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CRAFTY
She used to be on welfare.
Now, after just two weeks training,
she earns $12,000 a year
by painting wooden buttons
that will be sold to companies
such as Ralph Lauren and Esprit.
She belongs to The Watermark
Association of Artisans, a member-owned
crafts collective in
Camden, North Carolina, which
has pumped 9 million dollars
into the local rural economy
over the past 12 years.
Formed in 1978 as a looselyknit
group of artisans, Watermark
has evolved into a dynamic
wholesaling force composed
of 740 members. Under the
leadership of Carolyn McKecuen,
manager since 1981, the
collective has aggressively marketed
their crafts through an
array of innovative channelsretail
stores, design houses, catalogs,
trade shows, cable TV,
SOLUTIONS
foreign distributors—becoming
Camden's largest employer.
In 1987, the group formed a
non-profit, parallel organization
to train low- and middle-income
area residents to work within the
craft industry. "Some of these
women didn't graduate from
high school, and all of a sudden
they're selling things to the
Smithsonian catalog, making
money and teaching others to
do the same thing," McKecuen
explains. The two-week training
program has served over 14,000
Americans in the past six years,
and its comprehensive internship
program has taught visitors
from Canada, Ireland, Hungary,
Somalia, Tanzania, Ecuador, and
Peru the business and management
skills needed to start cooperative
home-based industries in
their regions.
With a few days of training,
Cheers for a California Court
one can start producing such
items as baskets, dolls or quilted
goods. Quickly learned skills
allow members to generate
income almost immediately,
and give Watermark the work
force to produce the quantities
needed by major customers.
All work is done at home, so
women can adjust their work
schedules to family obligations.
The collective also offers social
counseling services to women
in need, and operates a loan
fund. These services haven't
limited Watermark's growth
(sales have increased 1370%
since 1980), but they do inhibit
profit. "We're not here so the
members can make a huge
profit at the end of the year,"
asserts McKecuen, "but so that
they can make enough during
the year to pay the bills."
—SUZANNE LEVINE
In the Irvine California Unified School District, you used to need a 2.5 grade-point average to stay on
the cheerleading squad, but only a 2.0 to stay on the football team. When Melissa Fontes was thrown
off the cheer squad for letting her grades slip, she sued. A district court first ruled against her on the
grounds that cheerleading was "extracurricular" as opposed to "athletic." But this past July, an appellate
court threw the school a hardball. "The distinction between cheerleading and interscholastic athletics
flunks the rational basis test," Justice David Sills noted in his decision. "Aficionados would no
doubt assert that their own sport entails occult mysteries worthy of a Ph.D. thesis...nevertheless...
cheerleading is not so much less intellectually challenging than football or basketball that the latter
two can be said to be 'academic' while cheerleading is not."
—HARRIET BAROVICK
Paglia
on Paglia
In the spot usually reserved for a
bibliography, Camille Paglia's
new collection of essays, Vamps
& Tramps, offers up a 50-page
annotated "Media Chronicle."
Here, as in her first collection,
Sex, Art, and American Culture
(1992), Paglia records her
media battles with "establishment
feminists," her brazen
invective against campus speech
codes and academic careerism,
and her hit parade of controversial
lectures. She repeats her
throwaway one-liners and sassy
observations. She excerpts generously
from articles about her,
pro and con. She points out
cameo roles she's had in news
stories about other celebrities.
And—no small feat—she establishes
her supremacy in the art
of roll call criticism with soundbites
on Faludi, Gilbert, Cubar,
Millett, Morgan, Sontag,
Steinem, Wolf, and others.
Make no mistake: Paglia's
combative, scratch-and-sniff
romp through her media
appearances is a bibliography.
Traditionally (and usefully), bibliographies
document an
author's breadth of book-learning,
present source material to
eager readers, and line up the
intellectual forbears who may
or may not have been knocked
down along the way. They provide
context and a terse history
of the ideas at play. So it's no
surprise that Paglia has replaced
it here
ON THE ISSUES published
this powerful image by
artist and breast-cancer
survivor Matuschka on the
cover of our Winter 1992
issue. Reader response was
so positive that we used
that cover in subscription
sales efforts. Since
imitation is the sincerest
form of flattery, we were
pleased when The New
York Times Magazine later
ran the same image. But it
was disturbing to read
that the editors of Working
Woman magazine, who
had planned to run the
same cover this fall, were
forced to pull it at the last
minute because publishing
execs were afraid it would
be a "downer." Yes,
breast cancer is a downer.
But celebrating the body
beautiful after a
mastectomy is not!
the traditional paean to manifest
scholarship with one that
frankly acknowledges manifest
destiny: publicity. It's her slant
on academe's "publish or perish"
credo. Paglia may be an
opportunistic naysayer, a performance
intellectual, and a
podium star, but her Nexus-listing-cum-bibliography
makes
amply clear she knows how to
register on the sound sytem we
call public debate, -NINA MEHTA
ON THE ISSUES WINTER 1995