GOOD MORNING WORLD
In this country of the pioneer spirit I came to wonder this morning where the term DIY – Do It Yourself – cam about. Didn’t we do for ourselves all the time. Well we peasants. The royalty or gentry had servants. Today some of our wealthier have ‘people’. The rest of us I believe did what we had to to keep our households functioning properly. I am thinking pilgrim and pioneer times here. While I know there were trades people I believe mostly services were bartered or swapped. Perhaps I made a great loaf of bread and John was a blacksmith and could shoe a horse. I give him bread for my horses shoes.
In my lifetime my mother made many of our clothes as cost savings. They were lovely and unique as well and I did not ever mind wearing ‘homemade’. My father painted the rooms in our house. My husband did all the maintenance on our cars. I papered and painted our homes and made the clothes, curtains and slipcovers for furniture. I did not occur to me to have someone do any of it. We could and it saved money. I do remember my dad saying how glad he was when he could afford to have someone paint the rooms in the house as he really did not like doing it. I can so relate to that. The first time we bought a brand new home all painted I was in heaven. Still we do it ourselves when we can, or more likely now when we want not that we have to, do a project.
So the big DIY push came when? Longer ago than you thought I bet. An article by the National Builders Museum says the term Do It Yourself was first used.
(1) The phrase “do-it-yourself” first appeared in an October 1912 article
in Suburban Life encouraging men to do their own interior painting instead of hiring professionals. Finishing projects – such as painting furniture, touching up trim, or varnishing floors – were often directed toward women, reinforcing the traditional female roles of decorating and maintaining the domestic realm.
The same article went on to say that returning GIs had a hand in the push as they came home and new home products became available for them to work around their home. The article also said later a desire to rehab older homes was an additional impetus to the DIY boon. It was not simply homes either DIY was becoming a hobby.
Wikipedia agreed the term had been around since 1912. They go on to say that in the 1970’s a catalog was created to foster this idea.
(2)In the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college- and recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes. But it also related to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the 1960s and early 1970s. The young visionary Stewart Brand, working with friends and family, and initially using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, published the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog (subtitled Access to Tools) in late 1968.
The first Catalog, and its successors, used a broad definition of the term “tools”. There were informational tools, such as books (often technical in nature), professional journals, courses, classes, and the like. There were specialized, designed items, such as carpenters‘ and masons‘ tools, garden tools, welding equipment,chainsaws, fiberglass materials and so on; even early personal computers. The designer J. Baldwin acted as editor to include such items, writing many of the reviews. The Catalog’s publication both emerged from and spurred the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and do-it-yourself attitude of the late 1960s. Often copied, the Catalog appealed to a wide cross-section of people in North America and had a broad influence.
This article went on to say that by the 1990’s DIY had hit the web.
An article I found from hlntv.com (3) says that now DIY is more popular than ever and sites are exploding on the web. I am certain that many reading this have been on ehow.com,diynetwrok.com or even pinterest.com. It is all out there for us today. I am not certain what you could NOT find out how to do on the web.
I needed nothing this morning. I simply gave myself a home perm and wondered where the term DIY came from in the beginning. Home Perms are another whole area of DIY. Have to admit they are a lot easier today and do not smell as bad as the old “‘Toni’s” of my youth when my mother was determined to make my straight hair have some curls – oh the pictures I could share! Blessedly I do not have to show any proof.
…..ONWARD TO MORE MISADVENTURE…
(1)http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions/diy.html
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself
(3) http://www.hlntv.com/article/2012/10/10/diy-blogs-do-it-yourself-making-it-america
ktsquared 