More to the point, am I a radical homemaker?
I mean, okay.
Family well-being. Home with kids. Check.
Environmental sustainability. I use a clothesline. Check.
Community engagement and social justice. Well, I try to be nice to people, and my children say "please" and "thank you." Check?
Actually, I did quit the last steady job I had about thirteen years ago. At the time, I thought it was because I was going insane trying to grade papers with a toddler in the room, and because the teaching was crowding out the writing. Something had to give, and it wasn't the toddler or the poetry. I did not quit my job for the express purposes of growing tomatoes, canning green beans, or saving the planet; currently I have the tomatoes and the green beans, though I'm giving myself permission not to can anything if I don't want to, which is a prerogative you have when you don't especially think of yourself as part of a movement, with a prescribed paradigm, but as a person trying to live a decent life with other people to whom she has become attached. This, I suppose, is what is meant by "money losing power to relationships," though I'd never quite thought to put it that way before.
I was bemused, I have to say, by this confession of "Radical Homemaker Failure." I mean, on the one hand, yeah. However you happen to dress it up, ideologically speaking, domestic work is still work, and it's not always that much fun. Well, let me rephrase that: self-deprivation is not fun, which is why the first thing serious frugality experts will tell you is that you cannot set yourself up to feel deprived.
Which is what seems to be at the heart of this case of homemaker failure. It's not just that finding a coffee table is a drag; it's that the coffee table you really want is right there at Crate and Barrel, for $400, and whatever you find on Craigslist is a paltry substitute for that. It's not just that you drive a cheap little car, but that everyone else you know drives an SUV. It's not that you have a cruddy rental kitchen, but that your friends have Viking ranges. In other words, it's not (entirely) that your life is objectively inferior in quality, but that comparisons, as they say, are odious.
So I don't know that "failure" is the right word. I can call myself a "failure" at sewing, for example, but the truth is that I just don't want to sew -- except when I do. Crispina and I, together, made a lovely little dolly a few weeks back for a friend's birthday, all hand-sewn out of scraps we had lying around. Crispina drew on a smiling face, and I embroidered it, and Aelred remarked that we ought to go into business making dolls. So, obviously I can not fail at sewing when it really matters to me to sew something. I just don't happen to want to do it very often, which is far more true than saying, as I sometimes do, that I'm one of those bad mothers who can't sew.
As a general rule I'm suspicious of the whole "choice" trope -- my choices, your choices, we all respect each other's choices -- but the fact of the matter is that we do have to choose our way forward, and one kind of choice, at any turning, trumps another. I didn't take on homemaking to make some kind of statement, but because having the time to spend with my children while they're young and having the freedom to write meant more to me than cars and appliances and coffee tables. That choice, for those reasons, makes the cooking and the laundry easier to bear. They're the dues I pay -- the domestic equivalent of filing and meetings -- for the privileges I have, all of which seems a lot less radical than simply real.
It's late, and I'd like to think more about this, but not now.
H/T
45 comments:
I love your posts, Sally. I, too, need to give this some thought. I am radical in that I really try to grab this at its roots. But being a homemaker doesnt mean doing a lot of grunt HOUSE work. Just like being a businessman doesnt mean you are necessarily making the widgets or sweeping up under the widget machines. You are thinking and shaping and developing and making a culture that is your business or HOME. But again, must think a bit more. Time for bed. I think best with eyes closed. xxoxo M
I very unfrugally purchased Shannon Hayes's book from Amazon a few months ago. I got about halfway through it and then left it in my shopping cart at Price Chopper by mistake. It might have been a Freudian slip, because, though I was hoping to be inspired by the book, I found it very tedious.
It seemed to me that Hayes's premise is based upon a shared partnership in homemaking. The wives she interviewed, and she herself, are all partnered with husbands who take on a volume of domestic work that most men with jobs do not (in fact, according to Hayes's acknowledgments, her husband does the cooking, the cleaning, and the homeschooling too, and ramped it all up while she was driving around doing research for her self-published book). It seems to me the only way this kind of venture could work would be if agreements about chores and tasks were hammered out in advance.
M (lovely to see you!), I think what you say about creating a culture is spot on, and that's much more how I think about things, than that I'm trying to make some statement to the larger culture by my own life choices. I suppose that happens to some extent, but to think of yourself as a cultural movement in an external sense is, I think, putting the cart ahead of the horse, and/or directing your mental energy in a way that's ultimately going to frustrate you, the larger culture being generally a less rewarding recipient of your labors than your own family.
P: that's a hilarious anecdote. I've actually been thinking that this might be an interesting book for . . . I hate to admit that I've joined a book group after being such a loser member of RFB, but my friend K here wanted to have a faculty-wives' reading group, and the rule is that it doesn't matter if you actually read the book, you just have to come and talk, so I can kind of manage that.
