I like knitting, baking, cooking, enjoying nature, and being a hardcore feminist. Making the choice to lean into to what you want and enjoy IS feminism.
I read 'jam girl' and I thought yeah girl i'm going to listen to Dave Matthews like it's 2003 again! Then I realized you meant fruit jam and I thought hell yeah put that jam in a gin and tonic (bonus when your husband makes it for you after putting the kids to bed and you're reading your romantic novel out on the patio under the cafe lights).
In seriousness, I love this concept and this line really got me "Jam Girl is domestic, but not domesticated" I love catering to my babies and cleaning, and puttering in the house, and gardening for hours and long bedtimes, but I also love being a Director at my company and running meetings and having authority. I'm married to a true partner who gardens and cooks and does equal child-rearing and is on the PTO so I recognize that i'm fortunate that I get to do both. I wish that for more women, which is why I tell my girls all the time 'if you're going to marry, marry wisely'.
I’m so here for jam girl summer. Last week I ordered a batch of peach truck peaches. Excited to try making jam for the first time!
But also excited that I, a single, divorced, childless woman in the latter half of her thirties has the time and resources to do the softer things. Thanks feminism!
Peach Truck peaches are the pinnacle of summer to me! I'm visiting my family in Nashville currently (where they are based) and doing mental tetris over how many boxes I can fit in my car for our drive home!
LIFE long feminist here. I have always done all those "domestic" things, plus, I have power tools. AND, I spent 40 years working for social justice and JAMMIN' it to the fuking patriarchy. I have ALL of these skills NOT due to some culture branding and manipulation. I grew up poor as shit. Like many, many, many, many of us. MANY ass-kickers can bake bread. So can many bikers, cowboys, and engineers of any gender. This trad wife bullshit and calico-wrapped enslavement.
Being a hardcore feminist means having thd option to choose or not choose that life. Being a hard core feminist is living as slow and contrubiting as little or I want to the capitalist machinations. Those ladies are setting up a false narrative.
Legit homesteading is HARD. Not soft. It’s shoveling and lugging water and animal poop and weeding and dead animals and dead crops and getting stung by bees and feeding animals on dark, cold mornings. My partner owns a farm, I just moved in with him (after 4 years). I help with the chickens and make jam from his strawberries (can’t wait to read the jam resources bc my brain just cannot with the sugar/pectin/fruit math). M-F I work at my corporate job and on weekends I’m covered in dirt and chicken poop. Our kids run wild on the farm and also beg for screen time. I’m learning to sew, and I own my own property. I love being a mom - we play games and do art and take nature walks and cook together, and I signed my kid up for summer camps almost every week this summer so I can work! And it sounds like a dream life, I’m sure to many! We are extremely lucky. AND. We’ve experienced a lot of loss to get us to this point. Divorce, death, illness, job loss (my partner’s job was a DOGE casualty). It’s all messy and hard and lovely. I’m comfortable talking about the mess. I imagine the rightwing trad wife influencers can’t afford to be honest about the messy parts, because if you start to pull on one of the loose threads, the whole story unravels. I’m sure there’s a jam metaphor here somewhere.
The KKKULTISM is the point on the right. More women vote. This “re-branding” of women is to send women back to 1830 as property WITHOUT RIGHTS, like voting or educations. They want women to die in childbirth: fewer voters. They want women be disqualified from voting: birth certificate does not match the drivers license to married women who changed their name (-Another “custom” to invalidate women.) Fewer voters. They want women uneducated: fewer voters. Get it yet?
REPEATING: NAZ1G0P females DO NOT IDENTIFTY as WOMEN, or as INDIVIDUALS. There are willing PROPERTY to NAZIG0P MALES.
P-R-0-P-E-R-T-Y.
Property is identified by its purpose or relationship to its owner: wife, mother, handmaiden. (Like brood mare, hunting dog, milk cow, barn cat.)
Men, who have been entitled at birth by passive possession of a Y chromosome, AND NOTHING ELSE, at terrified now.
BOO-FUKING-HOO, dikkks.
The kkkristian kkkults have been working at this women-invalidation operation since the beginning of time. Until the 1950’s, 2 out of 5 women died in childbirth. As soon as, ob/gyn, research, pre-natal care, childhood vaccines, etc. were part of the culture and the population exploded, more women were born and more lived longer. (The female is always the stronger fetus.) Once the fear of dying in childbirth started to wane, women were unleashed and men were deafened by the sound of their testes retracting at lighting speed. -Wwwwhhhhhooooosh.
