the status corp

Interesting article about the myth of American women opting out of the workforce to stay home to raise families. Most of the stories focus on white, married, upper-class women with high-earning husbands, maternity leaves are getting shorter, and bias and inflexibility in the workplace forces many women to “choose” to stay at home with the family. “The American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment.” (link)

Originally
from kottke.org

reBlogged

by the status corporation

on Mar 22, 2007, 9:46PM

Stitch for Senate, launched on the day of the 4th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, invites knit hobbyists to craft helmet liners for every US Senator in an effort to encourage the politicians to support the troops by bringing them home.

The helmet liner pattern was adapted from a support-the-troops initiative for soldiers stationed in Iraq. Once they receive their helmet, senators can opt to send it to a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan. Charitable knitting during wartime has been a tradition since the American Revolution. During WWII in particular, women, men and even school-age children were invited to Knit for Defense and keep troops warm.

The aim of Stitch for Senate is to start a dialogue between both sides of the Iraq war debate. “I would like people to be thinking and talking about the war a little more, and this may be one way of doing it,” explains Catherine Mazza, founder of microRevolt and adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The website will compile testimonies from knitters seeking to understand what knitters express through wartime knitting: charity, allegiance, patriotism, resistance, radicalism, etc. and use the tradition of political organizing within knitting circles as a space for storytelling, discussion, exchange and protest.

Related: Victory Gardens, one of Amy Franceschini’s most recent projects re-imagines the Victory Gardens of World Wars I and II for the present political and ecological situation.

Via networked_performance and Orlando Sentinel.

More knitting stories: Follow the flocks, Pyuupiru’s costumes, Burrower knitwear, Shocking crochet, Delirious knitting show at Craft Council, Subversive knitting, Guerrilla knitters, etc.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine

reBlogged

by the status corporation

on Mar 20, 2007, 8:18PM

Xeni Jardin:

Here is a series of ads from Amnesty International (in Spanish) asking why prolific American serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and Pee Wee Gaskins received due process, but Guantánamo detainees have not. All three ads are made to look as if they were written in blood.

Originally
from Boing Boing

by Xeni Jardin

reBlogged

by the status corporation

on Mar 16, 2007, 7:45PM

Prudhoe Bay Proper 007
Originally uploaded by felispardalis.
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