feminism outright. As outlined above, to tell women they are letting down the cause is vomitously snide and unproductive – and I like the associated aesthetic as much as anyone. (Except for knitting, which for me could only end in injury.) Admittedly, too, the cupcake feminist is a sophisticated invention. Rouged, lipsticked, cinched at the waist, she performs big-F Femininity as the drag–show that it is. Her 50s-housewife schtick sets off everything about her that is radicalised and new. And, importantly, she emphasises that typically ‘feminine’ pursuits are no less worthy or important than their ‘masculine’ counterparts.

Still, Trussler worries that this reclaiming of women’s work is “more nostalgic than ironic,” which is something I often think about as well. She also points out how the cupcake feminist aesthetic has become commodified by mainstream corporations. She uses British examples, but I think a good American example would be how the punk-rock Riot Grrrl crafting movement of the 1990s begat the hipster craft marketplace Etsy in the mid-2000s, which begat faux handmade product lines at places like Target and Wal-Mart.

Sorry if anyone is horrified by this vagina dentata cupcake pic, but I thought it was pretty hilarious.

How to generate a media storm, lesson #37: Picture a hot young woman on your cover, breastfeeding a three-year-old. Nice one, Time Magazine!

This week’s Time cover story is about Dr Sears and attachment parenting, a hot topic these days (and something I look at in my book). The article asks: “[Dr Sears'] philosophy has made parenthood more physically and emotionally demanding than ever before. But are mothers taking his advice too far?” The story points out how Sears comes at parenting from an evangelical Christian perspective, which is something I’ve always found interesting. It also notes how Sears and his wife, Martha, both experienced childhood abandonment, which clearly affects their attachment philosophy.

There’s also a neat side essay about how attachment parenting is a byproduct of feminism – women who become parents after years of high-powered careers are highly invested in doing parenthood “right,” and gravitate towards parenting philosophies that involve a lot of “work” and rules. I can believe this, but I’ve also interviewed lots of attachment parents who never really had careers, and find parenthood to be their profession. AP appeals to them too, since it’s a parenting strategy that engages a lot of energy and creativity that might otherwise not have an outlet.

What do you think of the story?

UPDATE: Oh look, it’s become a meme: http://www.buzzfeed.com/provincialelitist/time-mag-breast-feeding-meme-is-here (am digging the Game of Thrones reference)

1970's hottie hottington via spiffo.tumblr.com

Obviously this blog/book looks at New Domesticity from a women’s issues/women’s history angle. But it’s also obvious that the New Domesticity phenomenon is not just a female thing. There are plenty of male food bloggers, crafters, crunchy stay-at-home dads, neo-homsteaders, etc., and their numbers are growing.

So: I am looking for guys to interview. Do you have a friend/husband/boyfriend/co-worker/brother/son who embodies some angle of New Domesticity? An Etsy vendor? An obsessive home canner? A self-proclaimed “radical homemaker”? If so, I’d most appreciate his input!

Hannah Mudge, author of the super-smart We Mixed Our Drinks blog, has just posted about a book I hadn’t heard of but must now read immediately*: The Fifties Mystique. By an English author named Jessica Mann, it’s (in Hannah’s words) a “memoir-cum-warning” about our current nostalgia for retro culture. Mann lived through the era as a bored housewife, and worries about today’s young women’s apparent longing for “a simpler time” that really wasn’t so simple.

Mann has a piece in The Guardian this week, explaining her book’s thesis:

After a survey found recently that young mothers long to be full-time home-makers, novelist Kate Kerrigan said: “Luxury is the time to stay at home and decorate cupcakes. We’re not fighting for our right to work any more, we’re fighting for our right to knit.”

Knitting, which is often used as a demonstration of radical feminism, can also be a demurely domestic pastime, like group crochet, cake-offs or joining the Women’s Institute [to my fellow Americans: this is kinda like the English version of the Junior League]. “We long to put the clock back to the postwar years when life seemed prettier and nicer,” writes another thirtysomething, who, like many of her contemporaries, has nostalgic fantasies about the pre-women’s liberation era when mothers were never expected to juggle jobs and families.

It is understandable that women today, who work long hours out of financial need, might yearn for more time at home. But distance has lent enchantment to that view of the 1950s and 60s. I remember those days very differently…But for every working mother now who fantasises about giving up work, there must have been a ”captive wife” then, who felt utterly bored and frustrated by full-time domesticity. I was one of them.

