Random Musings on Crochet, the Home Arts & Womanly Things

Permit me, if you will to do some rambling as I think through the topics of the home arts, engineering, the roles of men and women, mothers and fathers, and the current cultures affect on it all.  Like a good baking recipe, these things get all mixed up and once this happens they are impossible to separate and define, so please bear with me.

Two recent readings have stoked this fire in my heart, one written by a self-proclaimed feminist who surprisingly shares my struggles, and another a delightful young woman/engineer who now designs toys for very young girls in an effort to introduce them to non-traditional pursuits such as engineering.  As I was driving around town on one of my many trips to the store to buy my family food (least they starve - very important “womanly” job in my humble opinion), I had a chance to ask my daughter what she thought about such new toys.  Both of my daughters happened to grow up in a household with three brothers where toys for both boys and girls abounded.  No shortage of Legos, Lincoln Logs, blocks, or any other building/engineering type toys in this house for my girls!  They were free to play with all toys as much or as little as they liked.  On the other hand, just to level the playing field, my boys learned how to bake and decorate cakes and each child, that’s each girl and boy in my family - became skilled enough at cake decorating to bring home a champion ribbon or two from our county fair over the years.

Being a mother of 5 children in the time span of 6 1/2 years, I honestly didn’t have the time or energy to overly direct their playtime.  I know what I am about to say isn’t a “one size fits all”, but I dare say it may be a “one size fits most”.  My girls overwhelmingly came to prefer caring and dressing their stuffed animals and dolls, where as my boys room would be forever littered with Lego projects, scary looking robots, and toy cars.  They (the boys or girls) were never pushed, prodded, coerced or forced into liking any of these things.  These were just their natural tendencies.

Right now you may be thinking, “So what?”  Well... this is my question:  Are we purposing in our current culture to change these natural desires in our children?  I submit that we are and have been for at least 2 generations.  As I was growing up, I sought with all my heart to be pleasing to those in authority around me and it didn’t take me long to figure out what was expected.  Kids aren’t as dumb as we think.  Deep in my heart, my desires, although not popular in the ‘70s, were to be loved by a wonderful, faithful man inside the institution of marriage, and raise children together.  Of course I could and would NEVER vocalize such things in a culture where I was encouraged to be an Air Force Pilot, astronaut, engineer, research scientist, or to pursue some other REALLY great career outside the home.  I even remember being told by someone I deeply respected that I shouldn’t “waste my education” on raising a family.  Really?  Raising a family is a waste of my education?

It wasn’t until my senior year in college that I began attending a church where I actually got to meet young families where the wife and husband were so committed to Biblical values and to raising the next generation of children that they decided to forgo the wife’s income in order to pour their time into the training and education of their children.  Wow!  Really?  AND the wife was smart as a whip!  AND she really, really enjoyed being there for her children, almost as if it were even MORE important than the money or career.  Now that’s radical and totally counter-cultural.

That was more than 30 years ago.  Since then I have had the privilege of raising my children and even home educating them for more than 22 years.  Has it been easy?  No.  Fun?  Well, sometimes.  Sacrifices have been made all along the way to make it possible, and God has helped us every step of the way.  We have made plenty of mistakes and will be the first to say that this is NOT the only way, and we understand that this may not always possible or even desirable for everyone.  Please don’t read this as a mandate.  That said, if given the chance, we would probably choose to do it the same way all over again - minus some of the mistakes we made the first time around of course!

So what does this have to do with a crochet blog???  Well, as Debbie Stoller writes in her book, Stitch ‘N Bitch, The Knitters Handbook: “...feminists were claiming that anyone who spent her days cooking and cleaning and her nights knitting (crocheting) and sewing, all in an effort to please her husband and her children, was frittering her life away.”  She also speaks of her feminist friends responding with distain after learning of her newly found hobby of knitting.  She writes, “It seemed to me that the main difference between knitting and, say, fishing or woodworking or basketball, was that knitting had traditionally been done by women.”  I think this is the reason these womanly pursuits of the past don’t get a lot of recognition or are even considered legitimate art forms among many these days.  Months ago I tried contacting my local community college which provides continuing education courses of all types.  I was referred to the Arts section of this institution and have sought to learn more about becoming an instructor.  To this day no one has followed up or responded to my request.  I don’t know for sure why, but I suspect the fiber arts (crochet & knitting), so closely attached to traditional roles of women of the past, is not considered a serious art form for this institution.  

As you can imagine, this makes me sad because this means that many young ladies who will never come in contact with the joy of crocheting or knitting because of a wrong stigma placed upon it by our current confused culture.  Women can also become too busy trying to fulfill the culture’s expectations to have the time for such things.  How do I know?  I meet other women caught in this trap all the time, and often feel the pressures myself.  Most of us can become all harried, running from one place to the other, electronic device in hand or ear, too busy to complete a conversation without being interrupted by the next “urgent” e-mail or phone call coming in, you know “the tyranny of the urgent”.  The only problem with living this way is that it is too easy to miss the most important moments of life, which have their way of coming at very inconvenient times.  We need to learn how to relax and rest.  Our work will always be there, whether we work professionally outside the home, or if our work is primarily home based, in the form of the next load of laundry or preparing another family meal.  As my body has aged, I’ve grown to cherish these times of  rest, which often includes a skein of yarn and a crochet hook and a good conversation with one of my children.  I have often light-heartedly shared with other like-minded women that I believe crocheting has saved our family a lot of money that otherwise could have been invested in “professional medical help and medications” due to the stress that this world has placed upon women (and men), and the more I seriously think about this, the more truth I see in it.  

Driving home today with my teenage son at the wheel, I had the opportunity to ask for his input on this topic.  He was quick to point out that just as women aren’t as free to pursue more traditional womanly pursuits, he felt that men were no longer free to be men either.  Even as a junior in high school, he is well aware of this problem. My oldest son recently completed a college level class where gender was defined not by biology, but by “how one feels...”  We now have somewhere around 50+ different categories by which to define our gender now on Facebook. If that isn’t confusion, I don’t know what is.  

Getting back to Debbie Stoller’s book, she describes her eureka moment into all of this:  “All those people who looked down on knitting - and housework, and housewives - were not being feminist at all.  In fact, they were being anti-feminist, since they seemed to think that only those things that men did, or had done, were worthwhile.”  While I may not agree on everything with Debbie, I certainly agree with her here! 

None of my comments in this blog are meant to spark a mommy war, a war of the sexes, or to put one side against the other.  Instead it is my hope to free us all from other’s unrealistic expectations that just may not be our natural, God-given bent in this world.  I only wish I could have discovered this freedom myself about 40 years ago!  I would have done things a bit differently, probably fretted a lot less over others opinions and most likely crocheted a whole lot more!  The good news is that it's never too late to change.