(Last) (Month) In Reading
Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity by Emily Matchar
Homeward Bound chronicles a subgroup of young professionals that are turning their backs on traditional career goals in favor of domestic self-reliance. Faced with an unstable economic system, these disillusioned nouveau homesteaders are looking to a time that seems to symbolize security and simplicity. Economic uncertainty aside, many of these women are simply tired of their jobs—bored and frustrated by corporate politics and grueling work schedules. Knitting and making jam seems like an appealing alternative to the grind of capitalism, and so they are shifting their focus towards a homespun lifestyle plucked from a more nostalgic past.
These are familiar points, frequently trotted out as supporting arguments in articles about Vanlife YouTubers and Cottagecore TikTokers— but these are not the subjects of Homeward Bound. In fact, when the book was published, the phrase “Cottagecore TikTok” would have essentially been gibberish. Emily Matchar published Homeward Bound in 2015. The economic uncertainty rattling her interview subjects is the 2008 financial crash, a decade before pandemic bakers were nurturing sourdough starter in their fridges.
But of course, Matchar’s domestic millennials didn’t invent sourdough, nor did the artisan bakers a generation ahead of them. To engage in domestic craft is to engage in history— the loaf of hand-kneaded sourdough proofing under a towel is the distant descendent of all of the earlier loaves that came before. Though industrialization has eliminated the necessity of making all of these things ourselves, domestic crafts are more than a twee affection. A warm loaf of bread functions in the same way it did five centuries ago— it can still feed.
Reading the book in the year 2023, what was intended to be contemporary critique acts as an anthropological artifact— a thinkpiece preserved in amber. There are many tells that date the writing— the book spends a good deal of time discussing the shiny new phenomenon of Etsy and zero time talking about Instagram— a platform that had not yet been co-opted for personal marketing and small business.
It’s tempting to say the book was prescient to the crochet girlies and quilted jackets that have taken over my feed, but it is probably more accurate to say that the emotional logic underpinning the New Domesticity movement is timeless.
The points Matchar makes in her book have been argued in academic circles for decades— are part of a long unbroken stream of scholarly discourse. Popular discourse dips in and out of academia along trend cycles. In 2015, new domesticity and the rise of Etsy was trending. In 2023— new domesticity via Cottagecore TikTok is too. Each time, journalists treat the discourse of the moment as phenomena, when it is actually a visible point in a longer, cyclical conversation.
Even in the 2015 context of the book, Matchar positions her New Domesticity within a long history of domesticity. Many of the domestic labors that were common in the 17th century such as hand-stitching clothing and scrubbing laundry on washboards went extinct during various industrial revolutions. Others— like cooking a meal from scratch every night— were alleviated by the advent of the microwave and boxed cake mix in mid-century America. There have been so many moments in history when we have declared domestic crafts to be extinguished by societal shifts, whether it be the industrial revolution eliminating the need to hand-spin wool, or Rosie the Riveter telling women to leave the home to fill the wartime labor shortage, or the invention of TV dinners relieving busy mothers from preparing chicken pot pie from scratch on a Tuesday night.
We are constantly declaring a crisis, declaring that now! Now! The end of domesticity has finally come. Culture writing is a glorified birth/obit section, deciding over and over what has allegedly died, and what has come to take its place.
With each age of extinction comes a corresponding bubble of resurgence– a tiny rebellion reviving, reinventing, and reigniting the lifestyles and skills that have been left behind. The Riot Grrls embroidered political messages on hankies, knitbombers covered industrial landscapes with rainbow colored yarn. Throughout history, technological advancement has seeded a corresponding nostalgia for the time before that advancement, a desire to slow down while the world around us speeds up. Which brings us to Matchar’s new domestics, with their slow food and attachment parenting, and finally to our current crop of vanlifers filming Get Ready With Me videos in their built-out school buses.
Current conversation sees these as new revelations, triggered by the emotional reckoning of the pandemic, inflation, Donald Trump et al, but in reality– the discourse is eternal, it just comes in and out of fashion. Ideologies trend just as easily as seasonal colorways and checkerboard print. If the domestic arts didn’t end with the invention of the washing machine, then I don’t think Grubhub has the power to override human instinct to make, and nest, and caretake.
It’s the egoism of each generation that makes us believe our insights are new– that our revelations are unique to our specific historic factors. While the evolution of society over the course of history cannot be denied, for each generation, what defines our time on earth is how much changes in one human lifespan. We spend our lives coping with the reality that we are living in a different world than the one we were born into, and a different one than the one we will eventually die in. Surprise, surprise— the fundamental ways of coping with large scale change don’t differ that much across centuries.
It is hard to imagine that any historical event in my lifetime will feel as society shaping or personally affecting as COVID-19, but I have a good fifty years left, so who can say. There is an impulse to sift modern history into Before the pandemic and After– draw conclusions that everything in the After is defined by experience of a shared global lockdown. I frequently wonder— looking out over a burning landscape and a blood chilling newsfeed— if things are actually worse now, or if they were always this bad and I only became a conscious adult for the most recent decade of it. Maybe every generation feels like they are living through the end times. Certainly there were global wars and volcanic eruptions and military coups in the past that seemed to threaten entire societies’ ways of life. The pandemic was the one that remolded me at a moment when I was young and moldable. Perhaps I will be reformed in middle age, and again in my later years— putty warped by the force of the incoming future. History is a series of disruptions of various norms. Some approach disruption as an opportunity for reinvention, others as a cause for mourning. It can trigger fear or relief, inspiration or anger. We each decide if the disruption is positive or negative and what to do with that judgment. The specifics of the disruption are less important than the disruption itself.
Further Reading:
This book had been sitting in my TBR for eight years since it came out. It is inherently dated, but still really holds up, imo. If you just want a cozy domestic book, may I recommend Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life. I also deeply enjoy Rajiv Surendra’s YouTube videos where he teaches viewers to do mundane domestic tasks in the most antiquated, labor intensive possible way.
On a more thematic level, I saw Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum last week and feel like that experience really mirrored my recent thoughts about cyclical history and discourse. It is a restaging of a one-woman show that premiered 30 years ago, where all of the dialogue are word for word excerpts from interviews the playwright did with Angelenos affected by the Rodney King Riots—across all different demographic lines. The parallels to current events are obvious, but I was surprised by how much of the language and conversation felt reminiscent of discourse that I took as new in 2020. If you are in LA, consider snagging tickets to the last couple days of the run.
Housekeeping:
Paid subscriptions are still paused— I’m planning on resuming them in June before my birthday. I’m still trying to find the balance of being disciplined in my writing without being burdened by guilt. Until then, all posts will be free, lucky you! I know some free subscribers would like to read past locked paid posts and can’t access them because there isn’t an option to pay for a subscription…. I don’t have a solution for this at the moment— I’m sorry! Hang tight for now while I figure it out.