Bombeck Vs. Rodabaugh on Mending
Or How the Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank
Erma Bombeck hated mending clothes. She wrote a whole article about how she went to great lengths to avoid it.
Most tellingly, when she wrote an article about women losing themselves and thinking they had no talent, she ended with the observation that women did not ‘have no talent.’ It was just ‘hidden under a pile of mending.’
Fast forward 30 years and Katrina Rodabaugh has a whole network of businesses dedicated to the idea that mending on your clothes is a politically radical, eco-friendly way to express your individuality and can be embraced for its contribution to self-reliance and empowerment.
Who is right? What is with this shift in perspective?
When Mending Is Just Adulting
As the Welsh Viking once ranted, everyone knew how to do basic repairs to their clothes in ye olden times.
Ok, not everyone. But soldiers on the march repaired their clothes, and monks were required to always have a needle on hand in order to fix their robes. There is a story told about a monastery that couldn’t decide between two choices for abbot until someone suggested they ask to borrow a needle from the two at the chapter meeting. Only one had his needle, so only one was a good monk and choice of abbot. There is an order from a queen to re-hem all of the royal wardrobe and King Henry VIII’s wife famously kept mending his shirts.
And then clothing started being bought off the rack. The shift largely came in the 1920's through 1950’s, though there were department stores selling clothing since the late 1800’s. Not that this had anything to do with the secondhand clothing market- buying clothes from a stall that held other people’s old clothes goes back past the Middle Ages.
And still, the majority of people knew basic mending, especially if they weren’t wealthy enough to hire servants to do it for them. Clothes became cheaper and fashion changed faster with each decade, but people still had to re-attach buttons and add gussets to underarms.
This job, once a man married, fell to the wife.
The Bombeck Hot Take
All housework before the industrial revolution required going outside of the home and working with nonfamily members, and all official paid work was at least partially done in the home.
After the industrial revolution, it became more common for housewives to get all the tedious, non-rewarded, daily grind type of jobs because the more specialized, paid, highly-praised jobs outside of the house went to the husband. The more distinct the notion of working ‘outside of the home’ or ‘out of the domestic sphere’ became from just ‘working,’ the more ‘women’s work’ came to mean ‘housework’ in the public mind.
Enter the 20th century, and the division of domestic and public is complete. But Bombeck was one of the many women who worked for pay but, physically, in the house. She wrote a column for a newspaper from her personal typewriter in her home in Ohio.
But she was also still expected to spend hours on the upkeep of the house and the constantly on-call job of childrearing.
You see why she hated mending? It was yet another thankless job that was sucking away time and energy from her creative (and paid) pursuit.
You can also see where she is echoing Simone de Beauvier and others. Women get all the boring nothing jobs not because we are constitutionally better suited to them, but because other people think that we don’t have creative endeavors and worthwhile pursuits which would be subtracted from if we had to do the daily chaperoning, fetching, and carrying.
Hell, that’s the premise of ‘The Stepford Wives.’
Then No More Sewing
Industry was ahead of her on this. Fashion got faster and faster, clothing cheaper and cheaper. Her kids just didn’t need to repair clothes because none of it lasted long enough to be worth preserving. And then they had more time to write these here silly blog posts.
But…
There was a price to be paid for all that cheap cloth. Pumping it out in the volume that we do strips land of resources, and the only way to have cheap clothing is to pay the sewers as little as you can get away with.
Plus, now that sewing isn’t nearly as universal, with plenty of people bragging that they can’t sew on a button, mending has taken on the aura of a craft. Only survivalists, your quirky aunt, and the cool people on CraftTube do it.
The Bedazzled Mending
In 2018, Kristina Rodabaugh, an artist living in a restored Victorian house and generally living the Bohemian dream in Alabama and New York, wrote Mending Matters. It is mostly a bunch of projects to mend and upcycle clothes, but between the lovely photos of people in Sashiko-mended jeans and flowy tunics are peons to the power of mending and slow fashion. Various teachers and sellers of slow fashion equipment describe their mending philosophy and way of life. They go on particularly about making visible mending.
It’s a stark contrast to Erma Bombeck.
Some of this change comes from a different economic perspective brought on by making the mending a business. Visible mending is the creative endeavor that, say, answering emails, takes time away from for Ms. Rodabaugh.
Some of this is taking a different political approach. Bombeck is distinctly 2nd wave feminist- errand running is a link in the chain that keeps us tied to the kitchen. Rodabaugh is more the ecologist- fast fashion stuffs landfills and chugs water from an already parched land. (Well, some of it is just the more vague ‘do everything’ politics we seem to have fallen into since the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Rodabaugh wants to touch on human rights and the landfill while also going on about self-fulfillment.)
And some of this is nostalgia. Once a romantic time ago, we did the fun thing. Remember then? Are you rolling in the ‘member berries?’
Conclusion
There aren’t any great, all-purpose cure-alls in this world that will resolve everything with no side effects. Every solution provides a new problem from some other perspective. And the Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank.