Author: fitz

One comment on my last post moved me to respond.

I struggle with the “women only” classes.. to exclude on the basis of being inclusive… is a difficult logic puzzle. While I recognize the issues of sexism and bias (overt and unconscious) I also don’t see how creating separate spaces, brings people together. It feels in a way a declaration of war that one group is “Bad” and rightfully excluded.. today because of the sins of the father in our culture, and an admission of defeat, deciding that women are incapable of working with men so need their space. The Boy Scouts evolved… this movement seems to go the wrong way.

Thank you, reader, for grappling with the subject at hand, which demands finer distinctions than are often made in contemporary discourse. I hope that what follows will shed some light on the matter.

For decades I, too, rebelled against the idea of woodworking classes limited to women. As a woman trained in the City & Guilds trades system in England beginning in 1979, I took for granted that my woodworking classes would include primarily be made up of men, so I wasn’t at all surprised that I was the only female in my cohort. In most of the shops where I’ve worked since 1980, I continued to be the only woman–a laudable exception being the shop of Wall-Goldfinger in Northfield, Vermont, during the late 1980s, where women made up between 25 and 30 percent of the shop-floor workforce. (Kudos to John Wall, Michael Goldfinger, and David Haber, and also to their wives.)

Over the past 20 years I’ve encountered the argument that women-only classes are necessary because some women learn better in a setting without men, where they’re freed from having to compete with men or be insulted by them.* Until recently, I resisted those arguments. “In the real world of professional woodworking, most women have to work side-by-side with men,” I told Megan Fitzpatrick when discussing this subject in 2017. “Women just need to get used to it.” She disagreed, and because I respect her (greatly), I tried to figure out why. As another commenter put it: “You have given [me] more to think about beyond the above. I’m comfortable in my positions and beliefs, and am not threatened by trying to see through different eyes.”

As I tried to see Sarah’s project at A Workshop of Our Own through different eyes, I remembered that I’d gone to a women’s high school. I didn’t choose the school; my mother and grandparents did. They chose it because they were convinced that my sister and I would be better able to focus on learning, instead of on socializing. Of course, children who go to mixed-gender schools are also learning about gender relations, in addition to their subjects of formal study. That can be valuable. But because of the circumstances that had culminated in our parents’ divorce, they thought we needed to spend less time thinking about boys than about algebra, the Periodic Table, the life cycle of Taenia solium and the question of whether all animals are equal or some are perhaps more equal than others.

It’s undeniable that one of the lessons girls and boys learn in mixed-gender schools concerns how they’re expected to behave if they want to be attractive to others. There’s nothing wrong with that, at least in principle–unless it discourages boys from taking sewing and cooking classes, or from cultivating their gentler side (I’m really grateful that my husband did not get that memo), and girls from applying themselves to their studies and publicly acknowledging what they know on the grounds that being smart or skilled might be is often considered threatening.

Only after I gave my high school experience some serious reflection did I begin to understand the rationale behind classes, or even an entire school, for women only. (For the record, I also kicked myself for having been tone-deaf to my own privilege as a beneficiary of single-gender high-schooling. One thing about privilege–it’s easy to take for granted.) It’s not about excluding men, but about creating an environment where students can simply focus on the subject at hand.

Some people excel at multitasking. They can dictate the draft of a doctoral dissertation into Notes on their i-Phone while jogging through traffic with their dog. However, most of us function best in relatively controlled conditions. One friend of mine swears she’s incapable of writing unless her desk is clear of clutter. Another says he writes his funniest stories at night, after the rest of his family’s in bed. Another “cannot function” without coffee first thing in the morning. All of these are examples in which we have no trouble acknowledging that controlling select aspects of our circumstances, whether social or physical, aids focus.

Again, the point is not to exclude men, nor to vilify them. Nor is anyone claiming that women are “incapable of working with men so need their space.” Beyond the doors of those classrooms is a world where the same women who sign up for the classes speak, work, ride the subway, eat, and in many cases, have children with men. But it’s also a world in which graduates of those classes may feel just a little more confident asserting themselves because they did not have to deal with fellow students who resented their presence in a woodworking class/golf club/voting booth/branch of government and expressed their resentment by calling them vulgar names under their breath, defacing their work in the dark of night, sending anonymous threatening letters or complaining to the instructor about their underarm hair (while finding their fellow men’s underarm hair completely normal and inoffensive).

