I recently published an essay in The Journal where I began looking closely at Queen Anne’s Lace and followed a thread to the craft of lace making, a skill largely practiced by unknown women, and ended up thinking about how women’s creative work and labor, storytelling, and desires are often overlooked like the common weed. You’ll have to buy the print issue to read the whole thing, but I’m going to share a bit here to get us going on today’s topic.
These stories are legend or lore, dotted with the inevitable inaccuracies of oral tradition. It’s less true than history. But who’s to say what’s true? History has value that lore lacks. Well-educated men write history. Lore is told and retold around the kitchen stove, tucking children in at night, in the fields by working folk. We often fail to question history as established fact, but lore we parse like a metaphor that doesn’t necessarily have to be true to have truth.
Lacemaking was traditionally women’s work and required great technical skill. Before lace could be carefully tatted, first the fibers of the flax plant would be brushed out into increasingly fine threads, then it was spun on a spindle for hours to make enough thread for lace. All of this labor was done by women and poor people. Lacemaking had a practical purpose—it was worn, not looked at—so it was considered a craft, not an art. Though lace and paintings are both objects of beauty and decoration, men signed their paintings and are remembered as artists; the lacemakers are forgotten.
I’m the daughter of an artist and a craftswoman. My father, the artist, supported our family with paintings of nature and my mother, the craftswoman, hooked rugs and embroidered pillows without a set pattern. She kept us warm with quilts, knitted hats, mittens, and sweaters. As a child, I asked my mother what her job was, and she said, “I’m a housewife,” as if my sister and I were the only meaningful things she made. Every night, she drank instant coffee so she could stay awake in the quiet hours of the house while her husband and children slept. She smoked her Tareytons and her needles clicked and the motions of her fingers made a pattern of their own.
While writing the essay, I began thinking a lot about the words we use for things. What gets called a weed and what a flower? What is called literature and what is called lore or fairy tale? What is named art and what is called craft? The things that are useful and practical—weeds are medicinal, lore is didactic, and craft is worn or used in the home—are dismissed or less valued than the things we simply admire in art, literature, the beauty of a flower. Ever since noticing these distinctions, I’ve been interested in women’s relationship to work in a male-dominated society: how their labor is valued or not, how they express themselves in creative or personal ways within their limited means, how they challenge themselves and find meaning in their work. So today, I’m looking at women’s labor, often unaccredited, undervalued, and misunderstood, and thinking about how to expand the meaning of labor and work.
At some point, I stumbled across this article, “Behind Alice Neel’s Marxist Girl,” about Irene Peslikis. Though I’d never heard of Peslikis, I’d already know a little about the Redstockings and even read their manifesto. I loved learning about her life “on the ground and behind the scenes, during some of the most iconic moments of feminist organizing in New York.” Reading about this dedicated artist, writer, activist, and educator, I noticed a thread running through her creative work and life’s work: she broke barriers of silence caused by class or gender oppression by telling honest stories of people’s experience to raise consciousness.
As Susan Brownmiller wrote in The Village Voice, capturing the emphasis on personal experience, this was the ‘politics of confrontation and catharsis’. In the same spirit, the speak out was the culmination of a longer strand of organising by Redstockings and other feminist groups. It was an optimistic and heady time. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘this new feminism made itself known by means of demonstrations, some of them spectacular, others less so, and by a flood of literature – quantities of articles and books.’ Through small-run print zines and closed-knit consciousness raising groups, huge efforts were put into collecting and sharing women’s experiences, finding solidarity on the edge of societal taboo.
I like to imagine the vibrancy and foment of this time and place, when pamphlets, journals, and manifestos spoke with bold optimism and anger, when women like Alice Neel and Irene Peslikis held gatherings where their ideas and opinions bumped against each other as they evolved creatively and personally. I’d love to see organizing like theirs in response to our own political moment around abortion access and trans rights.
