Jo raises some interesting insights. One thing she mentions is the crafts to leisure aspect. Originally there seemed to be an ethos that one was practicing a âuseful craftâ. For instance, you made a quilt because you needed a bed covering, or a doily because every well kept house required doilies. At a certain point, I think that the concept that you were doing this as a âchoreâ gave way to the idea that it was a leisure activity that was fun, and might even be a mode of artistic expression. Mass production really took the steam out of any argument that you were doing this sort of thing because it was a housekeeping requirement. I still recall that there was a time when people made their own clothes to save money. But, when I touched base with a friend who taught sewing about ten years ago she confirmed that it was impossible to make a garment for as little money as you could buy one, and that most of her sewing clients made their own clothes because they had unusual requirements, often religious in nature. Jo mentions that women typically left their jobs to have families in the 1950s and by the 1970s they had empty nests. When I first went to lace meetings in the 1970s, they occurred on weekdays, running from 10 in the morning until about 2:30 in the afternoon, because that is when the kids came home. Later, in the 1980s and 90s with more women in the work place, this schedule began to be problematical. But attempts to have lace meetings on the weekends and weekday evenings didnât work too well either because women simply had less leisure time. Devon
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