Charlotte, thanks for the mention of the BBC program(me). Based on your comment, I took the 10 minutes or so to listen to it.

I agree with you - Ms. Brocket acquits herself well.

And the whole "pron" thing irritates me - one of the women brings up the issue that "women are expected to be thin and pretty and successful and NOW you are expecting them to knit, too!"

And I look at that? And I go, well, I don't think I'll ever be thin - even if I starved myself and exercised more than I do. And Pretty - well, I'm only going to be as pretty as God and Mary Kay can make me, I'm not going to put myself under the knife to get a more twee nose, or a smaller narrower chin, or anything like that. And as for successful - well, I AM a breadwinner. I have tenure. I've published the odd article. That's probably the level of success I'll achieve in this life. I don't want to be President. (dear God, No. Never.) I don't even want to be a University President. Or a Dean. Or even a Department Chair.

But.

I can come home at the end of the day and make a sock. And the sock is pretty and good and it keeps my foot warm and cushions it. It is actually an achievable expectation for me. A realistic expectation. (I think "Realistic Expectations" would make a WONDERFUL blog name, if it's not already taken).

Now, maybe for some women, being fit and toned is an achievable goal, and more achievable than knitting a sweater is. Or having a "showplace" house. Or dressing up to the height of fashion. Good for them. They are free to buy their sweaters. But don't knock the person who breathes a sigh of relief because she can knit a sock - or spin some wool - or rock a fussy baby to sleep (something I have NEVER been able to do. Not handled that many babies but they tend to go fussy as soon as they're placed in my arms) - or bake a loaf of bread.

Again - it's choices. I do not see why some people don't get that. I do not see why people feel threatened by a pretty book with pretty pictures. The one woman - the adversary of sorts - almost implied it needed to come with a warning label, something like, "Warning: real life is not actually like this."

As we used to say in fifth grade: well, DUH.

I realize that 90% of what you see on blogs is prettied up. Everything you see in the glossy house magazines is prettied up. I love Country Living - love, love, love it. But if you look closely at the photos: you almost never see a tv set or even a radio. You rarely see a modern appliance. You don't see a lot of books (at least in most of the room-shots) and you don't see mail stacked up on the table, bills waiting to be paid, a cookbook propped open with flour spilled on it.

And I am really not the cleverest person on the face of the earth to have figured this out. I am in fact quite obtuse about certain things, which puzzles me all the more when I hear an intelligent woman saying, "Those home magazines - they should tell people real life is not like the pictures."

And I guess that's my objection - to people who roll their eyes and go "But you're setting such HIGH STANDARDS and making women FEEL BAD because they don't do what you do."

'Cos I don't see it. What feeling-bad I do (e.g., all my maundering about why I can't design a sweater) is entirely self-imposed. (And actually? A really good antidote to feeling less because you're surrounded by creative people? I wear a sweater I knit to church - even a fairly simple sweater like one of the Sitcom Chic sweaters I've knit - and everyone goes nuts. "You MADE that?" They act like I discovered fire or something. Maybe one of the antidotes to overly high expectations for yourself is to step outside your field). I don't blame the clever pattern authors for the fact that I feel like I don't have time to noodle about with designing and that that makes me sad.

At any rate.

The comment on darning, too. Maybe I'm a bit of a survivalist at heart, but I find myself thinking: I'm glad I know how to darn. (My mom taught me when I was a kid. Even in my fairly prosperous family, she darned socks. Because it saved money and extended their life - and, incidentally, kept them out of the landfill just a bit longer) Oh, I almost never do it (if I get a hole in a beloved pair of handknit socks I do). But. If some horrible weird reversal of culture were to happen, and the only socks I get to have for the rest of my life are the socks I have now (or can make in the future), I'm darn glad I know how to fix them. (And I would happily - if this hypothetical reversal of fortunes came - darn other people's socks in barter for things I needed).

(And you DO NOT need a "darning mushroom" - my mom kept an old, burnt-out light bulb on hand and she darned over that. I DO have a darning mushroom - a sweet little one a British friend of the family gave me that she had bought as a souvenir of "The Waterfall at Lowoore" (or maybe it's Lowgore, I can't quite read it) and she had no one to pass it on to and she knew I'd treasure it.

Except it's more of an egg than a mushroom, and it's small - I think it's meant for darning glove fingers, which would also be a worthy preservation, if you want to take the time)

I don't know. I will admit I feel a bit secretly smug (but I don't really express it much, for fear of being considered one of those Domestic Overlords that we are apparently meant to fear, like Martha Stewart) about knowing some of those "vanishing skills" like darning socks or embroidering pillowcases or making an angel food cake from scratch.

My attitude is: it makes me happy. That is good enough for me.

I think I said somewhere else that sometimes I think "craft" and what it has become is being made to bear all sorts of burdens of symbol that it may not be meant to carry. It doesn't really MEAN anything, in a deep semiotic anthropological sense that I like to knit: it is something I enjoy, something that I am good at, and so I do it. It is not any kind of rebellion against the modern world, or desperate clinging to a past age which even my romantic heart knows is not as Golden as it was claimed to be

(A world without antibiotics, or the polio vaccine, or air conditioning. A world where you had to do the marketing every day because you had at best an ice box to keep food in. A world with more racism and xenophobia, and fewer options for women. A world where maybe you saw a newspaper once a week if you lived in a rural area, and that may have been your only link to what went on in the world. A world where children regularly died of things like rheumatic fever and milk-sickness. Not a Golden Age in my mind.)

I don't know. All I can say is: I like knitting. I like quilting. I like cooking. I like embroidering, making critters, working in my garden. I even like cleaning house, when I have the time to do it up right. I don't think any of those things make me a bad person, I don't think any of those things are foolish choices.

In the end, we have to decide what makes us happy. And not worry about someone whose idea of happiness is different from ours. I don't worry overmuch about the women who'd rather shop than do anything else, or who spend hours doing Sudoku or coaching their kids' soccer teams....