Posted by Elizabeth

When I was little, I loved to drag my mother’s senior yearbook from the bookshelf, the 1969 Pine Tree from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where I would immediately flip to the only photo in which my mother appeared.  Propped on an industrial kitchen counter, smiling through long, glossy locks, my mother appeared next to nine other girls who comprised the Future Homemakers of America.  Because the 1970s were nipping at their heels, the FHA was only a fraction of the size of DECA and the Future Teachers of America (all women), whose photos book-ended my mother’s “career club.”  The home arts were definitely on their way out the door.

Can you guess which one is my mom?

If my mom were alive today, I think she’d be surprised to see the renaissance that’s taking place where the home arts are concerned.  Ball canning supplies hit their highest sales in decades.  Websites such as Etsy and movies like Handmade Nation raise the arts and crafts moments to a higher aesthetic.  The wild success of Julie and Julia has reinvigorated an interest in slow cooking (The Art of French Cooking is back on the best-sellers list).  I even read a review for a children’s book this weekend that revolves around the process of making homemade applesauce, from farmer’s market to canning.  Everywhere I look these days I see throwbacks to an earlier era with a modern twist.  Some attribute it to the economy – when times are tight, we feel a need to produce our own goods – but I think it goes deeper than that.  This movement seems to indicate a nostalgia for a simpler time, a time when our own hands helped to create the things we consumed.

What we seem to have forgotten about the emissaries of the home arts movement, who we now consider so “ahead of their time,” was how out-of-synch they were in their respective eras.  Julia Child, for example, had a devil of a time selling her cookbook, as ready-to-make mixes and TV dinners were stepping into fashion, and the feminist movement was solidly underway.  Who wanted to be in the kitchen cooking? Michael Pollan examines this issue thoroughly in his must-read article Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch:  How American Cooking Became a Spectator Sport, and What We Lost Along the Way.  Polland notes that Julia Child “tried to show the sort of women who read ‘The Feminine Mystique’ that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention.”

As I think back to my own mother, who raised me in the 1980s, a time when women were encouraged to pursue high-powered careers and “have it all,” I understand better than ever that she was ahead of her time.  During a decade when the home arts had fallen out of fashion, my mom cooked homemade meals, canned jam in the summer, churned ice cream with a hand-cranked machine, and sewed my Halloween costumes every fall.  She also worked outside the home as a cake decorator, eventually owning her own bakery.  She was never the classic homemaker, nor the average working mom.  I don’t think her goal was to “do it all” in the Martha Stewart sense.  Much like how Julia Child viewed cooking, I think my mom “didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself.”  Regrettably, I never took much interest, nor had much respect, for the home-making that she did.  But now that I’m a grown woman, struggling her way through learning how to can and make her own lattice-top pies and grow her own vegetables, I wish I would have paid more attention to my mom growing up.

While I never aspired to be like my mom, I realize in retrospect that our goals are more similar than different.  I, too, want to be engaged in the home arts in a meaningful way, to be an active participant in the things I produce, without feeling “stuck in the kitchen.”  I want the everyday tasks of my life to matter.  Like Pollan says of Julia Child, I’m “less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than means to a meal.  It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles.”  As I think about how I want my life to be, I want that as much as I want a career.   I think the home arts have something important to offer us if its goal is to connect us to ourselves and provide pleasure, rather than be an obligation, a mechanism to impress, or perhaps worst of all, a fleeting trend.

So tell me, dear readers?  Are my ideas terribly out-of-step, or am I ahead of my time?