Does crafting and scrapbooking come from the same impulse?
I don’t know. What I found was that in the past, it wasn’t always a gendered activity. I have marvelous scrapbooks in my collection by two or three men that are as beautiful and as detailed and as soul-searching as ones by women. In this most recent boom, which to my way of thinking is since 9/11, it’s been very much targeted to women. A number of sociologists have done studies about what this is about. One of them was called “Making Me Time,” about the creative crisis of the stay-at-home mom who needs to feel she’s doing something with her day. The physicality of putting pen to paper and grease pencil to word fetti is making them feel they’re doing something. You object to the way today’s scrapbooks are so schematic, right? There are rules and guidelines for how to do them, and every element of them is premade rather than just gathering the flotsam and jetsam of your life and organizing it in a beautiful way. By and large, what is so beautiful about scrapbooks [historically] is that t
