Each Wednesday, I write a post from my dissertation.

The scrapbook industry is built around women doing gender through either owning scrapbook stores (Downs 2006) or selling scrapbook products inside people’s homes to friends and family as independent consultants.

All of the industry workers in this study are women. In the case of the independent consultants, this makes sense because 86.4% of all (scrapbooking and other) independent consultants are women (Direct Selling Association 2008). In this sample, the independent consultants like that the work allows them a flexible work schedule so that they can still provide primary childcare and eldercare. Vincent’s (2003:182) findings regarding Tupperware consultants, where being a consultant allows women to “organize their work around their other responsibilities” supports my findings.

Downs (2006) finds that women scrapbook store owners do gender as part of their job by providing food, childcare¹, holiday wish lists for husbands, and emotional comfort² to customers. Moreover, the success of local scrapbook stores is contingent upon the store owner’s ability to do womanhood (Downs 2006). In other words, successful store owners need to be gender appropriate.

Other Related Thoughts

I did not study the online world of scrapbooking in my study. This was to keep my project manageable. Since I defended my dissertation in August 2010, I have been noticing a few trends online regarding gender. I am noticing that some of the most popular scrapbooking experts are gender appropriate. They mention things like how they have to take a break from blogging to focus on their family (motherhood), they show off their recent purchases (shopping), they share recipes or focus on diet and exercise (body project), and so on. I have not done a formal analysis of these trends, but think that this is something I will pursue over the next few months. The experts though are not completely gender appropriate, however. They have successful businesses. They do something other than focus on femininity or their families. And they get called on it. I have seen more than one scrapbooking expert dedicate a blog post to answering a common reader question: “how do you have time for it all?” The implication behind this question is that your house is dirty, you serve frozen meals or fast food for dinner, and you use the television as a babysitter. In other words, you are bad mom, wife, or woman.
Why is it so important that industry workers are gender appropriate? Or, is it just that gender-appropriate industry workers are most likely to be successful in this industry? Comment below or join the conversation on facebook or twitter.

Footnotes

¹Some scrapbook stores have areas in their store for children to play while their mothers shop. At the store I worked at, there was not a play area because it was a liability. Even though there was no play area for children, customers would sometimes leave their children under the care of an employee while they ran out to the car. When children were left in my care, the mother was typically on her way out the door when she asked if I could watch the child, assuming I was both willing and capable of caring for her child.

²I have helped customers pick out products to create scrapbooks to memorialize recently lost loved ones (people and pets), scrapbooks that are for potential birth mothers to look through to choose adoptive parents, and scrapbooks detailing chronically ill children and their Make-a-Wish® foundation experiences.

Related Posts

• The Family Album is Like a Resume for a Man
• Scrapbooking Gender
• Men and Women Scrapbooking

References

Direct Selling Association. 2008. “Fact Sheet U.S. Direct Selling in 2008.” Retrieved January 30, 2010.

Downs, Heather Ann. 2006. “Crafting Culture: Scrapbooking and the Lives of Women.” PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL.

Vincent, Susan. 2003. “Preserving Domesticity: Reading Tupperware in Women’s Changing Domestic, Social and Economic Roles.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology/La Revue Canadienne de Sociologie et d’Anthorpologie 40(2):171-96.

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Stephanie

Each Wednesday, I write a post from my dissertation.

Last week, I kicked off my discussion on gender and scrapbooking, specifically, a concept called “doing gender.” According to West and Zimmerman (2002:4),

doing gender,” “involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures.’

It is easy to observe few men scrapbooking or few men working visibly within the scrapbooking industry and assume that men just are not interested in scrapbooking.

Industry workers in my study report that gender shapes the approach men and women take to preserving their stories. For instance, the owner of Scan Your Story (pseudonym) finds that men, too, want their stories and photographs preserved, but they want their photographs scanned so that the photographs are protected digitally. Women are more interested in using their photographs to tell their stories and are not as concerned with protecting the photographs digitally. Men also prefer making photographic slideshows on DVDs rather than conventional scrapbooks. This is one explanation as to why there seems to be few men scrapbooking. It is not that men do not want to preserve their memories, but that they are doing so differently than women.

