I actually spoke with an old SCA member at ICON 2011 on just this topic; he had mentioned that there were 3rd and (he claimed) 4th generation SCA members, and I asked how SCA could endure like that.
Eventually we/him/one of us concluded that part of the explanation was that SCA had something for everyone - the guys could dig into the martial arts aspect while the women could dive into the dress-up (I mean, costumes? Outfits? Cosplay?) and cooking.
The word you're looking for is "garb".
Of course, there are men who make and wear elaborate garb (the idea that wanting to wear fancy clothes is unmasculine is a fairly recent innovation as far as I can tell), and women who fight.
The SCA doesn't exactly have something for everybody (for example, I have a strong preference for sf fandom), but it does have something for both those who want a costume party and those who want to do carefully researched recreation of period skills.
One advantage of recreating the good parts of a past society is that the...
The Society for Creative Anachronism started as a backyard graduation party for a medieval studies student and grew to 32,000 members as of 2008. Does anyone have any insight into how that happened? Of particular interest would be any intersection between the SCA's mode of growth and the usual modes of growth of religions (keeping in mind that not every intersection would be worth incorporating into a strategy for raising the sanity waterline by spreading LW-style ideas and approaches).