This is just a tiny sampling of the stuff that still, amazingly, goes on in 2019. Some of us deal with such behavior by filing it under “desperate stuff some people do when they feel threatened or impotent”–i.e., compartmentalizing it with a degree of empathy–and moving on. Some of us report the behavior in the hope that those institutional cultures that (still?) silently overlook it will change. But can I now understand why some women respond by shaping their circumstances so that they don’t have to waste their time or emotional energy reacting to this kind of stuff? You bet.–Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work

*Please don’t read this as implying that all men insult women. Clearly they don’t. Nor am I denying that women sometimes compete with and insult each other.

Hang out with six (and in a couple cases a few more) of your new closest friends as you learn woodworking in our upcoming classes. Below are listed and linked those in which there are one or more bench spaces available, both at the Lost Art Press (LAP) storefront and at other locations in classes taught by LAP regulars.

• Building a Krenov-style Handplane with Brendan Gaffney
LAP, May 25-26

• Intro to Spoon Carving with JoJo Wood
LAP, June 17

• Build a Dutch Tool Chest, Inside and Out, with Megan Fitzpatrick
Port Townsend School of Woodworking, June 24-2

• French Polishing with Derek Jones
LAP, July 11-12

• Build a Krenovian Wall Cabinet Using Traditional Handskills with Brendan Gaffney
Marc Adams School of Woodworking, July 8-12

• Four Hand Tool Corner Joints with Megan Fitzpatrick
Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, July 20-21

• Staked Furniture with Brendan Gaffney
Port Townsend School of Woodworking, Sept. 9-13

• Build a Cabinetmaker’s Sector with Brendan Gaffney
Port Townsend School of Woodworking, Sept. 14-15

• Build a Wall Cabinet with Anne Briggs
LAP, Oct. 7-11

• Chip Carving with Daniel Clay
LAP, Oct. 19-20

• Build a Jennie Alexander Chair with Ray Schwanenberger
LAP, Nov. 4-8

• Build a Sawbench with Megan Fitzpatrick
LAP, Nov. 16-17

• Make a Carved Oak Box with Peter Follansbee
LAP, Dec 9-13

As always, if you’ve questions about classes, please send them to me (Megan with no “h”) at [email protected], not to Meghan with an “h” at the LAP Help Desk.

— Fitz

Our Chore Coat has been popular so far, so Chris and I wanted to follow it up with another garment that would be useful, not just merchandise. His idea was a work vest that’d layer over a shirt or under a coat, with plenty of pockets and a low collar. Sounds good, I said, and we were off to the races.

We kept it simple, with three outside patch pockets, a low band collar for ease of layering and an inside divided pocket for a pencil, marking knife, 6″ ruler, Sharpie, lumber crayon, paintbrush, tire pressure gauge, Slim Jim, asparagus stalk, Timberlok, cigarillo, chopsticks and other workbench essentials.

We’ll be producing a limited run of these vests – probably no more than 100 pieces – out of a beautiful English-woven moleskin fabric. More on moleskin later. (It’s not made out of dead moles. But it is awesome.) Later versions of the vest will be made using a cloth that is easier to get.

We’re glad to be working with Sew Valley in Cincinnati again. They’re growing and improving every month and we’re delighted to support them as best we can.

Expect to see our final prototype later this month.

— Tom Bonamici

This weekend I went through the final proof of Marc Adams’s forthcoming book, The Difference Makers, to be published this summer by Lost Art Press. It’s a rich portfolio of work by 30 makers in diverse woodworking forms and styles. Although I was familiar with some of the woodworkers before I read the book, Marc introduced me to several new ones. The work is gorgeous—technically brilliant and in many cases jaw-droppingly inspiring. I also found Marc’s profiles of the artists a compelling read. Even though I’ve now read every word of this book twice, I am going to purchase a copy when it’s available. I want to be able to look back at those photographs and be reminded to do my best.

