Lack of stable, meaningful careers is encouraging people to get creative with their crafting projects and start up home businesses. Concerns over food safety are inspiring backyard vegetable gardens and organic “locavore, slow food” diets. They’re speaking out about spiralling greenhouse gas emissions, rising sea levels, radiation-contaminated crops and waterways, and the integrity of their children’s future. They’re organising “knit-ins” at the G8 summit and “yarn-bombing” Wall Street.

Motivated by a growing distrust of corporate and government institutions, progressive, educated middle class professionals, with the financial means to opt out partially or permanently from the system, are taking matters into their own hands. According to Matchar, the New Domesticity is less about traditional gender roles, but rather a call to embracing historically undervalued women’s work in harsh economic times. In Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing The New Domesticity, Emily Matchar (Matchar, 2013) talks about an emerging generation of “radical homemakers” who are reclaiming family values, frugal living and DIY culture in the name of sustainability and self-sufficiency. Despite the yuppie conditioning imposed upon gen-Xers and Millennials to equate self-actualisation with technocentric careerism and “having it all”, the pull of re-skilling in the domestic arts has never been more alluring. When my mother and grandmother were my age, they knew how to cook, clean, sew and garden, while I grew up on Disney cartoons and microwaved pizza, beheading barbie dolls and pressing complex buttons on a machine.

Homeward bound emily matchar