Marybeth C. Stalp

Negotiating time and space for serious leisure: quilting in the modern U.S. home.

Drawing on unstructured interviews with 70 American women quilters, I examine both the leisure constraints they experience and the acts of resistance they engage in while practicing serious leisure quilting. Even though quilting is a feminized and gendered activity, there are still time and space constraints in the traditional heterosexual family which impact quilting. Women resist such constraints and stereotypical notions of gender relations as they pursue serious leisure quilting. They quilt first for themselves, and second to administer to family and kin needs in gendered ways (e.g., gifts that cement emotional ties to family and friends). As a serious leisure activity, quilting highlights how women accept, reproduce, and negotiate traditional notions of gender in families.

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple: Red Hatters cope with getting old.

ABSTRACT This ethnographic study examined womens friendships in Red Hat Society (RHS) chapters. Qualitative data included in-depth interviews (n = 25), a focus group interview (n = 7), participant observation, and examination of RHS publications. Results suggest that participation in the RHS (1) aids in developing and enhancing positive attitudes about self and aging that contribute to overall well-being, (2) offers the opportunity to obtain instrumental and emotional support, and (3) provides social connections that prevent feelings of social isolation. Collectively, these findings highlight the potential buffering role of RHS participation in womens lives.

Creating an Artistic Self: Amateur Quilters and Subjective Careers

Abstract As some contemporary U.S. women reach middle age, they develop interests in personal activities, filling time and space once occupied by family carework. As this occurs, women often also develop subjective careers in these new spaces—where they construct both the goals and measures of success, independent of mainstream definitions. In this interview study with 70 U.S. midlife women, I examine the process of developing a subjective career around amateur quilting practices. As women begin to self-identify as amateur quitters, they also begin to define success as it is important to them—learning to quilt, making connections with others who quilt, and maintaining kin ties through giving quilts to others. Consequently, women redefine the role of quilting from a leisure activity to a subjective career—for although quilting adheres to the prescriptions of traditional femininity, quilting also allows women to carve out time and space just for themselves and their chosen leisure pursuits.

Conspicuously Consuming: The Red Hat Society and Midlife Women's Identity

Drawing from interviews and fieldwork with Red Hat Society members (RHS), we consider the growing consumer culture of the RHS, how members conspicuously consume red and purple dress, and for what purposes they do so. RHS members in this study develop visible group identity, reinforce traditional gendered behavior, and challenge publicly what it means to be “old.” We investigate consumption as a means of discerning whether midlife womens participation in RHS is a commodity to be marketed, bought, and sold. Is the public space that RHS women take up collectively challenging the ageist ways in which society views aging women? We investigate the consumer culture of the RHS to determine possible links between conspicuous consumption and group identity within the cultural context of aging womens social invisibility.

Hiding the (Fabric) Stash: Collecting, Hoarding, and Hiding Strategies of Contemporary US Quilters

Abstract In this four-year, seventy-interview ethnographic study of US amateur quilters, I examine the guilty pleasures surrounding quilting practices, including the deviant acts of hiding both identity and fabric from family members and friends. While fabric is the medium of quilting, quilters purchase more than necessary for projects, slowly building up and hoarding a fabric stash. They then strategize hiding places for their fabric. Womens anxieties surrounding acquiring, hoarding, and hiding their fabric stashes highlight their diminished ability, relative to their spouses and their children, to pursue leisure activities without a stigma. Collecting and hiding the fabric stash become symbolic of womens attempts to carve out time ad space for themselves amid the multiple demands placed on them by such greedy institutions such as family and the workplace.

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers

Nineteenth-century women reformers such as the radical abolitionists have frequently been seen as having abandoned the constraints of religion in order to pursue their personal and political goals. The subjects of this book - Angelina Grimke, Sarah Grimke, Sallie Holley, Abby Kelley, and Lucretia Mott - did indeed reject what they found to be the repressive features of the Christianity of their day. Their religiosity, however, remained fundamental to their world view. In this book, Anna M. Speicher explores the dimentions of this evolving faith, which was critical in shaping their decisions and actions throughout their lives.

Guest Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue: Constructing a Color Line in the Twenty-first Century

In the Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois ([1903] 2007, 3) presciently put forth that the “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” During a century characterized by racial strife and radical change, scholars used this phrase to interrogate everything from educational desegregation to quality of life across and within groups (David 1994; Farley and Allen 1987). For Du Bois, the color line demarcated the boundaries between black and white, which grew out of slavery and continued through Jim Crow laws that made blacks “...a poor race in the land of dollars” (DuBois 2007, 12). It was “the question as to how far differences of race . . . are going to be made, hereafter, the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization” (Du Bois 2007, xv). The color line relegated blacks to subhuman status, creating deep emotional fissures within individuals, which Du Bois famously characterized as a “double consciousness” and “two warring ideals in one dark body” (Du Bois 2007, 8). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, demographic and sociopolitical changes call into question the implications of the color line, particularly in regards to “blacks” and “whites.” Individuals’ racial identities are increasingly multiracial or nonracial, fluid and complex (Harris and Sim Introduction to Special Issue