Anyway, I was thinking it might be fun to chew on for a group of women who are educated and interesting and all in the same "so my husband got a Ph.d" boat as the author of that Salon article (fortunately we don't all live in Southern California in a housing bubble).
But your observation about the role of men is interesting. I do actually know a number of families who do this off-the-land, self-sustaining thing to one extent or another, and what's always struck me is that what makes it work is that the husbands are able and willing to do the heavy manual labor: building the raised vegetable gardens and chicken coops, splitting the wood, and so on. Some of them cook; most of them are willing to do cleaning, dishes, etc. But their main contributions (aside from whatever actual paying jobs they have) are the ones that depend on their physical strength, not to mention their willingness and availability to do these heavy jobs for their wives. A guy with a new Ph.d and a 4/4 courseload doesn't have that much time for that kind of thing, even if he's good at it . . .
In those families, the children also contribute a lot to the running of the family enterprise, and that's part of their education. Success also largely depends on having children old enough to do real work -- some friends of ours with little children just moved from a rural area to the suburbs, because as the wife said, with three children under 5, the whole "children do the garden, children gather the eggs" vision does become "Mom does the garden, Mom gathers the eggs -- and does everything else, while nursing the baby."
Even my most agrarian friends weren't all that agrarian while their children were babies . . . at least while all they had were babies and toddlers.
I've been entirely lame on RFP too, though it was my idea. I am terrible at book clubs. I think I'm like my son -- "trouble following directions." An in-real-life group probably would work better for me, too. I would love to know about your discussions if your group chooses the book.
If you do read the book, you'll find that one of Shannon Hayes's overarching goals is the expansion of a kind of social activism that doesn't have a lot in common with, say, Catholic social teaching. She talks about feminism a lot, but it's interesting that, as you note about your friends, Sally, the feasibility of this lifestyle is dependent upon an essentialist division of men's and women's labor. Hayes goes a step further to suggest that its real success is based on men's willingness to bend their gender-defined work roles, as her husband apparently has. I'd be interested to see how it plays out in women's studies circles . . .
Yes, I was just thinking about this while out weeding the garden (less virtuous than it sounds: I haven't done it in months, but the wax beans are done, and the whole thing is a mess, so I had to rip some stuff out).
It does seem to me that what's at the root of all this (and thanks to M for the reminder that "radical" does mean "to do with roots") is a notion of work, and of trying to justify a certain kind of work as certifiably feminist, ie personally fulfilling in the way that the feminist narrative imagines that men's work has always been. If work, qua work, isn't personally fulfilling and empowering, then it isn't justifiable work. It's just . . . slavery.
So, having discovered that a lot of work-for-money -- the same kind of work most of our dads did because they had to -- amounts to "slavery" ("slavery" meaning, in this instance, anything we don't actively choose to do and enjoy doing at every minute; or anything which does not grant us power over other people and/or over our own circumstances), we go looking for some other source of empowerment and freedom, via the lifestyles of our foremothers, whom we were wont to view as so oppressed, until we realized that they didn't have to do any boring filing or eat antibiotic-fed beef.
And then it turns out that the foremother thing is a lot of work, too, and it gets boring and we wish we were someplace else.
I was also thinking about the need to establish ideological creds, because that seems like such a driving force in any kind of para-religious movement: feminism, environmentalism, etc. As soon as I say, "Well, I'm green; I have a clothesline," somebody else can come along and remind me that I also drive a 12-passenger van, which isn't green, which makes me a lame pretender, which I should feel guilty about. Or I can say, "Well, I'm a radical homemaker; I'm Superwoman in the following domestic ways . . . ," at which point somebody could say, "If you have to shop at Aldi, you're not trying hard enough. Wimp."
And the revelation that I had about all this, while I was weeding, is that ideology is religion -- with laws and mortal sins -- without any concept of grace. It's a win-or-lose proposition. You either are or you aren't, and if you aren't, well, darn you to some non-existent heck for the rotten lazy capitalist planet-wrecking person-oppressing slob that you are. Which is why this kind of thing stresses people out so much.
I also kind of have to smile at your characterization of Shannon Hayes. Looks like her husband's the radical homemaker, only he's too busy actually radically home-making to write a book.
And "trouble following directions" pretty much sums up every person in my entire household, with the possible exception of Amicus, who thrives on having a set of instructions to follow. The rest of us, not so much.
I should also add -- talking to myself here, dum de dum -- that although I'm not in sympathy with the feminist-justification act, I am largely in sympathy with the impulse towards this kind of lifestyle, as a sane option to consumer gimme-ism.
