Hello, I'm the Brat, and I'm a feminist who cooks. And knits.

[innerbrat]

Viv Groskop asks if good feminists bake cupcakes? Linked to by moviegrrl, I was so shocked by the title, that my first reaction was to say oh sod off, I can bake if I want to, and went to read the article all worked up to hate it, and ready to pass all sorts of judgements on Groskop

Comments

[gramarye1971]

Good food for thought here. I think I might feel a little better about this embrace of the domestic arts if there seemed to be a bit more awareness of the reasoning behind the tradition. In our grandmothers' day, you didn't knit socks because you wanted to make cute trendy socks with nice yarns and chat with friends -- you knitted socks because if you didn't, then you wouldn't have socks to put on your feet. You might have made the tradition of chatting with friends while you knitted because it was less boring than doing it on your own, but you still needed the socks and they wouldn't be made if you didn't knit them. Much the same with the other domestic arts: if you didn't know how to cook or mend, then you had raw food and clothes with holes in them.

I think that the dividing line between a fetishized trend and a genuine choice is that awareness of what created the traditions in the first place. If some women want to dress up in girdles and petticoats and make seven-layer cakes, that's fine, but it doesn't seem to be embracing or reclaiming the feminine as much as it's saying 'these are the aspects of the feminine that I like, and I'm going to ignore the rest of the parts that I don't'.

(Granted, I'm also crazy enough to mend my own underwear. Take that as you will.)

[mercuriazs]

Yes! I agree with this. Whether it was through unflattering reporting/quote-gathering or not, a lot of the young women in that article seemed to me to be embracing the feminism of Selective Recall, which is ... I just feel like it's a bit of a stretch to call something subversive just because you like doing it for yourself, but it used to be something that you were pressured/expected to do for your family. That's great, but it's not exactly subversive, to me.

It seems sort of more like ... well. In order to undermine the principles of '50s housewifeism, or whatever we're calling it, you'd have to get around (or subvert) the notion of women baking cakes because it's their natural state of being, or because they're not good at anything else, and not just pay attention to that whole nurturer/mother/provider thing. Just the act of baking a cake, no matter who it's for, doesn't actually seem to achieve that-- you'd need something else. Something like, uh. Power tools? I don't know.

Not to say people can't or shouldn't bake cakes! Because obviously that's ridiculous. I love cake. I hope to learn to bake some of my own one day (after I get better at sewing).