Wealth & Money Quote by Phyllis George

Phyllis George is doing something quietly radical here: she’s rescuing “crafts” from the cultural penalty box where they’re often filed as quaint, gendered, or merely decorative. Her intent isn’t to romanticize the past; it’s to argue that making things by hand is a serious technology of identity. “Rooted” and “belonging” are the key tells. She’s framing craft less as hobby and more as a social adhesive, a way people locate themselves when modern life makes place, community, and continuity feel optional or unstable.

The subtext rides on a sharp contrast: necessity versus choice. “Our ancestors used to create...out of necessity” acknowledges hardship and practicality, but it also grants craft a kind of ancestral legitimacy. Then she pivots: “now we do them for fun, to make money and to express ourselves.” That trio maps craft onto contemporary life: leisure culture (“fun”), the gig economy and monetized creativity (“make money”), and the modern hunger for authenticity (“express ourselves”). She’s saying: the economic function didn’t disappear; it mutated. The need moved from survival to meaning, from keeping warm to keeping coherent.

Context matters. George came of age in an America that increasingly swapped making for buying, domestic skill for convenience, local tradition for mass culture. Her line reads like a rebuttal to that drift, and a nod to the late-20th-century craft revival where handmade goods became both protest and product. It lands because it refuses the false choice between nostalgia and entrepreneurship: craft can be heritage, hustle, and selfhood in the same stitch.