However, when the lifestyle itself starts to drive a person insane, that is when she ought to step back and examine why she's doing what she's doing . . . and probably ask whether there's some deeper reason for embracing certain practices or sacrifices, beyond social activism.
It seems to me that without a sense of grace -- not graciousness, but grace as in, someone else continually takes care of the fact that I can't possibly save the world or myself or anything, no matter what I do -- then any endeavor is going to run up against its own futility eventually.
It seems that the lifestyle drove even Shannon Hayes insane; see this page on her site.
http://www.shannonhayes.info/homespun_mom_comes_unraveled_63638.htm
I'm sorry if this doesn't come through as a link; I don't know how to do that . . .
Interesting. And kind of sad, though also an epiphany in humility, which is always a good thing.
The idea that you're going to 1)put your family first while 2)refusing any kind of help or convenience which would save you from continual labor seems contradictory, to put it mildly. How are you helping your children by never having time to relax with them -- by choice and on principle?
Self-sufficiency has its limits as a positive impulse: its dark side is presumption and the kind of hubris that can't let you let things slide . . . except the meat drippings in the fridge and the laundry that's never put away. If your principles result in disorder everywhere you look, maybe it's time to reexamine them just a little.
And I'm all too prone to the same things -- I happen to be feeling sanguine because this week the laundry *is* under control. Haven't looked in the produce drawer lately, however. And I'm drawn to the wooden toy over the plastic and all that, except that then we wouldn't have Legos and Playmobil (and my kids have had hours of imaginative fun with tiny plastic animals -- made in China, I'm sure -- from Dollar Tree).
I can remember fantasizing, early in our marriage, about having an organic farm and raising livestock, to which my husband responded, "But you're not a farmer. You're a WRITER." And there's some truth to that, too. You can only live so many lives at one time . . .
My experience as part of an attachment-parenting group in NYC cannot be compared to hers as a puritanically ideological "radical homemaker" and farmer chick. But one thing strikes me about both -- the pride, the smugness even. At least Shannon Hayes is willing to show her cracks a little.
True enough. It takes some guts to begin to confront the unintended consequences of your utopian impulse.
I keep thinking of this book I read back in grad school -- Utopics: blah blah blah play blah blah blah spaces -- the essential thrust of which is that a utopian vision acted upon inevitably, and with breathtaking speed, hardens into an enslaving ideology. I've written about this with regard to unschooling, but I think it applies here, too.
She is being honest about the ways in which her utopianism has resulted in her own enslavement -- it all actually seems kind of self-annihilating, rather than merely self-mortifying (and of course there's a huge difference between the two, there being some actual good in mortification).
Of course, all this is *after* she's unleashed a book pushing this utopianism on other women . . . who then, like the woman in the Salon article, feel like failures because they can't/don't want to do it all.
It is hard to get past phrases like "an authentic life."
And in an unschooling group I once belonged to, I remember another mother's saying, in response to a local case in which a father had forgotten his baby in the car and the baby had died of heat exhaustion, that these parents must not have been attachment parents, because things like that would never happen to AP-ers.
It seems to me that it's human nature to make assumptions about the players in a tragedy, so as to keep it at arm's length. Surely that father wasn't an attachment parent, but I am; ergo, surely that tragedy -- surely no tragedy -- will every befall me or my children. People practice utopics (I'm liking that word!) as a talisman -- I think you're right about the phrase "the authentic life" being a clue to this magical thinking. Because I did dissertation research on nineteenth-century Britain, I thought a lot about the "authentic life" sought by many of those I studied - painters and poets and reformers (this all *was* connected to music, in a complicated sort of way). Oh, yes, also being a red diaper grandbaby makes one ponder these subjects too. (Even listening to early Bob Dylan will do it to you, but so will listening to Frederick Delius.) Anyway, the impulse to live an "authentic life" is always a response to whatever is soul-killing in our culture, and there have been these things throughout the modern age; but to do it by "refusing help" is neurotic and to do it as a couple is a folie à deux.
Oh, by the way, in Shannon Hayes's defense, I'm pretty sure that essay was published a few years before she published "Radical Homemakers."
Ah, thanks for the correction. I wasn't looking carefully at the dates. But then that raises the question, and it's not a rhetorical one: does she deal straightforwardly with this kind of burnout in her book? Or is it all just empowerment through home canning?
Talisman is a good word here, I think. Utopianism is meant as a kind of innoculation against whatever the evils of a society are understood to be -- if we live this way, we (and our children) will develop cultural immunity and rise above all the ick.
Have you ever read Jane Smiley's novella Good Will? That pretty much nixed whatever incipient agrarian utopianism I might have had . . .