The OP against women was in full throttle post ROE. The DEMs slept of the fuking job and here we are.
Saving DEMOCRACY is up to WE the PEOPLE NOW. Time to start the Pro-Democracy Party.
Whyt males (most particularly) are terrified about the end of what they view as our democracy as we know it.
hmmmm… What did I miss? When did we have democracy? Did I blink? I was born in this country. I am a smart female who became a smart, capable, well-read adult. I see that some of us “worked” at democracy to the amusement of the TOXIC CAPTIALISTS who run this misogyny.
But, democracy? WE HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED DEMOCRACY YET. The people who are panicked… males… are panicked because THEY ARE LOSING THEIR ENTITLEMENT, not OUR DEMOCRACY.
Tracking?
BTW, the DNC is about to drop $20M to figure out what I just said. -Cuz they are stupid that way.
As for the rest of us: women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, new Americans, disabled people, poor people… WE WILL BE JUST FIND because WE ARE SURVIVORS.
We have never had the “PRIVILEGE” to lose. And, like ALL BULLIES, these men losing their PASSIVELY ACQUIRED advantage, is a crisis. All they can think of to do is to make the rest of us smaller.
IT. WON’T. WORK.
We are survivors who never had the edge and live anyway.
It's funny because my one "tradwife" kind of hobby is crocheting which I picked up about 2 years ago. And as soon as I started making pretty/neat things immediately everyone was telling me I should sell them (despite me never complaining about money...). I just find that really interesting. Society wants women to participate in traditional hobbies and then... force capitalism on them? The heck. I just want something to do while I watch TV that's not using my phone ;)
This happened to me too. I took up crocheting again because it’s so calming & also keeps me from doom strolling & everybody was telling me to “start up a business”. I’m like “no - crocheting is for protecting my peace & making beautiful things because I can”.
Emily, how did you make me cry so much with the phrase “Jam girl”??? I’ve been at odds with the hobbies I love being co opted by maga and trad wives for such a long time. I’m privileged to stay home and homeschool my kids. We live on the 5 acres my husband and I have daydreamed about since we were teenagers. I give a lot of myself to educate the kids, tote them to a larger city to see friends, tote my youngest to therapy and specialist appointments and give to my own community of friends. I love doing it all but I need my soft hobbies to recharge. I love my gardens, my pet chickens, our three pet bunnies and three dogs. I love cooking and baking and a multitude of fiber arts crafts.
These things make me feel like a whole person, not just a mom. I’m going to tag anything I post related to these things as #jamgirl from now on. I’ve been working on reclaiming my identity in these hobbies and your post really resonated with me. Thank you for sharing.
I love this concept. But I do hate the kitchen. I will clean. I will do laundry. But I do not like cooking or baking. But I love the concept of finding that thing that slows you down, but also let's you be free. I am thankful to be in a marriage with a true partner, and if I really wanted him to do everything, he would. But I don't work that way. Although sometimes I just want to not be an adult and go to my parents and let them make my decisions for a few days (see also I have good parents where I could just walk away for a few days and do this). LOL
I also say this is why you'll never sell me on a house by telling me what a great kitchen it has. I think it's also why I really don't want an open concept. I don't need to see it. It's a means to an end. LOL
Domestic not domesticated is the perfect mantra for the summer
If anyone is in the market for a great jam-themed romance novel with a strong female main character written by a brilliant feminist, may I suggest In a Jam by Kate Canterbary? This jam newsletter reminded me it's time for a re-read.
I am about as tradwife as they come - practicing Christian, don't have a job I go to out of the home for which I am paid, had out of hospital births with all three of my kids, I cook most of our meals from scratch - AND I do these things because *I* want to, not because someone told me that is right or proper or where I belong. I am also very highly educated and always interested in disrupting systems which do not serve the most people. As a "tradwife," I am actually in a position to see some of the broken places in our society easier: spending more time at my kids' schools where you can see the problems kids, teachers and administrators have to deal with daily; noticing the people out and about during the day who don't have jobs...or homes; opportunities to volunteer for organizations that are trying to patch the cracks that our society allows to widen based on the moralization of poverty and race and ethnicity etc; trying to feed 5 people on a single income that is *not even close* to 3 figures. Being a "tradwife," if you let it, will radicalize you against regressive policies faster than anything because you are off the path from the daily grind. It's sad that these women, who - first of all are they old enough to be exhausted from making decisions? Lol - so easily hand over their entire wellbeing to people who will never care about anyone's best interest but their bank account's instead of forcing the system to change because no one should have to live this tired.
