A week ago when I had the audacity to say that I thought we should stop the willy-nilly giving of quilts as gifts and poked at the fact that “women’s hobbies” often had to be justified by giving the “spoils of the sport” away or one could not justify the money, time and energy spent on “the doing” and most people skimmed right over the part about this being a patriarchal lobster-trap of a situation meant to keep women “in their place” and instead bit down on the easier part about what happens to quilts after they are gifted and the emotions tied to these situations.
A lot to unpack
I get it, there is a lot to unpack with the idea that how we feel about what we make is tangled and conflated with the oppression of women over the ages and yet when we don’t spend some time thinking about these things we can’t further unpack the question about why the accumulation of metric shit tons of fabric gives us comfort since most of us own more fabric than we could reasonably use in even 10 year of serious quilting.
And please let me be clear here I am not talking about modest stashes of fabric to hold us and our creative pursuits in good stead for the next year or even possibly 5, I am talking staggering amounts of fabric taking up full rooms, sheds, and rented storage facilities, spilling out of boxes and stuffed under beds.
I can feel a few of you getting really uncomfortable, and some getting really mad so please hold tight and let’s keep teasing this apart.
I saw things
I owned a quilt shop long enough to know that a great deal of women skim money for family budgets. They over extend their credit cards as well as hiding in other ways the amount of money they spend on fabric ALL THE TIME. Many women hide their newest yardage, sneak it in the house, and otherwise claim to buy less than they do even when it is not a serious blow to the budget. This is so common that there are memes and jokes and cartoons about all of it, and yet like most jokes there is a dark truth lurking under the “hahaha”.
And while I will stand firm in my belief that one should never be going into debt to buy fabric the actions of so many beg the question of why when it is within their budgets women still feel the need to hide their fabric from family, husbands and others.
I posit that these actions are a mix of defiance, retaliation and shame and a lack of feeling worthy born out of the misogynistic view that what we do as women has little value that we must give away to justify making more / doing what we love. -tricky huh? Sure, a quilt is a loving gift but what if we were truly free to make only what we wanted, when we wanted to make, just for the act of making, what would that feel like?
I know these feelings
I have wrestled with this topic for long enough to know my own history and have many memories of long ago (30ish years ago) of paper couponing, not cashing in my coupons until the end of the grocery checkout when they would actually give you cash back for your amount of coupons and then using that money to buy fabric at the five and dime in our town, making myself feel better about my actions by sewing for my children and my home from those funds. I think of myself as a pretty liberated women and yet battling with worthiness is a perpetual act for me as well as most women and it shows up in our hobbies swiftly.
This is FAR from a definitive piece on this matter, in fact it barely scratches the surface of the topic of women and their hobbies and our need to justify any of it to anyone let alone ourselves. What it is, is the start of a conversation that let’s all makers claim their right to create and to further explore how systemic control and suppression leads us to get all twisted up with a myriad of results as individual as the makers themselves.