Hannah, who is English and has read The Fifties Mystique, offers this excellent summary of the book’s end:

She [Mann] turns her efforts to encouraging today’s women not to look at inequality and their dissatisfaction and see turning back the clock as the answer, but to look towards the problematic issues of the 21st century that are causing it instead. She mentions the stressful long hours culture of work today, the still-elusive dream of shared parenting and equality in relationships, the admonitions that we “can’t have it all” that discourage women and fuel judgmental attitudes, the “old-fashioned sexism” of biological determinism (quoting Natasha Walter’s excellent Living Dolls), the one-sided and exploitative approach to women’s sexuality and appearance, and the fact that as during the 1950s, mothers are still to blame for everything.

Truth! I also see today’s nostalgia culture as partly a reaction against 60-hour workweeks and lack of maternity leave and the stress of “balancing it all.” If it were easier to find part-time work with full benefits, for example, perhaps no one would fantasize that June Cleaver’s life was simpler?

*(Oh, great. Now I see the book is published in England and is only available via international air mail. Woe! Woe!)

Don't make Susan B. Anthony angry, moms!

I promise, my book isn’t all about motherhood by any means (it’s also about crafting, and cooking, and women’s history, and pie!). But there’s been so much interesting discussion about mothering lately, what with the continuing fallout from Elisabeth Badinter’s book. Today, the New York Times has convened one of its “Room for Debate” panels to referee the deathmatch of “Motherhood vs. Feminism.”  Fun!

To save you time, I’ll summarize.

Mayim Bialik (AKA Blossom!) says no, attachment parenting is empowering because it celebrates what’s natural and rejects male-dominated ideologies about what ladies should do with their vaginas.

Heather McDonald (a comedy writer) says yes, because as a woman you shouldn’t “sacrifice your career, your financial security and oftentimes your happiness all in the name of motherhood?” She also offers that she didn’t breastfeed and her son is still good at basketball. So…

LaShaun Williams (a blogger) says yes, but “good riddance to feminism” anyway, because feminism “devalued marriage and the familial and societal benefits of homemaking and encouraged self-indulgence.” I’ll spare you my long-winded historical analysis of why this is bullshit (you’ll have to buy the book!) and simply say, “this is bullshit.”

Erica Jong (zipless fuck enthusiast) says yes, because women who are busy breastfeeding and co-sleeping don’t have time for “making music” or “data entry.” I hear Jong spent a lot of time doing “data entry” in the 1970s, if you know what I mean!

Pamela Druckerman (cheese-eating surrender monkey enthusiast) says yes, and points out that the French don’t do “mommy martyrdom.” And the French are amazing. Baguettes, hello!

Annie Urban (blogger) says no, and wisely points out that fathers can parent just as well as mothers – though she doesn’t say whether or not they parent as often as mothers (they don’t. Not even close).

Maria Blois (author of a book about babywearing) says no, and quit being judgmental, jerks!

All fun aside, I do think looking at how parenting trends impact women’s lives is totally valid. And it’s clear that many young women today are choosing very, very intensive methods of parenting. In my book, I hope to offer more than a knee jerk yes-no opinion on what natural parenting means for feminism, instead giving some historical and cultural context on why women are choosing this.

Crafting, once considered the purview of grannies and wearers of Bad Christmas Sweaters, has been cool again for a while now. From 1990s-era Riot Grrrls knitting plush vaginas as a political statement to hipster Etsy vendors selling letterpress wedding invitations printed on recycled card stock, crafting has made the cultural leap from radical hobby to full-fledged alternative lifestyle. Now, even places like Target and Wal-Mart are trying to get in on the handmade (looking) action, selling faux-collaged picture frames and craftsy-looking stuffed animals. Craft is now a $29 billion a year industry.

But perhaps the biggest sign that crafting culture has hit the big time is the new TLC show, Craft Wars, hosted by none other than serial reality TV star Tori Spelling. The competition show will feature crafters doing battle, their projects judged by a panel that includes a “DIY lifestyle expert.”

Cuz nothing says “DIY lifestyle” like Donna from Beverly Hills 90210, amirite? And what word goes better with ‘craft’ than ‘war’?

“Craft Wars continues to re-define crafting as something extremely modern – this is not your grandmother’s crocheting,” say TLC’s general manager.

Chances I won’t be sneaking over to my mother’s house to watch this on her cable, than hating myself slightly afterward? Approximately zero.