A few weeks ago I made a cocktail in a (nearly) empty jam jar and for the first time it hit me that I could just add a spoonful of jam to my G&T without waiting for a jar to run out. Anyway, I've been doing that for weeks so I am VERY in for JGS
Jam cocktails are amazing! I like to make this one cocktail from the Hawksmoor at Home cookbook with bitter orange marmalade, gin, lemon juice, and Campari and it's delicious. Stirring the jam with the spirit first helps loosen up the jam nicely.
Yes, a lesson I learned the hard (as hard as mixing a cocktail can be I guess) way is to mix the gin & jam first. I actually have used a milk frother to great success!
Love this. I too read the “jam” in a music way and I’m ready for it. Reflecting that although I do love baking in my linen apron, my jamming of late has been recording an album on my own, at home- so literal jam here we come. Away from music industry male dominated spaces, in a cave of my own doing, I’ll be your jam girl all summer with tunes to show for it by the end 🎶 and a bit of slow life with my family in Brittany in August for the pretty pictures and late afternoon swims
I like knitting, baking, cooking, enjoying nature, and being a hardcore feminist. Making the choice to lean into to what you want and enjoy IS feminism.
Maybe my favorite Substack yet. Tagging all my happy home life photos with “domestic not domesticated” from now on.
Ditto!!!! This post made me tear up!
I read 'jam girl' and I thought yeah girl i'm going to listen to Dave Matthews like it's 2003 again! Then I realized you meant fruit jam and I thought hell yeah put that jam in a gin and tonic (bonus when your husband makes it for you after putting the kids to bed and you're reading your romantic novel out on the patio under the cafe lights).
In seriousness, I love this concept and this line really got me "Jam Girl is domestic, but not domesticated" I love catering to my babies and cleaning, and puttering in the house, and gardening for hours and long bedtimes, but I also love being a Director at my company and running meetings and having authority. I'm married to a true partner who gardens and cooks and does equal child-rearing and is on the PTO so I recognize that i'm fortunate that I get to do both. I wish that for more women, which is why I tell my girls all the time 'if you're going to marry, marry wisely'.
I lol'd at Dave Matthews 😂 maybe I'll put on Crush WHILE I make some jam!
I, too, lol'd at Dave Matthews.
I’m so here for jam girl summer. Last week I ordered a batch of peach truck peaches. Excited to try making jam for the first time!
But also excited that I, a single, divorced, childless woman in the latter half of her thirties has the time and resources to do the softer things. Thanks feminism!
RIGHT? Like, thank you for letting me earn money and own my own home and joyfully make my jam in peace.
Peach Truck peaches are the pinnacle of summer to me! I'm visiting my family in Nashville currently (where they are based) and doing mental tetris over how many boxes I can fit in my car for our drive home!
I think we need a "domestic but not domesticated" shirt! 🍓
Yes please! Except my husband might give me the side-eye at 'domestic.' Look I bake homemade birthday cakes, that's domestic!
oh no it's a CAR commercial?? https://www.autoevolution.com/news/dodge-s-new-domestic-not-domesticated-tagline-comes-with-a-warning-109963.html
...although I kind of like that. I was born in the USA, I'm domestic
oh nooooo
LIFE long feminist here. I have always done all those "domestic" things, plus, I have power tools. AND, I spent 40 years working for social justice and JAMMIN' it to the fuking patriarchy. I have ALL of these skills NOT due to some culture branding and manipulation. I grew up poor as shit. Like many, many, many, many of us. MANY ass-kickers can bake bread. So can many bikers, cowboys, and engineers of any gender. This trad wife bullshit and calico-wrapped enslavement.
Bread baking is producing food to feed yourself.
That is called "adulthood."
So good. “It’s called adulthood” 😂 love it.
😘
Being a hardcore feminist means having thd option to choose or not choose that life. Being a hard core feminist is living as slow and contrubiting as little or I want to the capitalist machinations. Those ladies are setting up a false narrative.
