{"id":4938,"date":"2014-09-01T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T13:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/?p=4938"},"modified":"2014-08-29T10:32:33","modified_gmt":"2014-08-29T14:32:33","slug":"jogging-macrame-and-mug-trees-a-70s-flashback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/2014\/09\/01\/jogging-macrame-and-mug-trees-a-70s-flashback\/","title":{"rendered":"Jogging, macram\u00e9 and mug trees: A \u201870s flashback"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week\u2019s post on Harvard College Library\u2019s zines collection looks at Part Two of a publication entitled It\u2019s a wonderful lifestyle: A seventies flashback<\/em> 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 \u2013 \u201870s products, lifestyles, crafts, sports, furniture, eating habit, appliances etc. \u2013 encyclopedic feels like the right adjective.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Strecker\u2019s aim is to show just how different the \u201870s were from her present moment in the early \u201890s, and she uses a quote by historian Carlo Ginzburg on the role of the historian to anchor her approach (see Image 2).<\/p>\n

\"Untitled-1\"\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\"Untitled-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Strecker begins by citing the results of a 1973 survey in Better Homes & Gardens<\/em> \u2013 a family-and-home-life magazine. \u00a0In answer to the question: \u201cWhat do you feel is the single greatest threat to family life in America today?\u201d 37% of respondents cited materialism, with only 18% choosing drugs and 4% war, crime or communism. Reflecting on the survey results, Strecker says: \u201cCan 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

This opening piece goes on to discuss the \u201cgrand themes\u201d of the \u201870s, such as a strong attraction for anything deemed \u201cnatural,\u2019\u2019 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 \u201calternative lifestyles\u201d; poverty chic; and voluntary simplicity.<\/p>\n

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 \u201860s) and where they were going: \u201cSomewhere in the course of the Seventies, \u201cmoney\u201d ceased to be a dirty word. A glib explanation would be to say that \u201ceverybody grew up,\u201d but it wasn\u2019t that simple\u2026When jobs got harder to find and inflation bled away the value of the dollar, bohemian nonchalance gave way to fear and frugality.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cAt Home in the Seventies,\u201d which focuses on how the \u201870s home was furnished: \u201cThe \u2018natural\u2019 look called for \u2018natural accessories\u2019 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 clich\u00e9: the narrow-necked little pottery vase that held exactly two dried flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Untitled-3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The second example comes from a piece entitled \u201cFoxfire & Whimmy-Diddles: Seventies crafts & hobbies.\u201d The grand theme here is nostalgia: \u201cThe hottest 70s crafts manuals helped people connect with the handicrafts of the nostalgic past.\u201d From hand-crafting wooden toys to embroidery to crocheting and pottery, anything reminiscent of \u201cthe folkways of Grandma\u2019s day\u201d was in. Although why macram\u00e9, a method of lace-making on a very large scale, became the signature craft of the \u201870s remains a mystery for the author, of one thing she is certain: from high-end macram\u00e9 artists using \u201cnatural\u201d materials to low-brow macram\u00e9 hobbyists using brightly-colored synthetic yarns, the macram\u00e9 was ubiquitous, especially in its most popular embodiment, the plant hanger.<\/p>\n

\"Untitled-4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The last example comes from a piece entitled \u201cHead Trips & Body Trips,\u201d 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 \u201860s baby-boomers\u2019 fear of losing the spotlight the previous decade had cast on youth culture.<\/p>\n

The most popular way to stay fit became jogging: \u201cToday, people just plain run, and \u201cjogging\u201d sounds hopelessly dated as \u201cdaddy-o\u201d or \u201c23-skidoo,\u201d but the word was needed at the time to differentiate fitness running from the kind a person did when being chased.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Untitled-5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although only Part Two of It\u2019s a Wonderful Lifestyle <\/em>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 \u201870s history and media. The last page also includes a notice about the Shangri-La, a Memphis store that contains the world\u2019s only \u201cSeventies Museum\u201d; and a bibliography.<\/p>\n

This is the eighth, and final, post contributed by Alina Lazar during her two months as a Harvard Library Pforzheimer Fellow. \u00a0Alina 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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week\u2019s post on Harvard College Library\u2019s zines collection looks at Part Two of a publication entitled It\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1761,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[64929],"tags":[128168,1235,119935],"class_list":["post-4938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-houghton-library","tag-american-studies","tag-crafts","tag-zines"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TUly-1hE","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1761"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4938"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4951,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4938\/revisions\/4951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}