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Mourning Becomes Hers: Women, Tradition, and Memory Albums

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Anne Blue Wills
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Abstract

In 1987, two women hatched a business plan that became Creative Memories, a direct-marketing company that sells scrapbook materials and techniques to a mostly female clientele through a worldwide network of sales consultants. By the beginning of the new millennium, millions of people had participated in Creative Memories workshops. Many successful imitators also flooded the crafting market with specialized publications, Web sites, tools, and materials, creating an industry worth $2.55 billion by 2004.

As significant as the economic impact of scrapbooking is, however, the claims of importance made by its practitioners rate closer examination. Promising to keep photos safe from deterioration, Creative Memories also sold a worldview, reflected across the industry, that such preservation is essential to human flourishing. Such a claim invites considerations both of how the promoters of memory-keeping envision its working and how memory-keepers themselves distinctively shape their practice. This article takes the view that album-making constitutes a kind of innovative female meaning-making (that is, religion) shaped, in part, by American-style Common Sense epistemology while also reflecting what we might call a sidelong feminism, in which a woman expresses agency, claims her voice, and declares the complexity of her full humanity, all by using modes that, on the surface, appear compliant with patriarchy. This article also uses certain notions of religious testimony to gauge the space between the Common Sense project of the album-making industry and the results produced by album-makers themselves.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Winter 2010 , pp. 93 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2010

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References

Notes

This article grew out of conversations with Pam Kelley, whose questions on the subject of scrapbooking prompted me to think about its religious aspects. She also graciously provided me with her copy of The Creative Memories Way. See her article, “The Scrapbook Life,” The Charlotte Observer, November 2, 2003, 1G, 4G.

I would also like to thank Kathleen Flake, Trent Foley, Gary Laderman, Fuji Lozada, Jan Shipps, Greg Snyder, Grant Wacker, and Trey Wills for their kind encouragement and thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. Portions of it have been presented at the Southeastern Regional Meeting of the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion, Atlanta, Georgia, March 6, 2004; the NEXUS Interdisciplinary Conference on Religion and Nation, Knoxville, Tennessee, April 7, 2006; and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina, November 30, 2006.

Among consultants and croppers, several in particular generously shared their expertise, impressions, and/or albums with me: Creative Memories unit leaders Kathy Grunert and Natalie Goodwin and more than a dozen other dedicated scrapbookers. Obviously, I owe my deepest debts to the four album-makers I feature toward the end of this article. My sincere thanks go out to them all.

1. Cheryl Lightle and Rhonda Anderson with MacDonald, Shari, The Creative Memories Way (Colorado Springs, Colo.: WaterBrook Press, 2002), 2, 90 Google Scholar. Henceforth referred to as CMW.

2. Ibid., 3 (emphasis in original).

3. Ibid., 3–4. The story varies slightly from the version on the company's Web site, <http://www.creativememories.com>, which refers to the telephone conversation as “The Call.”

4. See Cheryl Lightle with Everett, Heidi L., Creative Memories: The Ten Timeless Principles behind the Company that Pioneered the Scrapbooking Industry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), xiii Google Scholar; and Kim Hughes, Power Demo Day 2004, NorthStone Country Club, Huntersville, N.C., February 7, 2004.

5. Lightle with Everett, Creative Memories, xiii-xiv. One beneficiary of Creative Memories’ success is Stampin’ Up, another home-based direct-sales company offering specialty rubber stamps around the world; although stamping stands as a craft in its own right, many croppers use stamps to embellish their memory album pages. Other companies have thrived because of scrapbooking's popularity: K&Company and EK Success (both owned by Wilton, the cake decorating company) and Buzz&Bloom produce papers and stickers for albums; Cricut, a Utah company, produces a variety of sophisticated programmable cutting tools that allow croppers to produce customized embellishments. Since 1996, Memory Makers and Creating Keepsakes have been two of the most popular magazines for album-makers, although Memory Makers announced in May 2009 that it would cease publication with its September/October 2009 issue and consolidate its subscribers with readers of Scrapbook Trends magazine, <http://www.memorymakersmagazine.com/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=26896&posts=1> (accessed October 29, 2009). Major craft retailers such as Michael’s, Jo-Ann Stores, A. C. Moore, and Hobby Lobby now typically feature aisles of album-making materials and have prominent scrapbooking links on their respective Web sites. Web sites such as http://www.scrapbook.com and http://www.ScrapbookingTop50.com feature links to vendors, products, and tips and display the wide range of styles in which scrapbookers work. The e-mail newsletter www. Scrapbookupdate.com and trade publications such as ScrapbookBusiness Magazine and Scrapbooking.com's Business News follow the industry side of album-making. An October 2009 search on Amazon for “scrapbooking books” turned up almost 800 titles, including Wines-Reed, Jeanne and Wines, Joan, Ph.D., Scrapbooking for Dummies (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2004)Google Scholar, and many books published and reprinted by the Memory Makers and Creating Keepsakes companies.

