By Katherine
“Home is where the great change will begin. It is not where it ends. Once we feel sufficiently proficient with our domestic skills, few of us will be content to simply practice them to the end of our days. Many of us will strive for more, to bring more beauty to the world, to bring about greater social change, to make life better for our neighbors, to contribute our creative powers to the building of a new, brighter, sustainable, happy future.”—Shannon Hayes
Occasionally, I’m so jazzed up by a book that I bust out my highlighter, liberal arts college style, and start marking passages I want to reread to feel jazzed up all over again.
Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture
You see, despite my convictions about living a saner, simpler life, about choosing a less lucrative career path than my experience and education supports so that I can spend more time being a thoughtful, less wasteful and more joyful citizen of the world, I have guilt.
I have guilt over debts for advanced degrees that won’t be repaid for decades now that I’m no longer pulling in a six-figure income.
I have guilt that I didn’t stick it out longer in the legal profession, maybe crusading for better work-life balance.
I have guilt that I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in high school and that maybe my current gig of freelance writing, blogging, learning to garden, cooking healthy food from scratch and raising children no longer suffices for the title.
And I live in fear that Betty Friedan herself might come back from the grave just to strangle me with my cloth diapers or beat me over the head with a wooden spoon—if she even owned one.
But Shannon Hayes makes it all better.
Part carefully-researched sociological theory and part practical, self-improvement inspiration, “Radical Homemakers” empowers us to believe--to know--that cultivating a life that is frugal, simple, family- and relationship-centered, socially-just and sustainable is a political and ecological act. That not only is it radically feminist, it’s radically humanist and a necessity if we and the planet are to get out from under this soul-sucking, cancer-causing, unsustainable consumer culture in which we currently live.
Tracing the history of homemaking back to the early days of hunting and gathering, Hayes details how home and hearth did not become the separate sphere of women until the industrial revolution, when men were sent out of the home and into the factory to generate wealth.
She further details that it was the cult of the corporation and 20th century consumption-based culture that truly made domesticity nothing but drudgery, nothing but a base from which to drive and shop; that it was the full-court press of marketers that turned our home lives into something of no value, something simply to get through until the next work day, to be made more convenient by cool new gadgets, processed foods and the suburban shopping mall all in an effort to keep the capitalist economy and the focus on money as the centerpiece of life, churning.
Of course it makes sense that this kind of depressing, suffocating existence would send women screaming from the home and into the workforce in droves, spurred on by Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
But somehow things haven’t gotten much better. In fact, dual incomes have, in many cases, furthered worker and consumer exploitation. As Hayes points out: “corporate America seized upon a golden opportunity to secure a cheaper workforce and offer countless products to use up their paychecks.” With two people working crazy hours out of the home, many families need even more convenience items and resources to support themselves—in fact, spending more than a dual income would seem to justify.
Rather than making anyone’s lives better and, in fact, wreaking unsustainable havoc on the environment and fueling rampant depression and obesity in this country and abhorrent exploitation of people and resources in other, less developed countries, this focus on making homes consumption centers rather than what they used to be—homesteading production centers—is really sucking the lifeblood out of all of us.
Being a slave to this new kind of drudgery—of making more money so you can spend more money on cars for the commute, work clothes for the office, childcare and mind-numbing, anesthetizing entertainment for your overworked brain in the form of gigantic TVs, video game consoles and reality show addictions, isn’t liberating for anyone, male or female.
What Hayes details in her theory and interviews of “radical homemakers” across the country is that a return to homemaking—to growing our own food, pulling resources with family and community and living lives more self-reliant and less wealth-reliant—could help solve the economic, social and ecological crises of our time.
Of course, we can’t all live like the homesteading couples and families featured in Hayes’ book. I certainly don’t have the food growing or clothes-making skills for that.
And we need doctors and teachers and healthcare workers and artists.
Most of us have to work outside the home to support ourselves and enjoy doing so, and there’s nothing wrong with that for our own well-being and that of our neighbors as long as, according to Hayes, outside careers honor four tenets: ecological sustainability, social justice, family and community.
The message of “Radical Homemakers” is not that we all should be farmers; it's that we should wrestle our self-worth away from the endless pursuit of affluence and cult of spending and the control of our time from the corporations and the people who run them: the 20 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of the wealth in this country.
Perhaps these ideas are radical in the face of the mainstream, but to me they’re comforting.
I spent this past Sunday making three loaves of bread in a second-hand bread machine, weeding the garden, harvesting four gigantic cucumbers for a delicious chilled cucumber soup recipe, constructing homemade paper dolls with my daughter, reading two really good books and writing this post.
In my former life, I probably would have spent an August Sunday faxing contract signature pages to a bunch of investment bankers so a deal could done by market open on Monday and people who produce nothing but paper money could make even more paper money as fast as possible.
Which of these afternoons would make you feel guilty?
What a great review! I clicked over from Shannon's FB page, and I am so glad I did. Radical Homemakers has been on my "to read" list for weeks . . . I love that you show that her central message is NOT about all of us moving to farms, but rather just taking the radical step of saying no to consumption, consumerism, and commercialism.
Thank you so much for the thoughtful review. I can't wait to dig into this one!
Posted by: Megan@SortaCrunchy | August 17, 2010 at 02:45 PM
Megan, you won't be disappointed!
Posted by: Simplifying the Simple Life | August 18, 2010 at 03:25 PM