I just read New York Times columnist Mark Bittman’s essay praising Wendell Berry, which got me thinking about the guy. Berry, the beloved essayist and promoter of rural values, is a huge hero to many of the people I’ve interviewed for the book. In particular, I keep coming across this quote, from Berry’s essay “Feminism, the Body and the Machine:”

And what are we to say of the diversely skilled country housewife who now bores the same six holes day after day on an assembly line? What higher form of womanhood or humanity is she consenting to evolving toward?

How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? And that question is made legitimate by another: How have men improved themselves by submitting to it? The answer is that men have not, and women cannot, improve themselves by submitting to it.

Basically, Berry is saying that the working world has been degrading for men, and questions why women would want to follow in their footsteps. Isn’t it better to be a “diversely skilled,” self-sufficient homemaker than to be a cog in some assembly line, he asks?

The idea that self-sufficient homemaking is a way of escaping the rat race  is a major underlying theme of New Domesticity. Even people who aren’t full-time homemakers or homesteaders are really attracted to the idea of domestic DIY and “not working for The Man.” This is fascinating to me, since it’s basically the opposite of the 1960s/70s feminist view that careers would provide women with fulfillment.

I must admit, I’m not always a fan of Berry’s worldview, which I think over-romanticizes the rural past and undervalues scientific and technological progress (this is what Berry says about airplanes: “[they] have nothing to recommend them but speed; they are inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky, and scary.” I gotta say, airplanes seems pretty darn convenient to me, compared with the alternative. Also, they are amazing! A chunk of metal that flies?! Cool!). And I think that contrasting self-sufficient homemaking to assembly line work is silly – there are lots of jobs out there, and most of them do not involve assembly lines. And even early factory workers – like the Lowell Mill girls – thought factory work was a huge step up from the hardscrabble life on the farm.

Any Berry fans out there? Why do you think people today are so dissatisfied with the working world?

In the early 20th century, during what’s known as the Progressive Era, ordinary women were instrumental in fighting for greater government regulation of food and consumer products. After watching kids sicken and die from pus-contaminated “swill milk” and arsenic-laced penny candy, mothers of all social classes pretty much agreed that regulation was crucial. The Pure Food and Drug Act, passed in 1906, required federal inspection of meat-processing plants and mandated that medicines and packaged foods be correctly labeled. This act was followed by other legislation designed to promote public health and education – mandatory schooling for children, federally-funded maternal health clinics, compulsory vaccinations, etc. Infant and child mortality took a nosedive.

But lately, I’ve noticed that many people who self-identify as progressive are aligning themselves with Tea Partiers and other right-wing libertarians to fight against government health regulations. This week’s New Yorker has a great story on the raw milk movement (locked to non-subscribers, unfortunately). The raw milk advocates fall on either side of the political spectrum, from California hippies to ultra-conservative sheriffs. They claim raw milk has all kinds of health benefits, from curing allergies to alleviating ADHD. But government health agencies, which regulate or ban raw milk, say the risk of contamination with e. coli or listeria makes unpasteurized milk a public health threat. The pro-raw milk crew says the government needs to butt out. But, as writer Dana Goodyear points out, food freedom comes at a cost:

“A community that resists labeling and inspection as a government intrusion puts itself at the mercy of its suppliers.”

This question of “public regulation vs. personal freedom” is something we see over and over again with New Domesticity, and not just with food. Many of the people I’ve interviewed for this book have been fierce advocates for the freedom to have unregulated home schools, to choose to not vaccinate their children, etc. It’s all part of the DIY, parents-as-experts, smaller-is-better, home-based school of thought.

I feel really ambivalent about much of this (NOT about vaccines, I should note – I think those are pretty darn important). On the one hand, I think that, sure, adults should be able to eat whatever they want (and I love me some raw milk cheese!). On the other hand, I think food regulation is critical to keep everyone safe, including children and people who have neither time nor resources to wonder whether their food’s contaminated with e. coli.  Ditto for stuff like homeschooling. Most of the homeschooling parents I’ve talked to have been highly educated and clearly motivated to give their kids well-rounded educations. They want unregulated homeschooling so they don’t have to submit to what they see as arbitrary and invasive government standards. Fair enough. But the same lack of government regulation would also allow, for example, fundamentalist parents to raise children who can’t read. And, personally, I think being educated to a certain standard should be a universal right, a right which supersedes the parents’ right to choose whatever type of education or non-education they want for their kids.