Though what neither that novella, as far as I recall, nor what I understand of this Radical Homemaker thing, gets right is that evil isn't just inherent in your BP, or your Wal-Mart, or your (your favorite reviled presidential administration here), and you don't avoid it by avoiding contact with those unclean things. That's where all the -isms really break on the rocks -- either you confront original sin and go forward, or something has to implode.
I suppose the jettisoning of original sin is at the root of why all utopian movements either crash and burn or morph into authoritarian ideologies.
I didn't get far enough in the book to know if she addresses radical homemaker burnout, but from what I read I'm guessing that she didn't give it a lot of place. The whole first half is an overlabored analysis of the consumerist culture to which she posits her movement in reaction. I think the second half, which I hadn't gotten to before I left my book at the supermarket, is testimony from RH's.
Chiming in late (I'm on vacation) to add that the enslavement, it seems to me, comes when you start to put the cart of labels before the horse of goals. You start out wanting to teach your children, say, or feed your family better, and you use that goal as the grounds for deciding which actions to take. Pretty soon you've taken a bunch of actions that you can group together under a label such as "radical homemaking." Next thing you know, you're deciding what to do not on the basis of whether it fulfills the goal you had, but whether it's required by the label.
My husband calls this sort of labels "abstract virtue."
I think you're right, Anne-Marie. I was also thinking that these utopian impulses generally involve physical responses to what are ultimately metaphysical questions and problems -- if you just *do* right actions, and avoid wrong things (ie plastic, Wal-Mart), then you will be a better person living a better life, and the world will be a better place, which is nice to think but ultimately untrue, and also leaves you with no mechanism for seeing grace in the things you can't control -- for example, despite your avoidance of Disney movies, your daughter still wants to be a Disney princess. Is the project not working? Is the answer a more strenuous avoidance of Disney movies and people who go to them and might mention them to your child? More vigilance, night and day, against the creeping influence of Disney?
I dunno. I was also thinking of the effects of this kind of absolutist life on children. It's one thing to be frugal and grow vegetables because you're trying to live on one income, so that you can be present in your children's lives all day long, but when it becomes this kind of machinery . . . It all makes me think of the parents who say that their children don't eat sugar, but every time you see them at a party, the kids are shoveling candy into their pockets and hiding in the bathroom to wolf it down before someone catches them. What you think is going on and what your children think is going on are often radically different things.
I was also interested to note that in the "Homespun Mom Comes Unglued" essay, as she was describing the things she and her husband give time to, vs the things they let slide, the things that are privileged are largely commodities: the meat they sell, and the work that goes into producing it, wins over order in the household, which seems to have little value in their family economy. And I wonder about that.
Not that neatness, in and of itself, is necessarily a virtue (it's certainly not a virtue which comes naturally to me), but from one of the examens I use for Confession I learned that slovenliness can be as much a manifestation of vanity as uber-neatness, if you take pride in what your slovenliness says about you ("I am not a superficial person, obsessed with that no-wax shine on my floors!"). And I am chewing on the idea that "radical homemaking," for all the emphasis on a good life, might still really devalue the ordering of a home, so that it's pleasant to live in, and that it might devalue that ordering because there's no money involved. You can't sell folded laundry to sustain your family. You just do fold it, because it's nice to have a)folded clothes, and b)a couch for people, and not laundry, to sit on, and those are gifts, not purchases.
P.S. The only reason laundry is under control at my house right now is that I culled out the younger three children's clothes, so that each one has exactly a week's worth and no more. We'd had so many hand-me-downs that they were exploding out of drawers and carpeting the floors, and I hadn't been able to make myself just choose a few outfits, because they were all so cute. But finally I did, and now those children own only what will fit in a laundry basket in the downstairs hall, where I can easily sort things.
And now they just dress themselves out of the laundry baskets, and their dressers function as tabletops, and all of that is fine with me, because they can find their clothes AND we can sit on the couch.
Sally, your laundry solution is pure genius! I need to go buy seven laundry baskets!
No, actually what I need to do is purge my children's clothes down to one week's worth. There it is again--seven baskets, whether evil plastic or virtuous natural wicker, are the physical solution to what is really a metaphysical problem of lack of discipline (in owning and in putting away).
I have become more and more convinced of the importance of order in making a peaceful, welcoming, cosy, happy home. Cheryl Mendelsohn's book "Home Comforts" makes the point also.
Home Comforts is an awesome book.
It would be interesting to read both these books -- RH and HC -- in juxtaposition. There's another book on homemaking (I think it might in fact be called Homemaking), of which I've read about half and have kept meaning to finish. It's by a woman who I think is maybe a Presbyterian minister, and it deals with the sacramental nature of domestic work and ritual. Another M-friend who sometimes comments here sent it to me ages ago, and I really liked the bit of it that I read.
