To Craft Is Woman?

I just threw my 7yo a home-crafted Pinterest-worthy Harry Potter-themed birthday party and I am so, so sorry. I’m not sure if it makes it better or worse when I explain that the party was the culmination of a year’s worth of us enjoying special mother/son 5-Minute Crafts YouTube time every night combined with 6 months’ worth of homeschool art projects and that I did absolutely none of these things at you? Yeah, that’s worse somehow.

Amidst all my practical worries about the party (“Will people come?” “How will I get all this shit done?” “Do I really have to learn to temper chocolate for the chocolate frogs or can I cheat with candy melts?”—please don’t hurt your eyes from all the rolling, I’m so very, very sorry) I was plagued by a host of what seem to me to be gender-specific concerns:

—Does my love of crafting make me a bad feminist?
—Will throwing this party alienate my mom friends?
—Is there any way to share my love of crafting with my kids that doesn’t immediately make me an agent of the patriarchy?
—Is my love of crafting itself patriarchal programming?
—Why is it that men can post pics of something they’re proud of and everyone just supports their hobby (whatever it might be—keeping their children alive, smoking a giant slab of meat, building a table with just their own two hands, a prehistoric lathe, and ungodly amounts of free time—but when a woman indicates she’s proud of something she made she’s “that mom” or “being performative”?
—That’s so unfair (not a question)
—Why is crafting so gendered?
—Is it possible I’m overthinking all of this?

I decided that I would spare everyone’s feelings, including my own, and keep the party a secret from everyone who wasn’t attending. At the party, I pulled friends aside to explain shamefacedly how the party was really too much and I hoped it wasn’t a precedent and all of the cakes were store-bought. My son loved his party, and I loved making the things, but I still felt so worried that those successes would seem performative or—worse—make somebody feel bad about their own performance.

Despite my concerns, I made a thing—several things—that I considered beautiful, that I was proud of, and that ultimately I made for no other reason than the pleasure of making them. (My love for my son being merely the engine that “allowed” me to actually create for pleasure—a luxury I feel my familial and professional obligations should not yield to unless I can justify it as fulfilling someone else’s needs. What the fuck.) I’m angry that crafting is something that people are made to feel shame about, whether that’s because they think they aren’t doing enough of it or because they derive enjoyment from the practice. Crafting shouldn’t be lose-lose and yet, like so many other gendered activities, it often is.

To perform “crafting” is to gender female. The exceptions to this gendering—that a man who practices “woodcraft” or who hones his “writing craft” is a manly man, of the Ron Swanson or Ernest Hemingway variety, respectively—tend only to reinforce rather than subvert the general sense that, in US culture, “crafting” is a thing lonely, single ladies or lonely, bored housewives or lonely, empty-nested moms do. And it certainly isn’t <deep, pretentious sniff> “art.” Crafts are moderately useful at best, and useless, frivolous junk at worst.

This mapping of male and female onto “craft” and “art” displays the kind of rigid binary-based thinking that should signify for us that we have entered the realm of culture, not nature. And, indeed, there are many think pieces that seek to describe and delineate, reinforce and subvert, these associations qua cultural phenomenon. I am certain that some version of these ingrained associations is to blame for why I’ve had so much trouble finding time to craft, or why, when I do craft, I spend so much extra energy just justifying it (to myself, the world, other women) and apologizing for it. Even for a lipstick feminist like myself, crafting is sticky territory.

In my thinking on this modern mess of a concept, I’ve found it helpful to look at the notion of “craft” in classical antiquity—mainly because the study of classical antiquity is one of my day jobs, but also because many of our modern ideas about art, skill, specialized knowledge, professional practice, and, yes (bless us) gender performance are derived, cognate, or otherwise kin and akin to ancient ideas, whether smuggled in via religion or literature or consciously adopted from classical philosophy for the purpose of industrialized knowledge acquisition (translation: college). Comparing ancient and modern notions of “craft” helps me peek behind my programming and find some measure of acceptance of—if not my pursuits—at the very least my discomfort with them.

