The Women's Craft Ghetto

After writing yesterday's blog post, I started thinking about the economics of selling crafts.  The most obvious reason for why crafts earn so little money is that they are traditionally women's work.  It is almost impossible to earn a decent amount of money for making a craft.

Just as an example, it will take me about 50 or 60 hours to knit a sweater, plus between $60 and $100 for the yarn.  However, I can go to Target and buy a perfectly good sweater for about $20.00.  When someone asks me to knit a sweater, they are usually shocked at the price that I quote them.  My standard quote is the cost of materials plus $10.00 an hour.  This is a fair cost for me, but most people are appalled.

One striking feature of Etsy is that very few sellers are charging what the item is actually worth, if they include a reasonable cost for their time to complete it.  I recently saw someone who is selling hand knit baby sweaters for about $12.00 apiece.  I can guarantee that each of those sweaters takes at least 10 hours to complete.  Even if the seller is using a very cheap yarn, which she wasn't, that works out to about a dollar an hour.  Ouch!

Etsy has been described by many people as a race to the bottom.  Many sellers offer their items at the cheapest possible price, which hurts everyone in the long run.  The standard explanation is that this is because women do not value their time correctly.  Insert feminist rant here.

However, the same situation is happening in many other fields which have been traditionally dominated by men.  There has been much Internet outrage over spec work sites which ask graphic designers to submit completed projects, so that the buyer can choose between them.  Spec work is the bane of every freelancers existence, and every graphic designer, photographer, or writer who agrees to do spec work is treated like a scab.  And not without reason.

Graphic design, photography, and writing are good examples of industries which are hurting from the influx of amateurs, largely due to the accessibility of the Internet.  In this case, they are also useful examples to discuss, because none of them have been considered women's work.

Cooking on the other hand is a good example of the opposite.  Cooking was traditionally considered women's work, but a lot of people will now pay other people a lot of money to cook for them.  Granted, most celebrity chefs are men.  I'm not sure if I'm comfortable making a feminist point about that, but it is certainly there to be made.  At any rate, foodies will pay a lot of money for a gourmet meal at a high profile restaurant.  And I'm here to tell you that if you want to hire a personal chef, he or she will not come cheap.

The real question is, what does celebrity food have which a hand knit sweater does not?  According to many sources I've read, it took a long time before Americans were able to distinguish between regular food and fancy food.  Perhaps the same can be said for handcrafted items.  I can't tell you how many people have asked me why I would knit my own socks, when you can buy six pairs of tube socks for $5.00 at Target.  I think the real problem is that most people cannot distinguish between sweatshop clothing and handmade clothing. 

On the other hand, maybe the world of hand crafts just needs a suitably charismatic male figurehead.