Anne-Marie: My baskets are evil plastic from the evil dollar store. I have had authentic wicker baskets for all kinds of purposes, but my experience is that they tend to shatter by slow degrees into annoying little bits and pieces. Up with that I do not feel like putting.
My ultimate vision is that people will carry the baskets upstairs and put the clothing away nicely in their drawers (actually, my ultimate vision is that they'll all do their own laundry, as my eldest currently does, though that's not without its problems -- I get annoyed when people interrupt my system for their own purposes and dump a bunch of unfolded laundry on me because it was in their way, but we're working on that).
In the meantime, however, my frustration with people's never having the right clean clothes at the right times has trumped every other consideration, and I have declared a totalitarian laundry dictatorship. The upside of this system is that when you go out of town, you're already packed. Every article of clothing which a given person could conceivably need is right there in the basket. You put the basket in the car, and off you go. (for air travel, you dump it into a carry-on-sized bag and mash it down good and hope there's an iron at your destination).
Sorry, my comment about evil plastic vs. virtuous wicker should have had a smiley--it was meant tongue in cheek. All the wicker baskets I've ever owned degenerated into prickly things that tear at the laundry.
Don't worry, I read it with a smiley. The thing is, I have gone through phases of trying to avoid plastic in items like these -- cloth hampers on wooden legs, various kinds of natural-fiber baskets, and at the end of the day, what survived was the plastic. One of the children is using my college laundry basket, if that tells you anything.
Hmmm, now I want to read that book about homemaking, Sally. Is it this?
http://www.amazon.com/No-Ordinary-Home-Christ-Centered-Homemaking/dp/0880707445/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278357787&sr=8-3
No, I think the author's name is Margaret Kim (maybe?). There's a line for the computer, but I'll try to dig it up later.
Is this it?
http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-House-Litany-Everyday-Life/dp/0787976911/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t
The reviews mention the author's dislike of dishwashers, which I find very interesting. My own house has a dishwasher, but many places our family of nine has lived and visited don't have one. In my experience, a kitchen arranged so that two or more people can share the job efficiently makes all the difference to whether hand dishwashing is pleasant.
That's the one. I have a post about half-written about it right now, but the computer I'm on keeps making the draft disappear whenever I pull up the "edit" page, so I don't know whether I'll ever get it finished!
I noted that about the dishwasher, too. We currently don't have one -- well, as I like to say, I have four dishwashers, and I love them all. I wouldn't not have a mechanical dishwasher on principle, however: I'm not that anti-convenience. My current dishwashers wish we'd get one, and someday I'm sure we will, though as people leave home, the volume will decrease, and it might not matter that much at the end of the day.
At the moment, I'm not in a hurry, because it is useful to have them see that everything that happens has consequences, even a meal or a glass of milk. They have become quite the secret police over the use of glasses -- "Is that the one you had? Find the one you had! Don't get another one dirty!"
Yesterday we read the chapter in Little House in the Big Woods where the threshers come with their machines to help Pa and his relatives thresh their wheat. I was struck by the fact that although we can regard their way of life with a great deal of nostalgia -- simpler, freer, and all that -- they themselves were very progressive-minded in many ways. Pa wasn't going to keep on threshing his wheat by hand, with flails, for the sacramental experience of doing something the pure and simple way. He was going to look for ways not to break his back any more than he could help, because the work was hard enough and there was enough of it that he'd never get to the end of it as it was. Anyway, I found that interesting in the light of this conversation.
The difference between Pa and Almanzo's father is interesting. Pa loves the threshing machine and waxes eloquent about how quickly it gets the work done. Almanzo and his father see one at the fair and Father dismisses it as an inefficient saver of time that doesn't need saving; in his view, the waste (the machine apparently doesn't have as high a yield as hand threshing) is, well, wasteful, and "what else would I do in the winter?" One cause of the difference is that Father stores his cut grain in a barn, where it can be threshed at leisure throughout the winter, but Pa has no barn and has to thresh in time to stack the straw and bag the grain before winter comes.
That is interesting. I'd forgotten that scene in Farmer Boy -- been a while since we read that one. Of course, Almanzo's father is speaking as a prosperous farmer with sons to help him, in a country long since settled and tamed. Pa's perspective, as a man with a family of girls, battling the land mostly by himself, is probably one that lends itself to that kind of "progressivism" -- he doesn't have the time and energy to waste, if he can find a way not to waste them.