6. This figure is widely repeated, perhaps because it reflects the high-water mark for the industry, since sales began to slide the next year. See “Annual Sales for Scrapbook Industry Reach $2.55 Billion; Creating Keepsakes’ 2004 ‘Scrapbooking in America’ Survey Measures America's Passion for Preserving Memories,” Business Wire, FindArticles.com, <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2004_June_14/ai_n6064762/> (accessed October 29, 2009); and Dennis Conforto, “What to Consider for the Rest of 2008,” Scrapbooking.com Business News 6 (June 25, 2008), <http://scrapbooking.com/images/newsletters/SMART_032107.htm> (accessed October 29, 2009).

7. Conforto, “What to Consider.”

8. Ambar Espinoza, “Scrapbooking Company Attempts Fresh Start after Bankruptcy,” Minnesota Public Radio, January 9, 2009, <http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/01/08/creative_memories_bankruptcy/> (accessed October 29, 2009).

9. CMW, 4.

10. I take my understanding of “religion” primarily from Berger, Peter L., The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor, 1990 Google Scholar [1967]). He explains that humans live in a world that at once shapes and is shaped by their actions. All human activity aims, in Berger's view, to impose order (nomos) on chaos. Yet, religion— “the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established”—most powerfully imposes such order by tying events, practices, concepts, and places to something “other than” but nevertheless related intimately to humanity (25).

Lesley A. Northrup inspires my thinking on the subject of sidelong feminism; see her “Expanding the X-Axis: Women, Religious Ritual, and Culture,” in Women and Religious Ritual, ed. Lesley A. Northrup (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1993), 145, in which she speaks of women “sidling away” from patriarchy rather than rebelling headlong against it. One mines other contexts in U.S. religion for other examples of this phenomenon, where modes of compliance get reshaped in order to express agency or resistance: antebellum slave spirituals—giving voice to both faith and liberatory zeal—and nineteenth-century women's reform fiction—expounding the power of female piety.

11. For references to the album-making “vision,” see CMW, ix, 1; for the mission statement, see CMW, 51; Creative Memories 2003 catalog, the Storybook, 3; and newsletter, the Chronicle 1 (2004), 1.

12. See, for example, Kathy Grunert's newsletter, “A Creative Update,” Winter 2003, 1–2; and crop schedule, via e-mail, February 10, 2004. “Cropping” is “the practice of trimming … photos, sometimes into circles or shapes, so that the focus is on the most important part of the picture” (CMW, 32).

13. CMW, 3, 4, 154, 67 (emphasis in original).

14. Ibid., 39; 81, “start … today”; 103, “before it's too late.”

15. Techniques aim to simplify and speed up the work; for instance, the “Power Layout Box” allows the album-maker to “organiz[e] an album in under two hours” (Storybook, 59). Consultants also recommend that beginning album-makers start with their most recent photographs and work backwards. See CMW, 47, on “Simple Pages, Completed Albums.”

16. There are as many different types of albums as there are album-makers, but a few seem to be typical: heritage albums (gathering together heirloom photographs), school albums for children (one or two pages per year, with letters from the teacher and other students), ABC albums (a different character trait or favorite thing for each letter of the alphabet), baby books, and even something Creative Memories calls a “faithbook,” which “chronicl[es] life's [miraculous] signposts in order to encourage us in our daily lives” (CMW, 152). See Storybook, 6–18, for album examples; and CMW, 14–16, on photo-safe materials.

17. See, for instance, What about the Words? Creative Journaling for Scrapbookers (Denver, Colo.: Memory Makers Books, 2006).

