Women's Micro-Entrepreneurial Homeworking

Abstract

Enabled by the global distribution affordances of the Internet, increasing numbers of creative producers of the handmade—the majority of whom are women—are working from home as sole traders. Selling their wares via online marketplaces such as Etsy, such women often do so as a means by which to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. In this article I argue that rather than seeing the exponential growth of an online craft economy as a ‘back to the future’ moment for the status of women, these business practices are best seen as part of the process of the folding of the economy into society, a process which Lisa Adkins has located as positioning the home as an increasingly productive space for both men and women.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is not possible to provide an exhaustive list of all these sites, but, for example, they include (the nation listed in brackets indicates the country where the website is based or started, but not the limit of its market): ArtFire, ‘Global commerce with a local perspective. We are ArtFire’ (USA) http://www.artfire.com/; Big Cartel, ‘Big Cartel provides you with your own independent store to sell your stuff online’ (USA) http://bigcartel.com/; Blue Caravan, ‘[ethical] Design Market’ (Australia) http://www.bluecaravan.net/pages/about/; Bouf, ‘design-led living’ (UK) https://www.bouf.com/; ClickforArt, ‘Limited Edition Art, Art Prints, Canvas Prints & Limited Edition Homewares’ (UK) http://www.clickforart.com/; DaWanda, ‘products with love’, ‘the unique marketplace’ (Germany) http://en.dawanda.com/; Folksy, ‘Modern British Craft’ (UK) http://folksy.com/; Hand-Made.com.au, ‘Your place to buy and sell all things hand-made, vintage upcycled and supplies’ (Australia) https://www.hand-made.com.au/; iCraft, ‘Creativity without borders’ (Canada) http://icraftgifts.com/; Lilyshop (USA) http://www.lilyshop.com/; Madeit, ‘the handmade market open all day every day’ (Australia) http://www.madeit.com.au/; Not on the High Street, ‘for a life less ordinary’ (UK) http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/; Red Bubble, ‘Buy Shiny Independent Designs on Super-Great Products’ (USA and Australia) http://www.redbubble.com/; Supermarket, ‘Great design. Straight from designers’ (USA) http://supermarkethq.com/browse/everything; Zibbet, ‘Your place to buy unique, handmade products, direct from the maker’ (USA) http://www.zibbet.com/.

2. I employ the phrase ‘post-Etsy’ to indicate, temporally, how the contemporary craft economy is being impacted by the run-away success of online selling generally, and Etsy in particular. Etsy’s game-changing role is significant not only economically, but also aesthetically and socio-culturally in terms of how it is pushing consumer and marketplace expectations around marketing, business skills development and setting the tone for the presentation of the making self. Given Etsy is, at the time of writing, still very much going strong it is in no way a reference to an ‘after Etsy’ moment following its demise.

3. ‘A working day facilitated by women’s social reproduction’ (Grabham 2014,73), that is women’s unpaid reproductive work in the domestic sphere.

4. https://blog.etsy.com/en/tags/featured-shop/.

5. As of July 2014 there were 1150 profiles in the archive, clearly evidencing the emergence of greater levels of professionalism (in text but most markedly in the accompanying photographs), and even of a particular kind of ‘Etsy aesthetic’ since the first entry in October 2005.

6. See Adkins (2002, 2013) for critiques of both the prevalence of, and ideological presumptions dominant in, individual work–life narratives and discourses in the contemporary post-Fordist knowledge economy.

7. See also Ekinsmyth, 2013a, 2013b where she speaks of the pressure to engage in ‘intensive mothering’.

8. For just one real-world experience of this see the article: ‘The Young, Skint and Self-employed Need a Radical New Labour Market’, The Guardian, 21 July 2014, by Paul Mason.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Luckman

Susan Luckman is Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia where she is a member of the Hawke Research Institute. She is the author of Craft and the Creative Economy (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Locating Cultural Work: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and Remote Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), co-edited the anthology on creative music cultures and the global economy (Sonic Synergies, Ashgate 2008), and has published numerous book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles and government reports on cultural work, creative industries and creative micro-entrepreneurialism.