Of course, as a person who knows she's prone to sloth, I tend to regard too much convenience as perilous . . . though on the other hand, I'm not sure we'd be that much more virtuous if we had to expend all our time and energy on the tasks of keeping clean and clothed and fed. I love Ma Ingalls, but I really don't want to be her.
And interestingly, as lovingly as Laura renders all the details of Ma's ordering of things -- wherever they live, she makes their environment clean and pretty and orderly -- all that really didn't come naturally to her. In The First Four Years, she comments on the difficulties of home-making, and how her own house doesn't shine the way Ma's does. Her gift seems to lie not in doing those things, but in writing about them, which from our point of view is maybe the greater thing, because her writing gives us Ma's sense of order (and we either have it, or we can write about people who do, I guess!).
To bring this back to the metaphysical problem, one of the things that has always struck me about the Little House books is how hard they all expect to work. All day long, day in and day out, they are hard at it. When the day's work is done, Ma spends the evening mending. The Wilders go to bed at nine. There simply isn't time for the relaxation that I think of as my due. In fact I sometimes think of the things I do for relaxation as what I really ought to get to do all the time, if only things like laundry didn't get in the way so much.
They would say, "We don't work on Sundays," but on Sundays they still feed, water, milk, and muck out the animals, and serve and wash up three meals.
Excellent point.
I remember reading an article in the Telegraph once, when we were in England, which described the working day of the working-class English housewife in, I don't know, the years between 1920 and 1960, or something like that: the period when indoor plumbing and running water were not a given, and nobody had much in the way of labor-saving appliances. They described this round of labor -- washing, cooking, cleaning -- in terms of the number of calories the housewife would expend in a given day, versus the number of calories expended by the average English wife today.
I don't remember what those numbers were, but the suggestion was that those wives of yore were a lot more physically fit than their contemporary counterparts. The letters to the editor which the article provoked were interesting; in the most memorable one, the writer remarked that his mother had not had time to get fat and lazy, or to have enjoyed her fit condition, either, having died of exhaustion at the age of 48.
So I was going to say that that round of work which the Little House books describe did not leave people time to be unhappy, and that "burnout" as a concept probably didn't exist, but for a lot of people that was because "burnout" meant you lay down and died.
But in the main, yes, I am struck by how little I expect to do that kind of work, and how much I'm capable of moaning about it. I think of my husband who has gotten up and gone to some very boring and unpleasant jobs -- I think the security-guard job was probably the outright worst -- without complaining that this work was unfulfilling and that it was unjust to expect him to do it. He just did it, because we had to eat. Here's where I think the feminist narrative seriously goes off the rails: in its presumption that there's something inherently *defining* in work -- that we are what we do -- and that to do menial or mindless tasks makes us -- as women -- menial and mindless people. (to be continued -- my comments have been overlong, though somehow the system keeps publishing them!)
(continued)
So, that's kind of a materialist argument, to which the only serious response is that what we do is not the sum total of who we are, and meanwhile, there are things in this world which do have to be done. Not only is there value in doing them, but there is no devaluation of ourselves in *our* doing them.
I just reread an essay by Barbara Kingsolver, in a collection called High Tide in Tucson, which a number of years ago I found wonderful, but which now grates on me. It's an essay about liberation from housework -- "dirt is the earth's most renewable resource," she says, which makes me wonder: if that's the truth, then why do we hesitate to throw it out?
Anyway, the essay begins with a reference to the character in Barbara Pym's Excellent Women who moves in downstairs from the narrator (I love that novel, but I can't now remember either of their names -- the only name which comes immediately to mind is that of a very minor character, Sister Blatt). This new neighbor wears trousers and does some kind of research for a living; the narrator, on coming down to meet her glances around her untidy flat and the neighbor remarks cheerfully, "I'm such a slut."
Now, this woman's life, as the novel unfolds, turns out to be as chaotic as her housekeeping -- she's being unfaithful to her husband, and she's essentially selfish and thoughtless and so forth. Barbara Pym is clearly under no illusions that she represents some new order of freedom, but Barbara Kingsolver seems to be, because builds an entire essay about housekeeping, or the lack thereof, on the premise that being a "slut," ie a slattern, is a sign that you've found something better to do with your mind than vacuum.
(to be continued)
I wonder to what proportion labor-saving devices were the mother of feminist discontent.
The endless round of housework was why women from the working class could not be poets or musicians or artists or anything else like that until the twentieth century, unless they came from the "sub-class" of a family already working as artists or intellectuals or musicians -- Mary Shelley comes to mind. As for female singers, they were not from "nice" families, ever, not the professional ones. I found many pieces though, when I was working on Italian nineteenth-century music, that bore dedications from the composer to "l'egregia dilettante" Contessa so-and-so and things like that. "Dilettante" did not imply a low level of skill; it meant that Contessa X was a fantastic singer who would never dream of a scandal like going on the stage.