18. CMW, 29.

19. For example, unit leader Kathy Grunert's repeated mention of journaling during her presentation (January 16, 2004). Discussing album pages she had made earlier in the day, she pointed out the “journaling box”—a small square of colored paper included with the photos on the page—that she would return to later in order to write her memories of the day (Christmas Day with one of her children). Cropper Lori is not unique among women I spoke with in being almost apologetic as she showed me the captions she had written under every photo in her toddler's two albums. She explained that other album-makers write entire pages about the events included in their books.

20. CMW, 17.

21. See ibid., 16, when Anderson mentions childhood memories of her Grandpa Jensen reading the Danish Bible to her, which suggests a Lutheran background.

22. Ibid., 58–59; 129–30; adoption, 150–51. 23. For example, ibid., 55–56.

24. From <http://www.randomhouse.com/waterbrook/>, “Our Mission”: “WaterBrook Press is committed to creating products that both intensify and satisfy the elemental thirst for a deeper relationship with God. By communicating spiritual truth through books and ancillary products of the highest quality and creativity, we hope to provide a deep well of spiritual refreshment that will give readers a taste of the Living Water” (February 2, 2004). The press's name comes from Psalm 42:1.

25. Berger, , The Sacred Canopy, 25 Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., 4.

27. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90 Google Scholar, from Geertz's classic description of a religion.

28. Brereton, Virginia Lieson, From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, chap. 3.

29. CMW, 4.

30. While Creative Memories does not discourage men's participation, promotional and instructional materials focus on women and children. See, however, “Real Men Build Things,” Chronicle 1 (2004), n.p.—a Creative Memories publication advertising the “Sweet Moments” album. The story pictures a Sweetheart Workshop during which eleven men created albums as Valentine's Day gifts for their wives. Women and girls exclusively attended the scrapping events I observed. The Creative Memories Web site features some testimonials from men who make albums. In CMW, see “Tip: Album Making: It's Not Just for Women Anymore,” 20; also Mike Nistler's story, 76–77; and Shari MacDonald's story of her husband's “dream album,” 21.

31. Rudisill, Richard, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), 227 Google Scholar: “No other nation produced more or better daguerreotypes, and no other nation more widely employed the medium than the United States.”

32. Ibid., 197–98, gives figures for the numbers of daguerreotypists and other photographers in the mid-century decades.

33. Ibid., 65–67, although, without explanation, Rudisill takes women's interest in Gouraud's topic not as evidence that they wanted to learn photography but, rather, that they wanted simply to be entertained. 34. See Newhall, Beaumont, “American Photography, 1839–1900,” in Image of America: Early Photography, 1839–1900, A Catalog. An Exhibit Held in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1957), 2 Google Scholar; and Rudisill, , Mirror Image, 213–14Google Scholar.

35. Rudisill, , Mirror Image, 165 Google Scholar.

36. Newhall, “American Photography,” 1.

37. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn.: Leete's Island Books, 1980), 40. In her 1857 appraisal of photography, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake reviewed the course of photographic innovations in England and France from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Her goal was to show photography as a scientific feat rather than an art form.

38. Newhall, “American Photography,” 8 (for a series of historical views of scrapbooking in the United States, see Tucker, Susan, Ott, Katherine, and Buckler, Patricia P., eds., The Scrapbook in American Life [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006])Google Scholar; Green-Lewis, Jennifer, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 113n Google Scholar; Thomas, Alan, Time in a Frame: Photography and the Nineteenth-Century Mind (New York: Schocken, 1977), 43 Google Scholar. Eastlake, “Photography,” personifies photography as female (66).

39. Thomas, , Time in a Frame, 43 Google Scholar. Thomas discusses a sampling of English and American albums: the Waterlow family album, kept by Anna Maria Waterlow; the Wimpole album, which belonged to the Hardwickes and was prepared by Lady Hardwicke; and the Shurman albums, which Mrs. Shurman began and handed on to her daughter to complete. See Thomas, Time in a Frame, chap. 3, “The Family Chronicle,” 43–64. In CMW, 118–21, the cofounders tell the story of Beth Lamdin and her daughter Michelle, who share the album-making tradition. They have experienced great personal transformations because of their shared photo-preservation work.

