One of the most enjoyable things in my life are the yummy mummy crafty blogs. Quite a few can be found on my sidebar and I have even more in my FeedDemon. These women amaze me. They have husbands and kids to care for. Give or take maternity leave, they have some form of participation in the paid economy. They blog. And they cook and craft. How do they do it? Whether the yummy mummy is a working from home architect or a creative spirit building up work and a portfolio of design, they are admirable.
Now dear yummy mummies, draw close.
Miss Eagle has a question for you.
Are you a New Victorian?
The Gen-X style, the Sex and the City style, seem - according to Lizzy Rattner - to be going by the board. They are old hat. Still seems, though, that the idea is "to have it all" but it is well planned. And this quote Miss E found interesting:
From the time they were tykes, New Victorians have been bred to ace exams, master extracurricular activities, land a coveted spot at a prestigious college, and then go forth into the world, ready to achieve. “This generation has been more strategically educated than any other generation,” said Mike Sciola, the Director of the Career Resource Center at Wesleyan University.
Mmm......perhaps this is what we are seeing in Australia as parents across the socio-economic scale flock to private schools if they can rustle up the readies?
This phenomenon is pretty amazing to Miss E too. While she could be said to be privately educated - just the local convent school full of working-class Irish Catholic kids - and while she might frequently plead gender discrimination in education and opportunity, the fact is neither boys nor girls in Miss E's neighbourhoods were strategically educated. In fact, in Miss E's home town one did not have all twelve years of education available. In the whole of North Queensland there was not one university. One technical high school in Townsville. Trade apprentices had to go away in blocks of study periods. No government seemed to think of investing huge amounts of money in the education of North Queensland kids in Miss E's generation.
Anyway, enough of the 'plaints. Times have changed for most - if not all - of us. But some things remain and there are marvellous clusters of women keeping the feminine traditions of home and hearth on the boil. But what gets me is the craft.
Once upon a time, craft and associated skills were part of the domestic skills necessary to feed and clothe one's family and to stretch the domestic budget further. In a time when after-marriage female participation rates in the paid economy were low and there was no television and life had a slower pace, women filled their hours with all manner of craft.
One would have thought that women's craft would have diminished with increased prosperity and the availability of mass-produced goods. One would have thought that increased participation of women of all ages in the paid workforce would have meant virtually no time for craft. But this has not happened.
While there is still an air of thriftiness in what is going on in lots of crafts, other traditional crafts have assumed the status of art forms and may require quite an investment in skills and materials. Simply amazing! And most encouraging to Miss E's simple female heart.
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