I'm doing some research for an article on craftivism, and I'm getting all these articles about craft and feminism that just aren't quite getting at what I hope and think craftivism is. Mostly: it's bigger than just a small-scale resurgance of craft, it's really big, it's important. I mean, it's huge. It's about:

-reclamation of women's work, questioning of art vs. craft, of women's roles in the art world, etc;
-actually hand-making goods in a society moving further and further away from knowing where our entire lives - our clothes, our household goods, our food, everything - actually come from;
- most importantly, I think, it's about the fact that we live in a world that isn't operating properly: goods are underpriced to the point that we hardly pay for the materials to make them - what about the person sewing the jeans, what about the overhead costs of the factory, the shipping costs, everything? What about the fact that our minimum wage (in Canada, worse in the US) doesn't support a family, is below the poverty line? If we can't afford to actually buy things - I mean in a real way, paying an amount that reflects the work of making it, that allows for a fair, honest wage to the person making it - then there is something incredibly wrong with our economic system.
-if you forget who makes your clothing, your household goods, your life, then you are forgetting about the people involved in the process of making, the people who are being paid miserable, unlivable wages, working in poor, unhealthy environments. And we are forgetting ourselves - we are underpaying and shortchanging ourselves, and we become uninvolved in our own lives.

What I am saying is: when we don't make enough money to actually buy goods - I mean realistically priced and fairly made goods - then our society no longer works. When we challenge the production of goods - by making things by hand and saying that they are worth the cost of production, that they have intrinsic worth - then we are challenging the way that our society has grown to forget about the process and about the importance of people in the production of our lives. If we don't value handmade then we allow people to be treated inhumanely, we allow our wages to reflect a culture that is harmful, and we forget how to make the world work.

I think when handmade first became popular, and has now grown even more popular than ever, I was nervous that it was a passing trend, and that I was starting a business that wouldn't survive once the trendiness of craft and handmade passed. But I think people are starting to realize, even if only subconsciously for the time being, that there is something wrong with the way we forget the people who make our goods, and the way that we undervalue our own work because of it, and that our current system doesn't work. So what I'm calling for is a return to a time where people made things, realized how difficult it is to make things, and that goods shouldn't be so cheap, so disgustingly cheap, and that we need to reflect the true costs of real goods into our wages.

I promise the next post will be about reading, and maybe have some pictures of whales.

Love Amy.