40. Green-Lewis, , Framing the Victorians, 2 Google Scholar.

41. Rudisill, , Mirror Image, 72 Google Scholar; Noll, Mark A., America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (emphasis in original; Noll credits Henry May with the phrase “didactic Enlightenment”), chap. 6 passim, 110, 109–110.

42. Ibid., 94; the phrase is Norman Fiering’s.

43. Rudisill, , Mirror Image, 73 Google Scholar, and 233, which notes that daguerreotypy entered the United States during “the period of Emerson's ocular concern for spiritual insight through perceiving nature.” 44. Newhall, “American Photography,” 2; quotation from Rudisill, Mirror Image, 116, but see also chap. 6, “The Recorder and the Symbolist.” Rudisill does an excellent job throughout of showing how quickly daguerreotypy spread, how pervasive its impact became among many different kinds of Americans, and how well its processes were adapted to show a particularly American spirit.

45. Green-Lewis, , Framing the Victorians, 4 Google Scholar. See also Rudisill, Mirror Image, 224–25, on the often unflattering but nevertheless “authoritative” poses assumed by portrait-sitters; such stances had quickly become standardized, recognized as the way one sat for a daguerreotype.

46. Thomas, , Time in a Frame, 48 Google Scholar (emphasis mine); Rudisill, , Mirror Image, 224 Google Scholar (emphasis mine).

47. Guimond, James, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 215, 161Google Scholar; see also 151, 170–71, and chap. 5, “The American Way of Life at Home and Abroad.” In contrast to these magazines, Guimond offers the work of William Klein, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank, whose stark styles he examines in chap. 6, “The Great American Wasteland.”

48. Ibid., 156: “unlike documentary work, these images of ordinary Americans were almost invariably reassuring, and they were presented to illustrate popular stereotypes about patriotism, progress, gender roles, and the joys of consumerism.” See also 217: “Whether they were members of families shopping in supermarkets, citizens of friendly towns, smiling employees of large corporations, fans cheering for their sports teams, or voters chanting ‘I Like Ike,’ the Americans in the picture magazines were almost always people who belonged, cheerfully and voluntarily, to a society that made them happy and prosperous.”

49. Ibid., 162.

50. Ibid., 171, 222. See also Halberstam, David, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993)Google Scholar, chap. 38, for a quick view of postwar middleclass growth and its effects on women's lives: “A postwar definition of femininity evolved. To be feminine, the American woman first and foremost did not work. If she did, that made her competitive with men, which made her hard and aggressive and almost surely doomed to loneliness. Instead, she devotedly raised her family, supported her husband, kept her house spotless and efficient, got dinner ready on time, and remained attractive and optimistic; each hair was in place. According to studies, she was prettier than her mother, she was slimmer, and she even smelled better than her mother… . The ideal fifties women were to strive for was articulated by McCall's in 1954: togetherness… . And who was responsible ultimately for togetherness if not the wife?” (590, 591).

51. Guimond, , American Photography, 222 Google Scholar; on rituals, see 223.

52. CMW, 105.

53. Ibid., 109.

54. Ibid., 111.

55. Bednarowski, Mary Farrell, The Religious Imagination of American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 88 Google Scholar; CMW, 113, 115.

56. CMW, 111. See Guimond, , American Photography, 160–61Google Scholar, on Life's profile of Franklin, Indiana, titled “A Small Town's Saturday Night,” which focused on the activities of one farm family—dad's haircut, mom's shopping trip with the young children, the teenage daughter's date at the soda fountain—and town attractions such as the “new bowling alley” and the “lover's lane.” The pastoral, uncomplicated tone of the profile matches the cofounders’ wistful images of modern family life.

57. See Guimond, , American Photography, 169 Google Scholar, on an optimistic postwar photo essay titled “Dreams of 1946,” which featured women's and men's (material) dreams.

58. Grace Seiberling with Bloore, Carolyn, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 64 Google Scholar (emphases mine).

59. Indeed, even beyond life into the afterlife. Rudisill, , Mirror Image, 218–19, 223Google Scholar, reports that some nineteenth-century patrons of photographic studios expected the camera to generate, as part of the portrait, an image of distant or even departed loved ones.

60. The “contrasting images of hierarchy and network” are one way Carol Gilligan characterizes, respectively, male and female “thinking about moral conflict and choice”; see her classic study, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 33.