What was “craft,” to the Greeks? It wasn’t a hobby involving hot glue and glitter, but a really big, important concept, encompassing a wider semantic field than our “craft.” The term for “craft,” technē, is incredibly difficult to translate, given the highly specialized position of both technē and any English equivalent we might search for (options like “technique” and “technical,” which are derived from technē, the Germanic term “craft,” and the Latinate “art” are all insufficient). Maybe it helps to know that sometimes the antonym of technē was figured as tychē (“luck”). The difficulties are further compounded by the fact that ancient philosophers just loved to quibble over the real definition of the term (I mean, just look at this entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy!).

Not every activity counted as a “craft” and Greek thinkers cared a lot about determining what was necessary for something to be considered one; criteria included whether or not an activity had a replicable and consistent purpose, and whether or not the knowledge that composed a craft was learnable, teachable, discrete, and consistent.

Seems pretty straightforward and relatable, until you start looking at examples. Here’s a list of what the philosopher Plato made a huge point in underscoring were not technai, because they weren’t teachable but, instead, only could result from divine inspiration:

— composing poetry
— being a professional poetry reciter and interpreter
— doing corybanting

… and here’s a list of what Plato did consider to be technai:

—medicine
—horsemanship
—huntsmanship
—oxherding
—farming
—calculation
—geometry
—generalship
—piloting a ship
—chariot-racing
—political craft
—prophecy
—music
—lyre-playing
—flute-playing
—painting
—sculpture
—housebuilding
—shipbuilding
—carpentry
—weaving
—pottery
—smithing
—cookery

(I’m not sure what Plato would have said about the inspired nature of 5-Minute Crafts because they didn’t have hot glue guns in Ancient Greece, but if I ever have a beer with him I’ll ask)

In any case, as you can see, “crafting” in antiquity was a much more serious enterprise, encompassing a wider range of activities than today. For example, we would probably put painting in the first list since we don’t really think of painting as “crafting” or as bona fide teachable “real” profession—a modern painter might have good technique, might be “technically good,” for example, but those kinds of qualifications are generally considered insults, not facts. Rather, the true modern artist is inspired.

And, in contrast to our gendered notion of “crafting,” Greek discussions of crafting did not tend to imagine the pursuit of craft as a particularly feminine endeavor. But they did have opinions about what kinds of crafts were better than others, depending on whether or not they require the use of the body (called “banausic technai”) or of the mind (i.e. “the liberal arts”); and I’ll give you one guess which type of crafting the philosophers considered better.

(It was the liberal arts)

Crafts that required people to work with their bodies, and crafts where practitioners sold their goods for money were considered inferior, even immoral. That’s not to say that there weren’t places where crafting was gendered, however. If a writer wanted to really diss the banausic technai, for example, he could twist the knife by implying that these lower class activities were girly.

Which is why the Greek writer Xenophon, in his dialogue on household management, has Socrates give the following explanation for why the banausic technai were scorned and held in low regard (Xen., Oec. 4.2 Tr. Marchant, Todd, revised Henderson):

For they spoil the bodies of the workmen and the foremen, forcing them to sit still and stay indoors, and in some cases to spend the whole day by the fire. As their bodies become womanish their souls lose strength too. Moreover, these so-called banausic occupations leave no spare time for attention to one’s friends and city, so that those who follow them are reputed bad at dealing with friends and bad defenders of their country.

Emphasis very much mine. So the problem with the banausic crafts is that they take place indoors, feminizing men’s bodies and therefore ruining their souls. So, an ancient Greek woodcrafter was thought to be an effeminate, unbuff, cowardly, and shitty friend, and not Ron Swanson. Note that in Xenophon’s discussion, crafters are assumed to be men who either worked with their minds (the manly men!) or with their hands (losers!), but that in fact, workers in antiquity identified as both men and women (a fact we can access via material culture better than via literature—think visual representations, epitaphs, etc.).

Where literature might seem to confirm an incredibly egalitarian view on equal opportunity employment, such as the brief moment when Plato has Socrates assert, regarding human activities like crafting, that women “share by nature in every way of life just as men do”—we can just as easily find sexism, as when Socrates immediately adds “but in all of them women are weaker than men.”(Rep. V.455, tr. Grube & Reeve). Ah, there it is.

