Jogging, macramé and mug trees: A ‘70s flashback
Sep 1st, 2014 by houghtonmodern
This week’s post on Harvard College Library’s zines collection looks at Part Two of a publication entitled It’s a wonderful lifestyle: A seventies flashback published in 1993. In the words of author Candi Strecker, the publication is an “encyclopedic examination” of American popular culture in the 1970s, and judging by the range of topics covered – ‘70s products, lifestyles, crafts, sports, furniture, eating habit, appliances etc. – encyclopedic feels like the right adjective.
Strecker’s aim is to show just how different the ‘70s were from her present moment in the early ‘90s, and she uses a quote by historian Carlo Ginzburg on the role of the historian to anchor her approach (see Image 2).
The historian’s task is just the opposite of what most of us were taught to believe. He must destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past because they have from societies very different from our own. The more we discover about these people’s ‘mental universe,’ the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them.
Strecker begins by citing the results of a 1973 survey in Better Homes & Gardens – a family-and-home-life magazine. In answer to the question: “What do you feel is the single greatest threat to family life in America today?” 37% of respondents cited materialism, with only 18% choosing drugs and 4% war, crime or communism. Reflecting on the survey results, Strecker says: “Can you imagine modern parents worrying at all about their kids being materialistic, let alone ranking it their number-one concern? These days, shared materialism is one of the warmest ties binding parents and children.”
This opening piece goes on to discuss the “grand themes” of the ‘70s, such as a strong attraction for anything deemed “natural,’’ although no two people meant quite the same thing by this term; nostalgia for a past free of national self-doubt; a survivalist mentality which encompassed everything from tax audits, shark attacks, economic crash, or divorce; self-sufficiency; the notion of “alternative lifestyles”; poverty chic; and voluntary simplicity.
What makes this piece particularly interesting is that the grand themes are traced both in terms of where they came from (i.e. as reactions to the ‘60s) and where they were going: “Somewhere in the course of the Seventies, “money” ceased to be a dirty word. A glib explanation would be to say that “everybody grew up,” but it wasn’t that simple…When jobs got harder to find and inflation bled away the value of the dollar, bohemian nonchalance gave way to fear and frugality.”
In terms of how the grand themes translated into popular culture, three examples from the plethora provided suffice to illustrate the point. The first comes from a piece entitled “At Home in the Seventies,” which focuses on how the ‘70s home was furnished: “The ‘natural’ look called for ‘natural accessories’ and none were as popular as ceramic items with a certain crude, casual, handmade look and particularly earthenware pieces trimmed with just a bit of cobalt-blue gaze. One item swiftly became a cliché: the narrow-necked little pottery vase that held exactly two dried flowers.”
As hand-thrown pottery dishes became the dinnerware of the decade, no kitchen was complete without at least one clunky-crude brown mug in the cupboard or hanging on the contraption known as the mug-tree. In terms of kitchenware motifs likely to decorate said brown mugs, puffy strawberries, plump big-eyed owls and frogs, or herbal motifs for the higher-end consumers, were all in.
The second example comes from a piece entitled “Foxfire & Whimmy-Diddles: Seventies crafts & hobbies.” The grand theme here is nostalgia: “The hottest 70s crafts manuals helped people connect with the handicrafts of the nostalgic past.” From hand-crafting wooden toys to embroidery to crocheting and pottery, anything reminiscent of “the folkways of Grandma’s day” was in. Although why macramé, a method of lace-making on a very large scale, became the signature craft of the ‘70s remains a mystery for the author, of one thing she is certain: from high-end macramé artists using “natural” materials to low-brow macramé hobbyists using brightly-colored synthetic yarns, the macramé was ubiquitous, especially in its most popular embodiment, the plant hanger.
The last example comes from a piece entitled “Head Trips & Body Trips,” and specifically the first section on sport. The argument here is that health was sweepingly redefined during the Seventies, with the general attitude toward the physical body swinging from near-indifference to obsession. If body-consciousness had been seen as vain and narcissistic in the past, in the Seventies, fitness became a matter of survival linked perhaps, as the author speculates, to the ‘60s baby-boomers’ fear of losing the spotlight the previous decade had cast on youth culture.
The most popular way to stay fit became jogging: “Today, people just plain run, and “jogging” sounds hopelessly dated as “daddy-o” or “23-skidoo,” but the word was needed at the time to differentiate fitness running from the kind a person did when being chased.”
Although only Part Two of It’s a Wonderful Lifestyle has been found so far in the collection, on the last page the author thanks all those who reviewed or plugged Part One and announced that Part Three will be music-focused, with some ‘70s history and media. The last page also includes a notice about the Shangri-La, a Memphis store that contains the world’s only “Seventies Museum”; and a bibliography.
This is the eighth, and final, post contributed by Alina Lazar during her two months as a Harvard Library Pforzheimer Fellow. Alina is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. Her intern project was to compile a title listing of Harvard College Library’s Printernet Collection of approximately 20,000 zines. During her internship, Alina listed more than 2600 titles (the contents of 49 of 147 cartons) as well as contributing these blog posts. The Printernet Collection was assembled by an anonymous collector, and was purchased by Widener Library in 2012. The current project, which began with this internship, is to create a title list as the first step in the process to decide where the collection, or portions of it, might best be housed at Harvard, and how it will be made available for research.