Legit homesteading is HARD. Not soft. It’s shoveling and lugging water and animal poop and weeding and dead animals and dead crops and getting stung by bees and feeding animals on dark, cold mornings. My partner owns a farm, I just moved in with him (after 4 years). I help with the chickens and make jam from his strawberries (can’t wait to read the jam resources bc my brain just cannot with the sugar/pectin/fruit math). M-F I work at my corporate job and on weekends I’m covered in dirt and chicken poop. Our kids run wild on the farm and also beg for screen time. I’m learning to sew, and I own my own property. I love being a mom - we play games and do art and take nature walks and cook together, and I signed my kid up for summer camps almost every week this summer so I can work! And it sounds like a dream life, I’m sure to many! We are extremely lucky. AND. We’ve experienced a lot of loss to get us to this point. Divorce, death, illness, job loss (my partner’s job was a DOGE casualty). It’s all messy and hard and lovely. I’m comfortable talking about the mess. I imagine the rightwing trad wife influencers can’t afford to be honest about the messy parts, because if you start to pull on one of the loose threads, the whole story unravels. I’m sure there’s a jam metaphor here somewhere.
Jam is best when it’s messy. So is life. The sanitized version that tradwife influencers are selling has no authenticity left in it
The KKKULTISM is the point on the right. More women vote. This “re-branding” of women is to send women back to 1830 as property WITHOUT RIGHTS, like voting or educations. They want women to die in childbirth: fewer voters. They want women be disqualified from voting: birth certificate does not match the drivers license to married women who changed their name (-Another “custom” to invalidate women.) Fewer voters. They want women uneducated: fewer voters. Get it yet?
REPEATING: NAZ1G0P females DO NOT IDENTIFTY as WOMEN, or as INDIVIDUALS. There are willing PROPERTY to NAZIG0P MALES.
P-R-0-P-E-R-T-Y.
Property is identified by its purpose or relationship to its owner: wife, mother, handmaiden. (Like brood mare, hunting dog, milk cow, barn cat.)
Men, who have been entitled at birth by passive possession of a Y chromosome, AND NOTHING ELSE, at terrified now.
BOO-FUKING-HOO, dikkks.
The kkkristian kkkults have been working at this women-invalidation operation since the beginning of time. Until the 1950’s, 2 out of 5 women died in childbirth. As soon as, ob/gyn, research, pre-natal care, childhood vaccines, etc. were part of the culture and the population exploded, more women were born and more lived longer. (The female is always the stronger fetus.) Once the fear of dying in childbirth started to wane, women were unleashed and men were deafened by the sound of their testes retracting at lighting speed. -Wwwwhhhhhooooosh.
The OP against women was in full throttle post ROE. The DEMs slept of the fuking job and here we are.
Saving DEMOCRACY is up to WE the PEOPLE NOW. Time to start the Pro-Democracy Party.
Whyt males (most particularly) are terrified about the end of what they view as our democracy as we know it.
hmmmm… What did I miss? When did we have democracy? Did I blink? I was born in this country. I am a smart female who became a smart, capable, well-read adult. I see that some of us “worked” at democracy to the amusement of the TOXIC CAPTIALISTS who run this misogyny.
But, democracy? WE HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED DEMOCRACY YET. The people who are panicked… males… are panicked because THEY ARE LOSING THEIR ENTITLEMENT, not OUR DEMOCRACY.
Tracking?
BTW, the DNC is about to drop $20M to figure out what I just said. -Cuz they are stupid that way.
As for the rest of us: women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, new Americans, disabled people, poor people… WE WILL BE JUST FIND because WE ARE SURVIVORS.
We have never had the “PRIVILEGE” to lose. And, like ALL BULLIES, these men losing their PASSIVELY ACQUIRED advantage, is a crisis. All they can think of to do is to make the rest of us smaller.
IT. WON’T. WORK.
We are survivors who never had the edge and live anyway.
AND, WE FUKING OUT NUMBER THEM BY MILLIONS.
Get it yet?
It's funny because my one "tradwife" kind of hobby is crocheting which I picked up about 2 years ago. And as soon as I started making pretty/neat things immediately everyone was telling me I should sell them (despite me never complaining about money...). I just find that really interesting. Society wants women to participate in traditional hobbies and then... force capitalism on them? The heck. I just want something to do while I watch TV that's not using my phone ;)
This happened to me too. I took up crocheting again because it’s so calming & also keeps me from doom strolling & everybody was telling me to “start up a business”. I’m like “no - crocheting is for protecting my peace & making beautiful things because I can”.
Thisssss. If you have a hobby, you are so quickly encouraged to monetize that time.