Despite the fact that crafting-type activites were distinguished according to whether or not they were divine or replicable, and that the latter were good or bad depending on whether they required the use of the mind or the body, there were a few activities that were explicitly considered female crafts—and those discussions turn out about as you might expect. In that same passage of the Republic, Socrates poses the question:

Do you know of anything practiced by human beings in which the male sex isn’t superior to the female in all these ways? Or must we make a long story of it by mentioning weaving, baking cakes, and cooking vegetables, in which the female sex is believed to excel and in which it is most ridiculous of all for it to be inferior?

Thanks, I guess. But yes, there were some activities—only some of them considered crafts—in which women were thought to be the main practitioners.

In fact, one of the earliest literary accounts of crafting is gendered as female. In Hesiod’s Theogony, a woman performs the very first act of crafting in the world: the goddess Gaia, tired of her spouse violating her by stuffing her full of all of their children, devises the world’s first technē, which Hesiod labels as “evil” and “deceitful”: she creates within herself a brand new element: adamantine. To what end? Why to make a sickle strong enough for her offspring to cut off her husband’s junk, of course.

So when a woman decides to use crafting to castrate someone it’s all “evil” and “deceitful” and not an elevated philosophical pursuit? Ok, Hesiod.

In those few cases where ancient crafting was considered a wholly female pursuit, you can bet that gendered moralizing presents itself. Absent becoming a prophet, a Greek woman could, and should, weave, produce and raise children, and run her household. A list of acceptable activities that underscores the domestic and the deceptive nature of womankind.

Weaving, considered a technē, was both a form of textile production and a metaphor. Women weave—textiles and traps, tricks and devices. And new elements with which to castrate you. Women also conceive, birth, nourish, and raise children. And, finally, women maintain the house—a process that also has its own word—oikonomikos.

So a woman can, as her duty, speak in (deceitful) riddles, weave cloth (literally), weave lies (metaphorically), do baby things, do housewife things. And only some of those were considered crafts. But they were all coded female, for better (nurturing!) or worse (lying bitch!). And I imagine that the meaning and satisfaction that ancient women weavers derived from their work was inextricably tied up in their identity as a woman, wife, or mother.

Not much has changed—I justify all of the sewing I do because it’s useful. If I’m making clothes for my kids or practical gifts for family members I can feel like I’m nurturing other people, which has its own use, and not feeding my soul, which would be a waste of other people’s time and probably mine too.

Seeing how craft operates in Greek thought helps me locate the root of my issues with taking time to craft or crafting publicly within my apprehensions about seeming to affirm what our society says has to be a factor, for better (nurturing!) or worse (useless!) in my identity as a woman, wife, mother. I don’t see my creativity in those terms, and I don’t want to, but some part of me must think that I should—and the tension between my programming and my self is the cause of my ambivalence towards crafting. That these ideas—the shape of them, if not the same form—are so ancient is both validating and disheartening.

Modern “craft” might be more gendered than Greek technai. And the knowledge required for modern crafting might not be considered particularly strenuous to acquire. But where ancient and modern notions of crafting do overlap, it is in the antiquated (in every sense of that word) idea that a woman who crafts does so in particularly feminine ways—good female crafting is good only insofar as it ensures the comfort and nutriment of those in her domain, bad crafting is frivolous or worse. If a modern woman does craft for pleasure, she’s still not crafting “for art’s sake”—her products have little intrinsic value. Least of all, crafting is nothing for her to be proud of. If she is proud, she’s being proud at you, and you should feel bad about not doing enough Pinteresting.

I haven’t sorted out all my feelings about that birthday party, and so I’m tempted to just end this article in the same way Plato would end those of his dialogues in which the speakers ultimately disagreed—with a big ole’ “tk conclusion” (“APORIA”). But instead, can I just take a minute to show you some of the stuff I made (using a hot glue gun, I might add)? I’m really proud of it.

Sarah Scullin is Managing Editor of Eidolon, a full-time teacher and mother, and a part-time hobbyist. She is very tired.