Discover Your Feminist Voice Through Scrapbooking

9 PM Resource - International Scrapbook Day 🎨

As we continue to celebrate International Scrapbook Day, let’s take a moment to reflect on the deeper significance of our craft. Scrapbooking about preserving memories, telling stories, and connecting with the world around us; it's also a powerful tool for self-expression and personal discovery. Tonight, we delve into how scrapbooking helps us explore and define the type of feminists we are and the values that are important to us.

My favorite part of scrapbooking is telling stories. I love to create replicas of my favorite moments; whether they're everyday stories or bigger adventures. I like telling stories¹ and I love being a storyteller.

It's important that everyone knows they have the power to be their own storyteller. You are allowed to tell your story in any which way you want. I believe that you are a storyteller. No matter who else is in your story -- kids, spouse, family, friends, pets, fictional characters, etc -- when you're telling the stories, you are a big part of the story. There is no omniscience narrator of life and scrapbook pages.

In our patriarchal society, we’re constantly telling women that they should take up less space. If you’re going to be a scrapbooker, you’re going to have to take up space with your supplies, your finished albums, and all the stories that you will have made into tangible, physical, objects. You have to be okay with the idea of taking up space with your own stuff. It’s a direct lesson in being kind to yourself, and understanding your worth.

Even more than taking up space — I think that feminism and scrapbooking are intertwined in three very specific ways.

The Idea That Your Story is Valuable

You are enough. You don't have to be someone's mom, daughter, sister, or anyone's anything in order for your story to be important to this world. Your story matters.

Agency Over Your Own Story

You decide what stories to tell. You decide how to share, what to share, and the ways in which you share it with the world. When you're scrapbooking those stories, not only are you using words, but you're also playing with photography and all of your favorite paper supplies. The possibilities for you to express yourself are so much cooler.

It's Intersectional

Intersectionality is a term coined by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980's to describe the 'intersection' of characteristics like gender, race, class, location, ability, etc.

Feminist Scrapbooking asks you to look at your stories through an intersectional lens.

One of my personal favorite quotes about feminism fits perfectly into our feminist scrapbooking definition.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.

— Virginia Woolf

As long as you’re telling the truth about your life, you’re a feminist.

If you’re taking physical scraps of your life, whether it be photos, journaling, memorabilia, pretty paper, artwork, or anything else, and putting that together into a book/album, you’re a feminist scrapbooker.

Photo by Viola Kovács on Unsplash

By scrapbooking our experiences and the world around us, we engage in a form of storytelling that is inherently feminist.

We claim space for our stories and make our voices heard. It’s a celebration of our identity and a reaffirmation of our beliefs in equality and justice.

If you’re looking to hang out with some like-minded feminist women and tell your stories with pictures, words, supplies, and the bits of life we pick up along the way — join us over at my Feminist Scrapbook School. We’re your people.

Additional Feminism + Scrapbooking Posts

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Share your thoughts about feminism + scrapbooking here in our Substack chat, over in the ALP community, or by tagging us on social media and let’s inspire each other.

Can’t wait to see what we all think!

xoxo,

Kristin

1. I also love consuming stories. TV is my favorite medium for the most part. I get so many of my story and scrapbook ideas from TV.