Sprouting a Little Business Project

Hobbies are another avenue for potentially laying the foundations for a future career. If you spend time at a craft and get good at it, it's possible to transition that to paid work, though you will need to learn the business end of things. We could do more as a society for helping women value and monetize such skills.

I don't want to provide a link and put anyone in particular on the spot, but I periodically see discussions on Reddit where someone posts a thing and some of the comments indicate "I would buy that!" or "I would buy the pattern for making that!"

Typically the OP -- and it is usually a woman -- doesn't leap on it as a potential business opportunity. To them, making the thing is a hobby and sharing photos is another fun part of the hobby, but women routinely share things they are skilled at without pay and as a group also whine and cry about glass ceilings and typically blame misogyny instead of wondering what opportunities we are missing for developing a serious career and the kind of income you typically only get from a serious career.

Below is a couple of quoted sections from a piece I wrote elsewhere about the movie Out of Africa:

The clip suggests her story is quite lengthy and meaty. It shows that she really worked at being a good storyteller long before she ever thought of being a writer.

The clip ends with Denys telling her she is not indebted to him but he is to her and We pay our storytellers here and he gives her an expensive pen as payment. She tries to turn it down, saying "This is lovely, but my stories are free and your presence much too dear." He refuses to take the pen back and replies "Write them down sometime."...

If the movie is at all accurate, Denys Finch Hatton likely played a very large role in her personal development and did a lot to lay the groundwork for her to be able to pursue a paid career. Or even to be able to envision a career for herself as an author.

Had she not met him, we might not have ever heard of her.

The discussion I saw recently that inspired this post has commenters asking for a crochet pattern. I don't know how you would actually create a pattern, beta test it to make sure it makes sense to other people, price it, etc.

But I think you could probably start with telling people "If you are interested in seeing this become a pattern for sale, please contact me via x method. If x number of people say they would pay for this, I will start working on it and will look for beta testers from initial respondents." Or something like that.

I imagine you would then need to do some research on how to beta test, how to copyright it etc. If you're good enough to freehand something like the OP said they did in this case, you probably have some idea of what a pattern typically looks like and where to ask around for help with other pieces of the process.

This is my attempt to start the ball rolling on an Internet version of telling someone "We pay our storytellers" and "Write them down sometime."

If you're a married woman, odds are high you are several years younger than your husband and women live on average several years longer than men, so no matter how comfortable you are NOW because of his income, odds are extremely good you are currently on track to spend roughly the last DECADE of your life living in poverty.

Longer if it's a second marriage for him because the age difference tends to be bigger, but generally true in most cases. And then we pretend Mormons are weirdos and somehow OUR approach to marriage is fundamentally different when it's really NOT: 

MOST American women marry men older than them, get the lion's share of their income via marriage and outlive their husband. The result is that after following all the rules and being a good wife and blah blah blah blah blah, they spend their final years in poverty.

Guess who is the ONLY person who can give YOU a career of your own, sweetie?