61. Northrup, Lesley A., “Claiming Horizontal Space: Women's Religious Rituals,” Studia Liturgica 25 (1995): 86–102 Google Scholar; Bednarowski, Religious Imagination, esp. chap. 4; see also Neu, Diann, “Women Revisioning Religious Rituals,” in Northrup, Women and Religious Ritual, 155–72.Google Scholar

62. As opposed to the “major streams of feminist ritual practice,” identified by Caron, Charlotte, To Make and Make Again: Feminist Ritual Thealogy (New York: Crossroad, 1993)Google Scholar: liberal Protestant feminists working from within their respective denominations; Women-Church, Rosemary Radford Reuther's predominantly Roman Catholic movement; goddess-worshipers; and participants in consciousness-raising groups. Cited in Northrup, “Claiming Horizontal Space,” 89.

63. Northrup, “Claiming Horizontal Space,” 87, 89, 91 (but cf. 91, where Northrup quotes Edward T. Hall on the differences between men's and women's visual impressions of the world).

64. Ibid., 93–99 (quote from 93).

65. Ibid., 93. Neu, “Women Revisioning,” 158–66, lists a series of nine quilt “patches” or “principles of feminist ritual-making” that correspond in many ways to Northrup's condensed set of four.

66. Unit leader Kathy Grunert, Huntersville, N.C., January 16, 2004; unit leader Kathy Grunert, via e-mail: see, for instance, February 10, 2004, May 12, 2006, and May 30, 2008; Northrup, “Claiming Horizontal Space,” 94.

67. Northrup, “Claiming Horizontal Space,” 98.

68. CMW, 10, 125, 136.

69. Chapter 8 of The Creative Memories Way is titled “Celebrating Life: Special Events and Everyday Moments”; Bednarowski, , Religious Imagination, 87 Google Scholar (see also chap. 4, “The Revelatory Power of the Ordinary and the Ordinariness of the Sacred”); CMW, 150 (see also chap. 12, “Signs of the Miraculous”), 149.

70. CMW 149, 152 (citing Os Hillman). Distortions of perspective may admittedly appear when the category of “miracle” opens so widely. In the cofounders’ story of album-maker Naomi Shedd, for example, Shedd recorded two “miracles” in one album: a friend's healing from cancer and Naomi's finding a lost receipt (154).

71. Ibid., 157; Bednarowski, Religious Imagination, chap. 2, “Ambivalence as a New Religious Virtue.” For a lovely example of renovation within tradition, see Bednarowski's discussion of the sixteenthcentury Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Religious Imagination, 86–87.

72. Northrup, “Claiming Horizontal Space,” 90, 102; Northrup, “Expanding the X-Axis,” 145. An instructive episode of tradition's fruitful coexistence with feminist innovation—the founding of the National Organization for Women—has received powerful recent treatment by Ann Braude, “Faith, Feminism, and History,” in The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, ed. Catherine A. Brekus (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 232–52. Another good example of this combination is treated in exemplary fashion in Marie Griffith, R., God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

73. The title for this section comes from CMW, chap. 1 (section subheading for pages 9–23).

74. Brereton, , From Sin to Salvation, 103 Google Scholar and chap. 8 passim.

75. Ibid., 18, xii.

76. On obligation, see ibid., 59; 3 (quote).

77. Ibid., 28. “Submerged” plots include the woman convert's empowerment (to speak publicly, to publish, to defy male authority); her freedom to give expression to “the period of rebellion and anger” that led up to the conversion; and her determination to grapple meaningfully with life's absurdity (30–34).

78. Ibid., 40.

79. [Gerbrandt, Michele], Scrapbooking Your Favorite Family Memories (Denver, Colo.: Memory Makers Books, 2003)Google Scholar; White, Tracy, ed., Encyclopedia of Scrapbooking (Little Rock: Leisure Arts, 2009)Google Scholar.

80. Quoted comments and information in this discussion from R., interview with the author, October 27, 2006.

81. Quoted comments and information in this discussion from E., interview with the author, October 21, 2006; and her daughter E., interview with the author, October 5, 2006.

82. Quoted comments and information in this discussion from C., interview with the author, October 12, 2006.

83. CMW, 143.

84. Quoted comments and information in this discussion from N., interview with the author, October 17, 2006.