Amongst the various labels people slap onto females, I've always felt a little lost, and perhaps a bit dual-natured. As a child I never felt like I fully identified as either a 'Girly-Girl' or 'Tom-Boy'. I varied wildly between feeling like a 'Good Girl' and a 'Bad Girl'...although what defined each of those labels still eludes me.
I wore beautiful frilly dresses & skirts that my Mom made me (often with a matching one of her own...) and overalls with equal abandon. I spent my days in my back yard digging for worms, searching for snakes, swinging on my swing-set and picking daisies. I did crafts, I scrapbooked, I wrote & I read.
I had only female friends my own age, yet at adult gatherings & neighbourhood barbecues I gravitated towards the conversations held by the men.
Throughout my teens and early 20s the 'problem' of my inability to slot myself into a label that comfortably made sense of my multidimensionality became much more complicated. I am creative, I wanted to be a writer, an artist... pursuits which were traditionally predominantly male, which had become subverted into more feminine ideals. I considered becoming a librarian, which in my mind, at the time, was a primarily female career. I joked about being a 60 year old lady in a teenage body. When I settled into a more traditionally female driven craft-based practice, and learned more about the history of segregation & oppression of female values in the art world I felt even more torn.
As I'm sure most of you know, expecting to fit into a societal label just isn't realistic or compatible with being a complex human being, whether you're male or female...things are rarely as black and white as labels seem to suggest that they are. People are much more multifaceted than just virgin or whore; tyrant or benevolent king. But it's in human nature to want & need to classify what surrounds us in order to make sense of it & derive a feeling of safety and stability in our lives.
Being comfortable with who you are means coming to terms with the fact that you slot into multiple & often contradictory categories at the same time. You can be old fashioned yet progressive, conservative yet sexy, blatant and subtle. As someone who has spent their life feeling either hyper-sexualized or unfeminine, craft and textiles and the community of makers comprised of women from all types & backgrounds offers a refuge...a place to simply be, and to let what flows from my mind and my hands stand for its' self.