Though it is quite challenging to find men scrapbookers, those I interviewed scrapbooked differently than most women scrapbookers. For example, two men scrapbookers took up scrapbooking as a way to spend time with their female partners. They worked on specific projects alongside the woman in their life. If their partner had taken up a different hobby, they may have pursued that along with them. Scrapbooking is gendered not only in that many more women than men identify as scrapbookers, but also, there is variety in terms of scrapbooking styles among women scrapbookers and men scrapbookers.

The fact that women scrapbook and men—for the most part—do not, reinforces the perceived natural differences between men and women. Respondents suggest that women scrapbook because they have the time, energy, emotions, and personality to be scrapbookers. Women are thought to “need that community of connectiveness” that is obtained through scrapbooking according to an industry worker.

Moreover, women are more often drawn to scrapbooking than men because of the different ways men and women do relationships. Respondents said that men tend to compartmentalize their friends (i.e., work buddies, gym buddies, etc.) whereas women take a more holistic approach to friendships and that women need these relationships more than men do. Ultimately, women often became scrapbookers during transitional periods in their life such as becoming a mother or a wife, whereas men scrapbookers did not become scrapbookers due to life transitions. It is possible that these life transitions are either not as monumental as they are for women or they are memorialized in some other way (e.g., men have bachelor parties before getting married to memorialize their transition from bachelor to husband. Yes, women have bachelorette parties, but I’m not sure that they have these parties for exactly the same reasons.).

What is not acknowledged by my respondents is that women, for the most part, have always been the family historians (Holland 1991; Martin 1991). Women are already taking snapshots of the family and arranging professional photograph sessions for their children. Women are already compiling family photograph albums. If the scrapbook is replacing the family photograph album then it makes sense that women are the family’s scrapbooker. If you scrapbook, do you also keep more conventional family albums? Do you keep scrapbooks instead of family albums?

The gender gap lessens when the definition of a scrapbook is expanded (Ott 2006), as my research demonstrates. Ott (2006:29) expands the definition of a scrapbook to include “laboratory books, ship and travel logs, science notebooks, newspaper clipping books about businesses” in addition to “conventional scrapbooks.” For example, I had one respondent with a scrapbook that was much closer to a conventional photograph album than a conventional scrapbook. Because he considered it a scrapbook, I considered it a scrapbook. The album contained mainly photos, but it did contain bits of letters and other memorabilia. In the words of Stacy Julian: “it all counts.”

In recent years, the scrapbook industry has reached out to men in attempts to expand their customer base in a declining market (Crow 2007). One of the newest “scrapbooking celebrities” is in fact, a man, Tim Holtz, who has his own line of scrapbooking products and quite a devoted fan base. It seems though, that much of the marketing effort has just been making products thought to appeal to men by relying on stereotypes (e.g., masculine themed product such as hunting, construction, or sport), instead of actually making men feel welcome within the industry. What do you think? Has the scrapbook industry successfully welcomed men into the hobby?

Related Posts

• The Family Album is Like a Resume for a Man
• Scrapbooking Gender

References

Crow, Kelly. 2007. “Wanted: A Few Good Men (With Scissors); As Scrapbook Sales Slow, Industry Woos Males; Lug-Nut Stickers, $2.49” The Wall Street Journal“, April 6. Retrieved February 16, 2010.

Holland, Patricia. 1991. “Introduction: History, Memory and the Family Album.” Pp.1-14 in Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, edited by J. Spence and P. Holland. London, Great Britain: Virago Press.

Martin, Rosy. 1991. “Unwinde the Ties that Bind.” Pp. 209-21 in Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, edited by J. Spence and P. Holland. London, Great Britain: Virago.

Ott, Katherine. 2006. “Between Person and Profession: The Scrapbooks of Nineteenth-Century Medical Practitioners.” Pp. 29-41 in The Scrapbook in American Life, edited by S. Tucker, K. Ott, and P. P. Buckler. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. 2002. “Doing Gender.” Pp. 3-23 in Doing Gender, Doing Difference, edited by S. Fernstermaker and C. West. New York: Routledge.

Comment below or join the conversation on facebook or twitter.Don’t forget, you can always email me your questions and suggestions. Email me at stephaniemedleyrath at gmail dot com or contact me here and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I will personally respond to your emails and may use your questions in future articles.

Stephanie