Inspection of women’s lives in the home are often focused on the inequities and injustices - which were and continue to be numerous - but less interest is focused on our capacity, enjoyments and innovations. It’s devaluing to look at their (our) domestic hobbies as trivial or childish because it misses the very heart. It misses the rarely visible, universal human need for meaning. It misses the value of aesthetics and play .
This need drives a world of quilters and inspires my own creative work. The impulse to fill my world with color and pattern and richness. The desire for full saturation in these reaches beyond the practical straight into the sensual. I want layers and layers of quilts. I enjoy piles of fabric, works in process and finished quilts that multiply into each room in my home. The world of the body and the senses is essential here. Sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell surround your body intimately in a saturated environment. As I work I smell the flavors of the dye as I stir my vats. The floral indigo, the woody madder, the earthy barks and tangy iron. I drink tea ritualistically as I sew. I run my fingers over the texture of linen, rough and soft simultaneously. I daydream of folky eras where the craftsperson had an elevated place in the community.
In The Saturated World, Professor Beverly Gordon writes about the way American women in the late 19th and early 20s centuries “enriched and added meaning to their lives through ‘domestic amusements’ - leisure pursuits that took place in and were largely focused on the home.” I love these women she describes with the enchanted worlds they created in their homes and the places they spent their days. Their handcraft and the beauty they produced sustained them as they continue to sustain me. They were magicians, transforming everyday tasks from the mundane into playful and emotionally satisfying experiences. The designed experiences for their families and their friends to delight them for the pure reward of pleasure.
I bemoan the isolated world where we live. Extreme connectivity is met with the equal weight of isolation. It is a great dialectical challenge of our time. Yet for me, the quilt is a place to think about this. The quilt creates a space to be alone in front of our sewing machines, yet together with every other quilter who has ever made a half square triangle or Ohio star. The way the blocks and their names are shared and morphed and exchanged between us. The way that a pattern belongs to everyone and no one all at once. Quilt trends and innovations flow through us in waves of movement. Quilts are not objects that merely sit on the shelf at a safe distance but instead they enter the boundaries of the intimate space of our bodies. They surround us as we sleep, hold our fragile babies and aged ones, and tangle with us and our lovers. This year is the year of the gift quilt for me where I finally begin to make quilts for friends. The hours and months of work will tie us together in a way that a commodity or property could never do.
These kinds of “feminine” activities are often framed as trivial and frivolous pursuits - “embarrassing” in their childishness. The assumption is that women would be better served by entering the professional world where they would leave these limiting activities behind in the home. Gordon says that “The general stereotype is that women did not really have enough to do at home and were thus reduced to a kind of domestic brainwashing.” I worry about this myself. That when people see how much I quilt they will think I must have too much free time on my hands. That I should have outgrown this childish activity, or that I have entered a second childhood as I move into old age.
Well, perhaps we should take the work of children more seriously! We should look at how elderly women chose to spend their last days after they have tried everything else. Maybe the old lady quilters have rested upon what brings them most joy.
Gordon argues that while “…I certainly do not advocate a return to keeping women ‘in their place.’ At the same time, I do not fully accept the idea that women were silenced by men and could only speak to their female peers through the domestic achievements….I also want to restore women’s agency - to stop accepting the idea that they were passive pawns who acted only out of lack of choice or power. Those who amused themselves in these ways may have operated within a given social sphere, but they still did what they did for reasons of their own. They acted ‘childishly’ because they remained in touch with their sense of playfulness and wonder, not because they were not fully functioning adults. Their seemingly wasteful activities often brought satisfaction and pleasure into their lives.”
The prejudices are deeply engrained. In contemporary culture the Saturated World is so often associated with the ‘feminine’ or the ‘childish’ and the domestic. But these are worlds that everyone can be invited into. If anyone has ever worked in a beige cubicle hive of an office you will know that the professional world could use some saturation.
The walls of our cultures press in on me. I struggle to value my own work. But as I play with my tiny triangles I commit myself to my senses. To breaking down the barrier between the practical and the beautiful. To sensuality. To taking aesthetic pleasure seriously. It is here that we can take the repetitiveness of our lives and turn it into poetry.
Thanks Judy :)
I love your essay writing, Sarah. The photos of your saturated home are delightful.