Tagged: Feminism

You may have noticed a DIY trend among young people these days. Some are getting into knitting sweaters; others are keeping backyard chicken coups. Otherwise, they are making cheese, canning, beekeeping and growing their own vegetables. These labor-intensive homemaking projects may not be just a trend towards rustic pleasures.

Emily Matchar calls this movement the New Domesticity.  And she documents this phenomenon in her new book, "Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity." Generally, she is writing not about people who embrace DIY culture out of necessity, but rather as a voluntary lifestyle. 

While growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Jeanette Stokes never imagined she would become a minister. After all, as a young girl, she had never even seen a woman lead a congregation. But she eventually followed her faith, fulfilled her ambition, and helped other women to better nurture their own spirituality.

  When you opened up a children’s book in the 1960s, chances are you saw girls in pink playing with dolls and boys in blue going on adventures. And most of the characters were probably white.

A group of women in Chapel Hill, many of them mothers and academics, decided they wanted to see more diverse and empowering images in children’s literature and took matters into their own hands. This collective became the printing press known as Lollipop Power Inc.

In 1970, Beverly Guy-Sheftall helped create the first women’s studies department at Spelman College, and it became the first and only department of its kind at a historically Black college.