The mysteries of life...and Mormon culture

David and I are proactively saving our marriage (before it has really begun) and are currently taking the church's 6 week course, Strengthening Marriage, which was organized by LDS Services and is taught by an old married couple in our stake. It really is a great class and if your stake offers it, I highly recommend it. It doesn't offer insights you might not have already made, but it does force you and your spouse to discuss things you might not have contemplated before.

During last week's lesson, entitled "Fostering Equality and Unity," our teachers gave us each a quiz on who should decide certain questions in the marriage like "What hobbies should the wife pursue?" or "How much time should each spouse spend pursuing hobbies or interests?" These two questions in particular raised the following exchange:

Me: "I think we both can decide our own interests, as long as it doesn't interfere with what needs to be done at home."

Lady Teacher: "What if you [meaning me, the woman] decide to take up scrapbooking? It can be a huge drain on finances and take up a lot of time."

David: "...."

Me: [looks at David] "I will never take up scrapbooking."

David: "Thank you."

I know there are people out there--people I call friends even--who enjoy scrapbooking and are quite good at it. But I don't get it. Well, I do get it: it's a creative and artistic outlet that allows you to document your memories with cute paper and random cutouts, stickers, and doodads. I tried it out once but was not very successful. Plus it takes forever. I'm still trying to find the patience to organize all my wedding photos so that I can slip them into the little plastic covers of the photo album I bought. Even that is proving to be too complicated for me. So why do so many women spend so much time and money on this particular hobby?

I read an article once that basically said that the popularity of scrapbooking is greatly attributable to Mormon women. Yay for us I guess. If there's one thing I love to investigate--and to mock--it's Mormon culture. What about our religion breeds the desire to spend hours agonizing over the layout of one page of a scrapbook, attending scrapbooking galas, and buying up papers, crazy cutouts, themed kits, and stamps to enhance a few photographs?

I'd really like to understand the allure of scrapbooking and why, as a Mormon woman, it's almost expected that I should be a scrapbooker. So, for the few who read this blog, and the even fewer who comment, why do you scrapbook? Why do you think it's so popular in the Mormon community besides as a way to "document family history"? And do you think the stereotypes surrounding the scrapbooking community are really fair?

One of my mentors at the Smithsonian, who is very interested in ephemera, wrote a book about scrapbooking. She suggested that scrapbooking is a new evolution of women's domestic work which, until the 20th century, mainly consisted of sewing and embroidery and odd little domestic crafts. (Check out Godey's Lady's Book or Ladies Home Journal from the latter half of the 19th century. I saw one how-to guide to make a hair pin holder using a dead lobster carcass. How's that for crafty? Martha Stewart has nothing on these ladies.) In a way, scrapbooking has replaced quilts has the means through which women tell the stories of their lives and to gather together for social purposes. But quilts always served a more utilitarian function (to keep one warm) but do scrapbooks have any functions beyond words and photographs on a piece of paper?

I feel a research project coming on...