Each Wednesday, I write a post from my dissertation.
Family relationships are maintained through scrapbooking in at least three ways:
- Scrapbooking can be a family activity
- Scrapbooks are offered as gifts (Downs 2006)
- Family history is chronicled within scrapbooks.
Moreover, photographs work to reinforce kinship relations, with photography regularly being a part of significant family rituals such as births and weddings (Musello 1979). Kin work (e.g., gift-giving, sending holiday cards, planning children’s birthday parties) falls primarily on women and is part of the unpaid, domestic work many women do (di Leonardo 1987). Even in same-sex couples, kin work tends to fall on the partner who does the majority of the domestic work (Carrington 1999). Respondents recognize that the scrapbook industry influences who does this form of kin work. One respondent, for instance, believes that because the industry (the magazines in particular) typically showcase white, middle class families and layouts produced by women, it let’s men off the hook in terms of scrapbooking and also in terms of being full members of the family.
The scrapbooker in the family often becomes the family historian (or is already the family historian and becomes the scrapbooker). This occurs regardless of the presence of children in the person’s life. For example, even though one respondent does not have children of her own and is single, she is still the primary kin worker in her family of origin, as a sister and a daughter. It is difficult to know whether or not this task falls on her because she is a scrapbooker, the oldest daughter, does not have her own children or a spouse and is thought to have more time to devote to her family of origin, or some combination of the three.
Kin work can most fully be accomplished with the support of the family. For example, one respondent takes photographs of all the family members at family reunions. I asked him if he struggled to get all family members to consent to being photographed. He says:
Yeah, there are always a few people that you have to twist their arm, but they know that I warned them, and they’re now used to having a flash bulb go off in their face because of me. It’s pretty easy now to get the pictures that I want.
In contrast to this family’s compliance, another respondent expects her daughter-in-law to provide photographs of her grandchildren for the scrapbook. She expresses frustration over the fact her daughter-in-law does not send photographs. She finally enlisted her son to send photographs instead. It is not that photographs are not being taken; the problem is they were not being sent to her. Despite the fact both her daughter-in-law and son work full-time, this respondent still feels her daughter-in-law should be sending the photographs. In this example, this respondent fully expects the kin work role to be performed by the women in the family even if they are employed full-time.
Kin work is passed on to future generations when scrapbooks are passed down to select family members (usually women), who then become the keeper of these records. Several respondents say that their daughters, not their sons, get the scrapbooks when they die. Mothers did not see sons as caring about the scrapbooks like their daughters did or would (most of these children are younger than five, too young to have really developed any kind of opinion towards scrapbooking at the time of their mother’s interviews). In other words, mothers rely on gender stereotypes. This could be due to the fact most scrapbookers are women, most of the support they get for their craft comes from other women (e.g., mothers, sisters, mother-in-laws, female friends), women are typically the kin workers both inside and outside of scrapbooking, or all of these reasons.
Respondents report that they scrapbook their husband and boyfriend’s photographs and memorabilia. They think their male family members are not going to do it because of the stigma attached to the hobby. In this way, scrapbookers are not only compiling their own memories or the family’s collective memory, but also are compiling the memories of family members from before they were part of his life.
Though respondents talk about scrapbooking as something that is fun, this does not negate the fact that work goes into the hobby. Moreover, just because some scrapbookers view scrapbooking as fun, does not mean some scrapbookers do not see it as work, similar to the work involved in other domestic tasks (e.g., the holiday work of meal preparation and gift giving) (Pleck 2004). The work that goes into the scrapbook is often not fully realized by others, as I discuss regarding gift scrapbooks. The work part is made further invisible when husbands do not even realize what their wives are already doing in the scrapbooks. For example, one respondent comments that her husband is supportive of the hobby but says things like, “we should really write down all the things that she [their daughter] says or does.” She replies, “I do that.” He has no idea that she is already doing that sort of thing. Though none of my respondents conceptualize scrapbooking only as work or as just another chore on par with childcare or feeding the family, scrapbooks as gifts is another story (and will be discussed next week).
Is scrapbooking a form of kin work for you? Join the conversation below or on facebook.
References:
Carrington, Christopher. 1999. No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
di Leonardo, Micaela. 1987. “The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12(3):440-53.
Downs, Heather Ann. 2006. “Crafting Culture: Scrapbooking and the Lives of Women.” PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL.
Musello, Christopher. 1979. “Family Photography.” Pp. 101-18 in Images of Information: Still Photography in the Social Sciences, edited by J. Wagner. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Pleck, Elizabeth H. 2004. “Who are We and Where Do We Come From?: Ritual, Families and Identity.” in We are What We Celebrate: Understanding Holidays and Rituals, edited by A. Etzioni and J. Bloom. New York: New York University Press.
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Stephanie
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
