I’m planning on canning homemade jam this holiday season, swept
up in the same DIY zeitgeist that seems to have carried off half my
female friends. I picked and froze the berries this summer, and
I’ve been squirreling away flats of Ball jars under my kitchen sink
for months. For recipes, I’m poring over my favorite food and
homemaking blogs — the ones with pictures of young women in
handmade vintage-style aprons and charmingly overexposed photos of
steamy pies on windowsills.

“That’s neat,” says my mother, as I babble to her about pectin
and jar sterilization. She’s responding in the same tone of benign
disinterest she would have used had I informed her that I was
learning Catalan or taking up emu husbandry.

My baby boomer mother does not can jam. Or bake bread. Or knit.
Or sew. Nor did my grandmother, a 1960s housewife of the
cigarette-in-one-hand-cocktail-in-the-other variety, who saw
convenience food as a liberation from her immigrant mother’s
domestic burdens. Her idea of a fancy holiday treat was imported
lobster strudel from the gourmet market.

My, how things have changed.

My grandmother died nearly a decade ago, but I can imagine how
puzzled she’d be to behold my generation’s newfound mania for
old-fashioned domestic work. Around the country, women my age (I’m
29), the daughters and granddaughters of the post-Betty Friedan
feminists, are embracing the very homemaking activities our mothers
and grandmothers so eagerly shucked off. We’re heading back to
jam-canning and knitting needles, both for fun and for a greater
sense of control over what we eat and wear.

But in an era when women still do the majority of the housework
and earn far less of the money, “reclaiming” domesticity is about
more than homemade holiday treats. Could this “new domesticity”
start to look like old-fashioned obligation?

Jam-canning is just a tiny facet of our domesticity craze. Sales
of home canning supplies have risen 35 percent in the past three
years, and sales of the “Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving” (the
bible of home canning) have doubled over just the past year,
according to the company. There’s the knitting resurgence, the
homemade cleaning supplies made using white vinegar, the homemaker
blogs. Then there’s all the “Little House on the Prairie” stuff,
with its shades of ’70s hippie back-to-the-landism — the
beekeeping, the cheesemaking, the urban chickens. When the magazine
Backyard Poultry came out with its first issue almost six years
ago, it printed 15,000 copies. Today, it prints 113,000.

The shelves at Barnes and Noble are overflowing with how-to
guides to sewing and yogurt-making and rooftop vegetable gardening,
more philosophical books about “urban homesteading” and “radical
home economics,” and memoirs by women who quit their corporate
careers to raise sheep or home-school their kids (the number of
home-schooled children went up from 850,000 in 1999 to 1.5 million
in 2007, according to the most recent official estimate). The
“career girl gone Green Acres” story is to the 2010s what chick lit
was to the 1990s, a fantasy for a certain demographic of educated
(though not necessarily wealthy) young women; today they’re
concerned with sustainability, good food and conscious living.

At one level, this stuff is just plain fun. “Sometimes a can of
jam is just a can of jam,” as Freud (never) said. Our
tech-saturated generation craves creative hands-on activities, and
nostalgic hobbies such as canning, knitting and baking fit the
bill. We’ve realized that just because something was historically
devalued as “women’s work” doesn’t mean we have to shun it to be
taken seriously in the world. Plenty of young men are embracing
their domestic sides, too. My husband bakes a mean blueberry pie,
and nobody considers him less the man for it.

But lately, many women (and a few men) are diving into
domesticity with a sense of moral purpose. The homemade jar of jam
becomes a symbol of resistance to industrial food and its
environment-defiling ways. This view has been brewing for a while,
a thick stew of Slow Food and locavorism and DIY brought to a boil
by recession and anxiety. Suddenly, learning the old-fashioned
skills of our great-grandmothers seems not just fun, but necessary
and even virtuous.

“This was initially about being frugal and concerned with what I
put in my body,” says Kate Payne, 30, the Austin-based author of
“The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking” and something of a guru on the
new-domesticity scene. “But it became about the politics. … Am I
going to buy cheap crap, or am I going to do this stuff
myself?”

I recently had the chance to spend some time with Megan Paska, a
31-year-old Brooklynite whose pixie-cut hair and inked-up biceps
make her look like she should be fronting an indie rock band. But
Paska’s daily life more closely resembles a 19th-century farm
wife’s: soaking beans for stews, feeding her backyard chickens and
rabbits, drying herbs, baking bread, keeping bees on her apartment
roof. Her frugal, home-based life allowed her to leave a desk job
she disliked; she now lives on $1,000 a month earned by teaching
classes on DIY urban food production and writing about beekeeping
and other pre-industrial skills.

A few years ago, her friends thought she was nuts. Now, with the
economy stagnating and career disillusionment growing, they all
want to imitate her. (Though her boyfriend, an IT guy, is not so
sure.)