Each of us can come up with a list of individuals we admire. Marc presents the artists in this book as exemplary members of a generation on the cutting edge of craft, not only on account of their hands-on work, but for their thinking (and in some cases, writing) about tools, furniture, sculpture and surface decoration. As I reflected on who might be included in my own list of difference makers during a Sunday afternoon walk, I came up with a short list of names: Megan Fitzpatrick, Sarah Marriage and Laura Mays. Here’s why.

I’ve been a woodworker since 1980 and have made my living as a cabinetmaker for most of those years. As a woman in a field long populated primarily by men, I’ve had my challenges, ranging from vague expressions of gender-based discrimination to sexist hijinks and one straightforward sexual proposition. Worst of all, one skilled co-worker at a small shop in rural England quit his job a few weeks after I was hired and killed himself a few months later. “It’s because of you,” said another employee who had known us both. It was 1985, and I was in my mid 20s, mature enough to recognize the insanity of this response to the hiring of a woman, yet still vulnerable to a deep sense of guilt.

Even so, the most insidious effect of being a woman in a field where men have almost exclusively made the rules and determined the standards has come from seeing woodworking as a field into which I was intruding. The problem was not that I minded being an intruder in a men’s club (I didn’t); it had more to do with how I perceived myself and others. On the exceedingly rare occasions when a woman woodworker did appear in the national media (most notably, Aimé Ontario Fraser in the pages of Fine Woodworking), the main thing I, along with most people, noticed was that she was a woman. By far the most common response from readers to editors upon the publication of an article by a woman has long been “Thank you for featuring a woman in the magazine!” What about her work?! Oh, sorry; that has long been secondary to her gender by virtue of its rarity in this context.

Accepting that you don’t really belong does a number on how you see yourself and others, no matter how hard you tell yourself to ignore this message, recognizing intellectually that its validity has long passed. I am of a generation raised to be nice, even in the face of insult. “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me” was the prescribed mantra when I was a child. “They’re being stupid. Just ignore them” came later on, followed by “Don’t make a big deal of your gender. That only makes gender even more of a focus. Just get on with your work. It will speak for itself.” (Please see the last sentence of the previous paragraph.)

Three decades later, Megan, Sarah, and Laura seriously shook up my world. Not only did they mention gender; they made it a focus of their work (note: a focus, not the only one), and they had a powerful rationale for doing so. Women now constitute a significant percentage of woodworkers, especially in the field of studio furniture. Publishing media should represent this shift, not only by citing statistics, but by including images of women working, as they long have with men. When it comes to influencing how we see the world at an existential level, visual imagery is far more powerful than numbers.

Beyond concern for proportionate representation, we all need role models. My role models in woodworking have all been men. Sure, the world of social media today is filled with young women working with wood, but those depictions are new, and notably, most are self-generated. For decades I was comfortable being the tough girl in the shop or on the jobsite, but I couldn’t see myself continuing in this field once I reached middle age. I couldn’t even conceive of how a 50-year-old woman cabinetmaker might look. What Megan and Sarah wrote and said about the importance of visibility catapulted me into a visceral realization that the question of who is granted visibility is not a matter of chance. Sure, as some have pointed out, it depends in part on the willingness of members of under-represented groups to be seen–a willingness that isn’t always present. But ultimately the people who determine visibility, at least, beyond social media, are those who control traditional publishing media and the institutions and organizations with sufficient cultural clout to venture beyond prevailing norms. Finding bases for inclusion often entails broadening the criteria for acceptance (whether into a publication, an exhibit, a club, or a guild) beyond long-established understandings of what constitutes success and what’s considered worthwhile.

Every day I look at Instagram posts by women woodworkers—sculptors, studio furniture makers, designer-builders of custom work and more. More and more women are appearing on the pages of Fine Woodworking magazine, American Craft and related periodicals. My eyes are now so saturated by images of women woodworkers that I no longer focus on their gender, but on their work. One paradox we face today is that the only way to stop going on and on about gender is by drawing attention to skewed proportional representation and calling for an overdue adjustment, as Laura Mays did in an influential Facebook post in February, 2017, Megan did in her editor’s letter that same year and Sarah did in an essay for American Craft.

These three women, all accomplished teachers as well as woodworkers, have significantly shifted my views on the importance of paying attention to gender. In doing so, they have also helped me see myself in a healthier way. I call that making a difference.—Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work