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Q: Our parents have spent decades rejecting the domesticity of their parents — the ideal woman in the 1990s was a Sex and the City-style careerist, you write, who stored extra copies of Vogue in her stove. So what gives? Why is this shift happening now?

A: Those of us in our 20s and 30s now are far enough removed from the enforced domesticity of the 1950s — the desperate housewives of Betty Friedan — that we’re able to look at these things in a new light. Some of us are going “Hey, these things are cool and fun and interesting, and maybe they’ll even save us some money or help the environment.”

Q: And a lot of these blogs have exploded since the 2008 recession. But weren’t we seeing urban knitting circles before that?

A: All these things have been building for years. Riot Grrrls — a punk subculture of the 1990s — started reclaiming “girly” skills under the feminist banner. That opened the gate for things like knitting circles to be considered hip and fun among a younger demographic. Those skills began to take on a new urgency for many people as the recession made people more concerned with self-sufficiency.

Q: How closely is the New Domesticity tied to class?

A: Things that were once the necessities of the poor are now hobbies of the educated middle-class. A handmade sweater used to signify that you didn’t have enough money to buy a “nice” store-bought one, while today a handmade sweater means you have enough leisure time (a real luxury these days) to knit. That said, I don’t think most people involved in New Domesticity are some kind of elite — most are middle-class, concerned with the fact that their standard of living will likely be lower than their parents’, and interested in new ways of balancing work and life.