Where do you fall on the personal freedom vs. public regulation stuff? Does any of this affect your day-to-day life?

via nymag.com

Warning: don’t read this New York Magazine cover story if you’re hungry. Too much talk about artisanal chocolate and handmade olive oil granola and small-batch lemon-hibiscus jam is dangerous before lunch.

The story is about Brooklyn’s booming artisan food culture, which has become a cliche over the past few years (chocolatiers with lumberjack beards! Liberal arts grads obsessed with canning!). The author riffs, slightly snarkily, on Brooklynites desire for “authenticity” and the supposedly simpler times of a bygone past:

Area code 718 romantics love to see their hometown’s name every time they pull something out of the fridge, to pretend a borough of 2.5 million people is a small English village, to partake of a Shop Class As Soulcraft authenticity that’s missing in their Twitter-addled, ­cubicle-drone lives, and to reassure themselves that Brooklyn is more “real” than Manhattan and not just an annex with shorter buildings.

The thing I find interesting about artisan food culture – and crafty/handmade culture in general – is how much of it is driven by our current climate of financial and social anxiety. In a world where solid, well-paid careers seem almost hilariously hard to obtain, “making stuff” begins to seem like a legitimate career path. In a world where people don’t trust Big Business – from factory farms to Wal-Mart – small and locally made goods seem increasingly appealing.

I’ve lately been interviewing lots of female “makers” – Etsy vendors, artisan jam producers, etc. – and it seems like for women, there’s often the additional appeal of having a flexible job where you can work from home while taking care of kids. Of course, when an artisan becomes really successful, flexibility often flies out the window and home craft workshops become mini assembly lines: call it the ‘Etsy paradox’!

About a month ago, I wrote about Elisabeth Badinter’s upcoming book: The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. The book, which claims that the current mania for natural parenting (babywearing, extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping, etc.) is becoming a new form of oppression for women, has been a bestseller in Europe. I predicted that it would cause a huge stir when released in the US.

Of course, predicting that any manifesto/screed/polemic about modern motherhood will cause a huge stir is like predicting that the sun will rise in the morning. It’s really a law of nature.

So it’s entirely unsurprising that the book, which will still not be released until April 24, has already been pondered and reviewed in every publication besides Cat Fancy and Cigar Aficionado. A sampling of thoughts:

Sabrina Parsons of Forbes.com hates the very idea of the book.

Just reading the description of the book fills me with anger. I am annoyed that Badinter is implying that the only way to be a “liberal” mother, and not only believe, but implement theories of attachment parenting, is if you are tethered to your home.

Amanda Marcotte of Slate thinks Badinter’s got a good point:

I’m really glad someone has written this book, even though I expect it to be rejected by people who believe labeling a behavior a “choice” exempts it from analysis or criticism. I suppose it could be a coincidence that lengthy breast-feeding and attachment parenting that interferes heavily with maintaining a career came into style right as it became passé to pressure women to downplay their ambitions for the sake of men, but it just seems highly unlikely. One thing I do know is that the more conservative women of my acquaintance don’t feel the same pressure to breast-feed until their kids are talking or to keep their kids by their side at all times, even bedtime. It seems that if you live in social circles where it’s simply expected that you curtail your professional ambitions and do most of the domestic work so as to avoid emasculating your husband, the psychic need to create elaborate parenting theories to achieve the same result—woman at home, tied to the kitchen—simply vanishes. Strange coincidence, indeed.

[I'd have to quibble with Marcotte on this last point: many conservative women embrace attachment parenting, though they may embrace it for very different reasons than liberal women. In fact, Dr. William Sears, the father of modern attachment parenting, is an evangelical Christian who has written books on Christian parenting. One of the things I find most interesting about natural parenting is the fact that it brings together women on the far right and the far left when it comes to topics like home birth and homeschooling.]

KJ Dell’Antonia of The New York Times Motherlode blog thinks the book raises interesting questions. 

If we absorb a message that to breastfeed on demand, to protect one’s children from all dubious chemical exposures, and to take on full responsibility for their physical and psychological health at all times are crucial to our children’s well-being, then does that message also push women away from the work force, and back into the realm of home and family?

Emily Matchar, of New Domesticity, STILL HASN’T GOTTEN HER HANDS ON A DAMN COPY!