As for me, I get resentful and depressed sometimes that I spend my day in housework and caring for others (I'm visitng my very ill mother right now) and don't get to sing or work on my book proposal. I feel like I should give up those unprofitable pursuits; if I had been raised before the washing machine, I never would have picked them up to begin with . . .
(continued)
Kingsolver does make the claim that work defines you, and that in days of yore, housework was simply the inadequate stand-in for more fulfilling work. "If you work in the kitchen and have the mind of a rocket scientist, then your cabinets will be organized like Mission Control," she says, or something to that effect.
Or, well, maybe you just like being able to find things, because when you work in the kitchen, you discover that having to spend, regularly, half an hour hunting for the salt is a serious pain in the neck. Kingsolver also remarks that slut-ism is a great deal for kids -- Mom doesn't care whether you make your bed! -- and I think of the friends of mine who grew up with mothers who didn't or couldn't (because they were single and working) maintain their homes, and how my friends didn't exactly think they'd gotten such a great deal, back in the day. Home felt like dirt and chaos, not freedom, and their mothers didn't strike them as being especially free, either. They just had to make money to support their families, because nobody else was there to do it.
Kingsolver mentions "nostalgia" as a factor in the valuation of a clean house, and remarks on the Little House books as an example. In her reading, they're just pure rosy-hued nostalgia; not once, she says, does Laura mention having to go out to the outhouse on cold prairie nights (really I guess there'd have been chamber pots, which we aren't exactly nostalgic for, either, but on the other hand, let's not let historical accuracy get in the way of our arguments). She also completely overlooks the actual grittiness of those books: the round of work which Anne-Marie describes, the loss of crops, the year they almost starve to death and spend all their days twisting hay to keep the stove going, the nights they sit up waiting for the Indians in the creek bottoms to come scalp them. I mean, okay, we're spared the potty details, but the books hardly suggest an easy or, to the contemporary mind, desirable life, if what we desire is ease and comfort. We want the rosy family scene, but we don't want the work which goes hand-in-hand with it.
Pentimento: very true. I can never make a case against labor-saving devices, because they do give me at least some time and energy for my own "unprofitable pursuits." I'll never be nostalgic for those "Little House" days to that extent -- as I think Laura herself wasn't, if her last book, about the early days of her marriage, is any indication.
Again, of course, questions of work lie at the heart of all this: what *is* work, to what extent *does* it define us, what makes a pursuit *work* and not play, etc. I think of writing as work, even when it doesn't bring in money, and even though it's a relief to escape into it (though sometimes it's a grind, too). But then sometimes I think I'm using it to avoid doing things that just really do need doing in the here and now, because I also have a family, and they are my work. And I can be just as resentful, and there are days when I tearfully declare to myself that I'm just not going to be a writer . . .
I'm just not sure there is a clear answer here. For any material good, I think there's always a danger involved, and while I'm not really rosily nostalgic for some other golden age, I think it is possible to argue that in these cultural transactions, we do pay with things we maybe didn't mean to pay with, or reap things we didn't mean to sow, in terms of our own souls and in terms of larger cultural things.
What came to my mind as I was rereading this Kingsolver essay were the examples of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop -- neither of whom had children, of course, but both of whom were artists who valued order in their surroundings. In Bishop's memoir of her, Moore is said to remark that she carries her poems around with her on a clipboard, "Even when I'm *dusting,* Elizabeth." And Bishop's letters reveal a like-mindedness in herself: she was always looking for places to live, and writing to people about the possibility of living in their houses or apartments, and describing herself as a "good housekeeper." Part of that, of course, was that she really, really needed for people to let her live in their houses, but I also think she just had an orderly mind. It certainly shows in her poems, which is what makes them so wonderful and so, in their own way, above the kinds of agendas which show so plainly in . . . well, the work of Barbara Kingsolver, for example.
I'm not sure that my female discontent at being a mother-housewife-artist is particularly female, now that I think about i. I've known plenty of men who really wanted to be artists and poets but had to make a living instead.
(As for Kingsolver's agendas . . . I just read her latest, "The Lacuna," which I couldn't put down. It certainly stirred up all the anti-nostalgia for the ravages of McCarthyism that some of my family members experienced personally. At the same time, it seemed to me a novel really out of its time and place. She seemed to have been making a case for the "anti-Stalinist Left" of yore, but no one knows what those distinctions mean these days or cares, and she was very gentle on Trotsky.)
My verification word: nonsinge, which seems like a good word for a singing housewife.