Emily, how did you make me cry so much with the phrase “Jam girl”??? I’ve been at odds with the hobbies I love being co opted by maga and trad wives for such a long time. I’m privileged to stay home and homeschool my kids. We live on the 5 acres my husband and I have daydreamed about since we were teenagers. I give a lot of myself to educate the kids, tote them to a larger city to see friends, tote my youngest to therapy and specialist appointments and give to my own community of friends. I love doing it all but I need my soft hobbies to recharge. I love my gardens, my pet chickens, our three pet bunnies and three dogs. I love cooking and baking and a multitude of fiber arts crafts.
These things make me feel like a whole person, not just a mom. I’m going to tag anything I post related to these things as #jamgirl from now on. I’ve been working on reclaiming my identity in these hobbies and your post really resonated with me. Thank you for sharing.
I love this concept. But I do hate the kitchen. I will clean. I will do laundry. But I do not like cooking or baking. But I love the concept of finding that thing that slows you down, but also let's you be free. I am thankful to be in a marriage with a true partner, and if I really wanted him to do everything, he would. But I don't work that way. Although sometimes I just want to not be an adult and go to my parents and let them make my decisions for a few days (see also I have good parents where I could just walk away for a few days and do this). LOL
lol, Jam Girl Summer is a lifestyle that can involve store-bought jam.
Now you are speaking my language. LOL I do love my home chef deliveries but you best believe I pick the easiest ones.
I love the concept of domestic but not domesticated—- I’ve jokingly called myself a feral housewife for years bc I don’t do the cooking
I also say this is why you'll never sell me on a house by telling me what a great kitchen it has. I think it's also why I really don't want an open concept. I don't need to see it. It's a means to an end. LOL
Domestic not domesticated is the perfect mantra for the summer
If anyone is in the market for a great jam-themed romance novel with a strong female main character written by a brilliant feminist, may I suggest In a Jam by Kate Canterbary? This jam newsletter reminded me it's time for a re-read.
WAIT that's so on the nose!
I am about as tradwife as they come - practicing Christian, don't have a job I go to out of the home for which I am paid, had out of hospital births with all three of my kids, I cook most of our meals from scratch - AND I do these things because *I* want to, not because someone told me that is right or proper or where I belong. I am also very highly educated and always interested in disrupting systems which do not serve the most people. As a "tradwife," I am actually in a position to see some of the broken places in our society easier: spending more time at my kids' schools where you can see the problems kids, teachers and administrators have to deal with daily; noticing the people out and about during the day who don't have jobs...or homes; opportunities to volunteer for organizations that are trying to patch the cracks that our society allows to widen based on the moralization of poverty and race and ethnicity etc; trying to feed 5 people on a single income that is *not even close* to 3 figures. Being a "tradwife," if you let it, will radicalize you against regressive policies faster than anything because you are off the path from the daily grind. It's sad that these women, who - first of all are they old enough to be exhausted from making decisions? Lol - so easily hand over their entire wellbeing to people who will never care about anyone's best interest but their bank account's instead of forcing the system to change because no one should have to live this tired.
Thank you so much for mentioning my french toast in your article! It was so interesting to read 🥹🩷
A few weeks ago I made a cocktail in a (nearly) empty jam jar and for the first time it hit me that I could just add a spoonful of jam to my G&T without waiting for a jar to run out. Anyway, I've been doing that for weeks so I am VERY in for JGS
YES gin and jams are a thing! I discovered them last summer, don't forget a squeeze of lemon, dreamy
I've never heard of this but now I can't *wait* to try it
Jam cocktails are amazing! I like to make this one cocktail from the Hawksmoor at Home cookbook with bitter orange marmalade, gin, lemon juice, and Campari and it's delicious. Stirring the jam with the spirit first helps loosen up the jam nicely.
Yes, a lesson I learned the hard (as hard as mixing a cocktail can be I guess) way is to mix the gin & jam first. I actually have used a milk frother to great success!
Love this. I too read the “jam” in a music way and I’m ready for it. Reflecting that although I do love baking in my linen apron, my jamming of late has been recording an album on my own, at home- so literal jam here we come. Away from music industry male dominated spaces, in a cave of my own doing, I’ll be your jam girl all summer with tunes to show for it by the end 🎶 and a bit of slow life with my family in Brittany in August for the pretty pictures and late afternoon swims
Love this take. Jam away.