Riley and Avery

So, a couple things happened recently that made me think about feminism and its various applications, and what "feminism" truly means.

First, my World History teacher seems to be a rather militant feminist. She hasn't said as much, but when she refers to the notion of "a woman's place" she has a rather disgusted and snarky look on her face, or about womens' roles as child-rearers. I'm sorry, women are different from men, and being feminist doesn't mean that we have to want the same things and have to be treated the exact same way as men. That's not true feminism. Actually, it's anti-feminism. It's a veiled and sophisticated form of woman-hate, in my book, this militant and political feminism.

Anyway, she mentioned while talking about the Industrial Revolution, how big a deal it was for women not have to sew clothes anymore, and she said that she hated sewing, and I said "I LOVE sewing! Clothes, quilts, anything!" She looked at me in a surprised way. I guess the loud-mouthed, opinionated woman in class enjoying sewing was a bit of a shock. She didn't say anything other than "really?!?" but I knew what she was thinking. I was a failed feminist for doing stuff so out-dated, but here's the thing...

I am really interested in historic Colorado quilts. Why, you ask? Because historically, women have been invisible. Our work is historically temporary. Food is made and consumed. Children are raised and leave the house to start their own families. Houses are cleaned, only to become dirty, and we clean again. A man's work is more permanent. He builds a fence and it stands for decades. He builds a homestead and it's still standing hundreds of years later, etc. A woman who's name was, perhaps, Emily Smith, become Mrs. Robert Brown upon marriage, and that name is written on photographs of her, if there even are any, and within a couple of generations, no one knows who the woman in the picture actually is.

But she made quilts, and they still exist. The only tangible testament to her existence. Her hands may have bled, her eyes may have grown dim, but she made quilts by hand. She may have saved fabric for decades, worn out pants, out-grown shirts, remnants of older quilts, the cloth from feed sacks. She may have cut up the "nice" clothes she brought with her west, finding them impractical for homesteading life.

Quilts served as backdrops for the rare photograph. When an infant died, she lay him on a quilt and called in a photographer to take perhaps the only picture she would ever commission, of her dear child on a beautiful quilt that had become a burial shroud.

When she was preparing to go west, women in her community gathered cloth for her to take with her, and made her memory quilts to take with her and to remember them by. She traded her precious quilts for provisions for the trip, and necessities along the way. Quilts and quilt-making tools became popular trade items between white women and Indian women, opening up trade relationships that were previously only available to men. Women widowed on the frontier were able to sustain themselves and their children through sewing and trading quilts. Those quilts saved lives.

If a child fell ill, she sat by her bedside quilting a death vigil.

Later, rural women came together to have quilting bees. They probably breastfed while quilting, exchanging female wisdom over a quilt top. With no access to modern medicine, they probably exchanged recipes for homeopathic remedies over a quilt. What an incredible female-only culture! And these women were tough! One woman cut a gash in her arm while performing farm labor, and called to her daughter to fetch her quilting needle and thread. The woman proceeded to sew up her own arm right there in the field, while her husband fainted dead away.

With industrialization, quilting almost became extinct, with "liberated" women opting to buy factory-made quilts rather than engaging in such a pedestrian and old-fashioned occupation. But to let this art form die (and those who think that quilting is not art have a fundamental misunderstanding of what art actually is) would be to negate and invalidate the existence of whole generations of women!

The crux of the hypocrisy of modern feminists is the advent of new (awesome) websites like etsy.com where women, mostly, ply their handmade wares. Feminist neo-hippies are covetous of the domestic crafts of other women, an occupation which, if they were honest with themselves and adhered uniformly to their own philosophies, they abhor. So, through this ego-centric consumerism, we create an elite class of women who are "too feminist" to participate in domestic occupations, yet still desire, and can afford, to buy handmade organic toys or handknit organic wool leggings made by other women. Feminist neo-hippies have become elitist classists, and the object of their domination is other women! Doesn't this just drip with hypocrisy???

We don't question Indians who continue to do beadwork, men who do woodwork, people who make their own bread when it can be bought in a store, so why do we question women who continue to practice domestic arts? How come we can grow our own herbs and vegetables, but can't make our own quilt for fear of "setting women back?" Because women themselves are the single largest obstacle to true feminism, that's why. Because at the root of it all, militant feminist hate being women, and are ashamed of the female experience (for they deny that the female experience exists at all, no?). True feminism is the act of embracing all that women are, were, and will be.