Dolly famously wrote this song using her acrylic nails as a rhythm instrument. The song is covered in season one of We Are Ladyparts, a comedy about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band in Britain—I found it thoroughly delightful. The show’s version is full of cathartic rage. With Peslikis’s “Resistance to Consciousness” fresh in my mind, I don’t want to choose between Dolly’s cheery celebration and Ladyparts’ growling anger. Both are equally valid ways of thinking about women’s work, the grinding exhaustion of it, the strength we pull from it. Moreover, we can hold both at the same time because in our multiplicity we are most human.
I fear that the Degrowth Movement will get misunderstood and for the same simplistic and reactionary reasons the “defund the police” movement did. It’s the de- at the beginning of these terms, the undoing of structures we all exist within, that’s scary. But if you listen to the actual ideas of Degrowth, you might find a radical hope worth striving for, a way of reconceptualizing our social life to prioritize care for the planet and each other, shared humanity and sustainability. Figga Haug is a German feminist-socialist philosopher and badass octogenarian who has been advocating for Four-in-One Perspective which “seeks to alter our societies’ timeregime in a fundamental way.” Within this framework, we’d divide our waking hours in four equal parts between 1) work and labor (our skilled or physical contributions to the economy) 2) care for families (expansively defined) 3) learning, personal growth, pursuit of passions and 4) contributing to political social good. Think about how much time you spend doing your job, how gendered family care is, how unequal society is, or how disempowered we are by our government, then think about what Mary Oliver calls your “one wild and precious life” and what it would be like to balance our work with learning, care, and justice.
No one area should be pursued without the others, since what is sought is a political constitution of life which, when carried out, would be enjoyed as truly vital, meaningful, engaging, joyful.
So often, critiques of socialist ideas shout “unrealistic!” but Haug reminds us of the value of a compass toward our ideals. If an ideal is impossible, fine, most ideals are, but that doesn’t mean we should accept the current reality as the only way or that it’s not worth orienting ourselves toward a hopeful ideal.
This is not an immediate goal; it cannot be implemented here and now. But it can serve as a compass for our demands, as the basis of our critique, as hope, as a concrete utopia which incorporates all human beings and in which, finally, the development of each and every one may become the precondition for the development of all.
Mierle Ukeles is awesome. I had the joy of learning about Ukeles while helping a client through her PhD thesis on her work. Her manifesto, excerpted above, is critical to understanding her art, which is maintenance—the dull, unaccredited, under-paid, invisible work that keeps homes, cities, and society running—and as she says in her manifesto, “Everything I say is Art is Art.” For her maintenance is art. In some pieces, she works—cleaning the museum steps, locking and unlocking doors, etc.—the work of the people you never notice that help respected and well-funded art spaces function. In others, she celebrates maintenance workers, like shaking the hands of 8,500 sanitation workers and thanking them for keeping New York City alive. Thirty years after that piece, she brought back the phrase to thank essential workers during the pandemic, her point is the same and still urgent: maintenance work is the real labor that makes all other work possible. Maintaining homes, workspaces, or city infrastructure is necessary and far more difficult than the work of the person in the suit benefitting from all of it (and 1,000 times over more than a maintenance worker).
Ukeles contemporary, Agnes Denes, is the creator of “Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan” which planted two acres of beautiful golden wheat between the World Trade Center and Wall Street and the Statue of Liberty. It was a protest against climate change and economic inequality in the form of labor.
Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities.
LIGHT ME DOWN
Light me down to the long meadow
to where the new snow taps on the fallen snow
with the fingers of the lost tribe.
Who would want us to listen?
Someone does want it:
Mother of snow
smoking your cigarette ration, your dark
lipstick mouthprint hungry
for the frail paper,
long after the war was over.
(Jean Valentine)
Honestly, I just came across this poem and the final image lingered long after I read, reread, and put the poem down. I miss the sound of snow falling, and I think of that exhaustion (existential and physical)—the mother sucking on the cigarette so like my own at the end of a long day of raising me—as the result of society’s imbalanced priorities and distribution of labor. But the key to the poem isn’t the last image, it’s the question in the middle. Who would want us to listen? I hope you listen to the voices, quiet in society as snow falling on snow, and appreciate their beauty and importance to our survival.
Or you could get mad…
Whether listening or angry, don’t be complacent and complicit.