Most of the urban homesteaders Paska knows are female. “Women
find this lifestyle very empowering,” she says. “Some people assume
that this is a backlash against the feminist movement, but I see it
as a continuation of it.”

In the past couple of years, a slew of hipster home-ec books has
arrived to fill us in on lost domestic skills, recasting housework
as scrappy, anti-establishment self-fulfillment. In addition to
Payne’s “Hip Girl’s Guide,” there’s Raleigh Briggs’ “Make Your
Place,” Bust Magazine’s “The Bust DIY Guide to Life,” Kelly Coyne
and Erik Knutzen’s “Making It: Radical Home-Ec for a Post-Consumer
World” and Shannon Hayes’s “Radical Homemakers.”

In one such book — “How to Sew a Button: And Other Nifty Things
Your Grandmother Knew” — writer Erin Bried recalls serving her
dinner party guests a homemade “rhubarb” pie accidentally made with
look-alike Swiss chard. One might chalk this up as a simple goof
(hey, they’ve both got red stems!), but Bried sees her mistake as
something much more serious:

“When did I lose my ability to take care of myself? … What is
simultaneously comforting and alarming about my domestic
incompetence is that I am hardly alone. I’m joined by millions of
women, Gen Xers and Gen Yers, who either have consciously rejected
household endeavors in favor of career or, even more likely, were
simply raised in the ultimate age of convenience and
consumerism.”

This vision of what it means for a woman to take care of herself
is either radically new or incredibly retro. Bried is a senior
editor at a major national magazine, yet she’s framing her ability
to take care of herself around her ability to bake a pie.

Clearly, knowing how to cook (or knit, or garden) is good and
useful. Some of us — myself included — find it enjoyable. But is it
a moral and environmental necessity? Is it not good enough that I
earn the cash to buy the jam — or the pie, or the loaf of bread, or
the scarf? Do I really need to be able to can the jam myself? And
if we’re raising the stakes on domestic expectations, we have to
ask: Who’s doing the extra labor, men or women?

Many champions of the DIY movement explicitly say that domestic
work shouldn’t be about gender. But I’ve also noticed a resurgence
of old-fashioned gender essentialism from some surprising sources.
I’ve lately been hearing things like “There’s just something
natural about women taking on the nurturing role in the home”
coming out of the mouths of women’s studies grads and Ivy League
Ph.Ds.

What used to be a reactionary right-wing view now passes as
almost progressive — stuff like “We’re biologically hard-wired to
do this” or “It makes evolutionary sense.” When you get too focused
on the word “natural” as it applies to food and clothing and
shampoo, it seems to become awfully tempting to apply it to
people.

Natural or not, women are still overwhelmingly viewed as the
guardians of family health and safety. And a growing number of
women whom I’ve spoken to genuinely think that “do it yourself” is
the best — perhaps the only — way to ensure their families’
well-being. This anxiety and the need to personally vet food and
other household items has been well-noted by scholars: A large part
of the return to domesticity among educated young women has to do
with “a reaction against a broken food system in America,” says
historian Marcie Cohen Ferris.

As a young stay-at-home mom in Pennsylvania recently told me,
“The only way to know what’s in your food is to make it yourself.”
A stay-at-home mom in Iowa said she wants to try home-schooling her
son because she’s worried about the school environment: the
cleaning supplies, the food in the cafeteria.

You could say these women are simply homemakers searching for a
purpose beyond driving carpool. As work-life balance scholar Joan
Williams tells me, extreme domesticity can be a refuge for educated
women who’ve left the workforce: “You’ve been trained your entire
life in a high-pressure, high-achievement atmosphere, and you need
somewhere to put that,” she says. “So you turn your household into
an arena for dazzling performance.”

But these extreme DIY-ers are also voicing a fear and
frustration that resonates with anyone who worries about
salmonella-tainted eggs or BPA in their kid’s sippy cup. Which is
to say, most of us. Their domesticity can be seen as an effort to
repair on an individual level what isn’t being fixed at a
governmental or societal one. Pro bono. Because, as important and
fulfilling as housework may be, it’s unpaid. And in a world where
college-educated women still earn, over the course of their
careers, about $713,000 less than college-educated men, that’s no
small thing.

Women like me are enjoying domestic projects again in large part
because they’re no longer a duty, but a choice. But how many moral
and environmental claims can we assign to domestic work before it
starts to feel, once more, like an obligation? If history is any
lesson, my just-for-fun jar of jam could turn into my daughter’s
chore, and from there all the way to my granddaughter’s
“liberating” lobster strudel. And as … delicious as that sounds,
it’s not really what I want on my holiday table in 2050.

Emily Matchar is a freelance culture writer whose work has
appeared in Salon, Gourmet and Outside, among other publications.
She is working on a book about “new domesticity.” This column
appeared first in the Washington Post.