Heh. There's nostalgia, and then there's nostalgia. And yes, she is a very good writer, and I have loved her novels. Over time, though, I've come to mistrust them, with their permutations of what's good and what's evil. I'm far more inclined to trust the generally-grim outlook of, say, Muriel Spark, about whom I've just finished knocking out a post. I mean, she's a realist about human nature across the board, instead of positing that there are good people and not-good people, depending on their political/moral affiliations (or their moral nature as defined by political philosophy).
And you are right that women don't own discontent. You have to ask: for every woman who wasn't a poet because washing machines didn't exist, how many men also weren't poets because they were plowing the fields and digging the ditches? Men throughout the ages have also done unpleasant and backbreaking and "unfulfilling" work, which fact seems to get lost in the feminist narrative. Of course, then you verge onto the Marxist narrative, which is problematic in its own way . . .
And my husband, after all, isn't still a security guard -- and while he was one, he was really an academic pretending to be a security guard for exactly as long as that occupation was the only opportunity he had for paying the bills. And that distinction in his own mind was important to him. Still, he did that job without complaint, and without any resentment of me, at home with the children and not making obvious financial contributions, though I probably could and possibly should have. It occurs to me that he was, and is, far kinder to me in that role than the classic feminist narrative would be, because he does recognize it as important work, even if I don't try to dress it up philosophically.
Jude the Obscure, I think, is the classic example of the thwarting of male dreams by virtue of the labor prescribed by social class.
Incidentally, there's a burgeoning interest in Victorian circles in working-class narratives by male and female worker-autodidacts. I haven't read any myself.
Which reminds me that I haven't read nearly enough Hardy. Haven't read Jude the Obscure -- alas! not yet! And too immersed in Muriel Spark at the moment to care.
The thought came to me that actually, when we get down to artistic discontent and writing-work not done, the culprit isn't so much housework, which in this day and age I can usually effect to a reasonable standard in about an hour a day, including cooking but excluding grocery shopping. The culprit really is . . . um . . . things like this. But I'm less inclined to grouse about blogging and blog conversations because 1) I really like conversations like this and blogging in general; 2) the pattern of behavior is intrinsic to me and not imposed on me by some larger authority or cultural norm/ie I choose to do this, so I can't very well gripe about it; and 3) I can justify it to myself as part of the life of the mind -- as in fact I think it is, which is why I value it.
Still, I mean, if I want to be honest with myself about why "real" writing's not getting done, it is not the calling of my name by the dust on the mantel which is to blame.
Which leads me to speculate on the connection of all this to the old problems of mind/soul-body duality. Are we what our bodies do? Are we what our minds do? Do we privilege one kind of doing over another (clearly a lot of us do), and if so, why? In what ways does the feminist narrative privilege the life of the mind and disparage the life of the body (the necessity of contraception and abortion to that narrative naturally springs to mind, but what else?). What does all this have to do with the laundry? Etc.
Great points, Sally, and I stand accused too. In addition, I think I would be horribly lonely if I hadn't started blogging.
BTW, I think you would love Jude the Obscure, and your husband might identify with it in some ways.
I'll have to read it when I'm done Sparkling.
And yeah, it's not like I'm stopping the blog-conversation thing . . . Just noting the state of things, the way I'd write down a 1-800 number I didn't mean ever to call.
By the way, I'm not dropping out of the conversation, but I am going to be away from the computer all day tomorrow and part of Sunday, so if y'all want to keep talking, feel free to carry on without me. If it's still going when I get back, I'll be glad to pick right up again. Can't remember the last time I had this many comments!
"the actual grittiness of those books"
The passage in "Little House on the Prairie" that most haunted me was when they all came down with malaria, and a neighbour came and found them lying about the house in various stages of fevered collapse. "Nostalgia" hardly comes into it.
Just on a general note, any discussion of sluttishness can, I am convinced, benefit from being informed by Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger
Two or three years ago I read a book for review purposes -- though I wound up not reviewing it -- called Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity, by a Virginia Smith. It was an interesting-ish read, though drearily predictable in some areas: hygiene in the Middle Ages went down the tubes because the Catholic Church devalued the body, and so on. I'd forgotten about it, but could be mildly interesting to revisit in light of this conversation.
And oh, yeah, that malaria chapter. Nostalgia really isn't what that inspires me to . . . admiration of the character of a child who crawls out of bed and across the floor to get her sister a drink of water, but not nostalgia.
I just had a quick look at Clean on google books, and at once came across this:
“extended contact with human waste matter (laundering, rubbish clearance) is commonly assigned to the lowest human rank, class, caste, or gender”.
Since dustmen and washerwomen are different "genders", I wonder which is the lowest?
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