Earlier this week in Bromley Heath, Bristol, hundreds of women queued to join a new branch of the Women's Institute. This is the kind of sentence, like "The clocks were striking thirteen", where each word is perfectly sensible but the implication is wild. A queue to join the WI! An organisation for the promotion of jam-making, founded during the first world war to boost productivity, is having a surge of popularity. Things must be bad.
But really, the idea that the WI is the face of 21st century sisterhood should be no surprise at all. The reason why the venerable institution has survived in an increasingly atomised age is because it is founded on an eternal truth: that doing stuff with other women feeds some atavistic communal urge, the sort of thing that made us gather round the fire tatting animal skins. It feels good. A lot of us like it.
It matters most of all when times are hard. The WI has always put a premium on making do and mending, and doing it with your friends and neighbours. But nothing is quite as it seems, starting with making do which, as branches like the Shoreditch Sisters have discovered, is just another way of describing vintage.
And then there's baking. Truly, when Mary Berry has become a style icon, the WI would have to be moribund not to make a killing. The Great British Bake Off has shown a whole new generation that skill and creativity are valuable even when they aren't paid for (although they do seem to be worth more if they win prizes. The world isn't perfect yet.)
But maybe what the queues outside the WI's new Bromley Heath branch really show is that, at last, it's OK to be a woman, in the sense that being a woman comfortably embraces Mary Berry, Sue Perkins and Ruby Tandoh. Womanhood – to risk the scathing wrath of some – can at last be self-defining. That may explain why the show annoyed so many men. The triumph of the art of baking marks not so much a breakout as a breakthrough. No compulsion to escape from the kitchen any more, because the kitchen itself is cool. Or hot, obviously.
It's been coming for a while. All those cooking shows. There've even been shows about housework. Housework! Hoovering and dusting and how to clean the bath. This can only be explained by the appeal of the unavailable. Now that most of us work out of the home most of the time, daily domesticity looks like some beguiling luxury. Oh, beware of what you wish for.
Yet once the daily chores are elevated into an art form, at least in television's terms, the people who always used to do them – that's us, women – have a new authority. It's not about fitting the old prescribed, age-appropriate roles relating to size and shape. It's not even about earning power. It's a kind of permission to be ourselves, and it reflects a different ordering of society that recognises the extent of female friendship.
And here comes the WI. The WI kept on trucking through the bad times when what happened at home didn't matter because it was all about being out there, consuming not creating, succeeding on your own, not on your own terms. Now its core value, that it's not about who you are, but what you can do, feels exactly right. Just like its appeal to community, to knowing your neighbours and having a good time together. Political parties used to do this stuff, you know.
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