RebelDad

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1. 

   Brian
   

   03. Sep, 2003

   I thought this was a very compelling piece that raised interesting questions and successfully dispelled many damaging myths.

   I especially liked this passage:

   “The general idea, implied in countless nitwit books and articles and in a variety of popular movies, is that shortly after President Truman dropped the big one on Nagasaki, an entire generation of brave, brilliant women—many of them enjoying the deep satisfaction of doing shift work in munitions factories (the extent to which the riveters’ lot is glorified by professional-class feminists who never set foot on a factory floor is shameful)—was kidnapped by a bunch of rat-bastard men, deposited in Levittown, and told to mop. That women in large numbers were eagerly, joyfully complicit in this life plan, that women helped to create the plan, is rarely considered. To be a young woman during the war years was to know that many of the boys from your high school class were overseas and, perhaps, that several of them had died there. It was to have a steady, often unspoken fear that a future including children and a husband and a household—women used to be unconflicted and unashamed about wanting these things—might not be in the cards. For it all to change on a dime—for the men to come home in vast, apparently unscathed numbers, and for there to be the GI Bill and GI mortgages and plenty of good jobs for returning servicemen (remember, these were women who had experienced childhoods in which there were not enough jobs, in which it was highly possible for a family to be ruined)—must have been a relief beyond measure.”

   And also, I found this article posed a possible answer to a question often asked here on RD: Why don’t more men consider and choose stay-at-home-dad-dom? Consider this:

   “The success of the women’s movement depended on imposing a certain narrative—of boredom, of oppression, of despairing uselessness—on an entire generation of women, a narrative that has only gained strength as the years have passed, leaving people with a skewed and rather offensive view of those women.”

   And didn’t men buy into this too? Aren’t there many men walking around NOT saying staying at home is “women’s work” — in other words not choosing to work out of any antiquated sense of gender roles — but rather (quite opposite) looking at what feminists have been staying about being a stay-at-home mother and simply agreeing that work is the best place to be FOR ANYONE?

   In other words, if you agree with the feminist view of keeping home described by the author above, then the PROGRESSIVE, the FEMINIST thing to do — by logical extension — is to not stay home, but rather to on your career.

   Feminism may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We all bought the myth of the oppressed housewife. And now no one stays home.

2. Rebel Dad
   

   03. Sep, 2003

   I seemed to think that today’s at-home parent — one committed, almost single-mindedly — to raising smart, independent children stemmed from a redefition of that “homemaker” role into one of “educator” or “mentor.” The article lays this down:

   “Most important, she must somehow draw a line in the sand between the valuable, important work she is doing and the pathetic imprisonment, the Doll’s House existence, of the housewife of old. It’s a tall order.”

   I don’t think it’s a tall order. I know what my important work is. And most importantly, I *chose* to do that work. Am I nostaglic for an era in which a near-total loss of economic power for women in return for a lifetime of household responsibility was “a relief beyond measure.” Nope. (This may be a product of my environment. I was raised by a housewife, who, unlike the housewives the article’s author draws upon, didn’t much like the gig.)

   Clearly, “The Feminine Mystique” messed with the idea of motherhood (and fatherhood) by declaring parenting as kind of a second-class existance. But the real benefit of that wave of feminism was to widen the array of choices that women had. You want a job? You shouldn’t face legal or social barrier to do it. And there are a lot fewer of those barriers now.

   One of the RD mantras is that more choice in family arrangement is almost always better for every member of the family. And that’s why I have a hard time looking into the past with rose-tinted shades.

   -RD

   (As an aside, I thought of Bombeck not as the trapped housewife, but one of the first women to have choices and the freedom to chase happiness whereever she saw it. She often saw that happiness at home. I’d like to think that makes her a prophet, not a throwback.)
3. 

   Brian
   

   04. Sep, 2003

   1) I think you agree w/the article more than you think you do. The first quote you offer is quietly disagreeing with the situation just as you are, but perhaps from different sides of the issue.

   2) “Am I nostaglic for an era in which a near-total loss of economic power for women in return for a lifetime of household responsibility was ‘a relief beyond measure.’” You’re stacking the deck, creating a false choice here. The author’s point is that this is exactly what DIDN’T happen (I know you know this, but your response is circular in its logic).

   For some women, sure this may have been the case. But to create entire generations of trapped housewives is simply inaccurate. Inconvenient to feminist mythologizing, perhaps. But innaccurate nonetheless. Both my grandmothers, my mother, my aunts — all educated, strong, independent women — stayed home (at least for large portions of their children’s lives). They were never trapped, and have never seen themselves that way. To buy into the feminist myth is to condescendingly dismiss their estimations of their own lives.

   Also, I think you sometimes confuse my PARTICULAR criticisms of feminism with a dismissal of feminism in general. I just look back and see a TACTICAL mistake in disparaging the homemaker for the benefit of the working woman. A mistake because (as I said above) I think that it currently plays into why more men don’t stay at home, and a mistake too because it continues to too often insult the women who stay home now. Feminism still doesn’t have much of a coherent vocabulary that embraces both the business women AND the housewife.

   And choices built on myth and inaccuracy are not really choices at all.

   3) We may also be coming at this from slightly different directions. You mention that “homemaker” has been recast as “educator” or “mentor.” I would agree this is the case for most people. But not for me. I very much see my role as “keeper of the home.” My job is to (as the name suggests) “make a home.” And this is FAR HARDER and FAR MORE SATISFYING than many people realize.

   The running around in the afternoons to shuttle kids from activity to activity is something I just have too little time to do. As the author says, “Who would make dinner” if I did that? And already, I see friends and neighbors with kids my daughter’s age (about 2) who drive their kids to swimming, dancing, etc. Meanwhile, their houses are filthy and their children unruly.

   And so when the author of this Atlatic piece described women who KNEW how to handle a wide variety of household tasks, problems, etc., who knew how to keep the kids occupied, how to make a dinner from scratch, how to get crayon stains out of a load of laundry, who pored over household guides (as I do)…

   I say HELL YEAH! We need more of those, more PEOPLE who know what their doing. Men, women, gay, straight, Jew, Atheist, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, fat, thin, hip and un
4. 

   Anonymous
   

   04. Sep, 2003

   [Don't know where the rest of my post went, but here it is...]

   …hip and unhip: Let us all guzzle from the frosty mug of beer-y homemakery. Huzzah!

   4) I’ll close with two questions. A) Given you grew up in a family where your mother didn’t enjoy her at-home gig, how did you come to choose it for yourself? I’d be very interested to hear about the decision-making process. What model were you following (i.e. what image did you have in your head?)? And B) Have you read/do you own Cheryl Mendelson’s “Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House”?

5. Rebel Dad
   

   04. Sep, 2003

   I really shouldn’t argue with people smarter than me. That was my first mistake. The more of Brian’s posts I read, and the more I reread the article, the more I’m feeling wrong.

   The thrust of the article — I now recognize — was that housewives have been given a bad name, and that’s really a shame. I know full well how hard the job is, and that anone who can do it — and do it well — should be lionized, not demonized. And I agree that much of the undermining of that work has been done in the name of feminism. That’s a real shame.

   What prompted my knee-jerk reaction, though, is my deep aversion to the economic and social conditions of mid-century. It was not a high point for gender equity, whether measured by educational attainment, economic opportunity or wages paid. And I’d wager that male participation in activities like cooking, cleaning and childrearing was far lower then than now. I am willing to celebrate the housewife. But I am exceedingly uncomfortable celebrating the environment they existed in.

   The women in your family may not have felt trapped, but in many ways they had few other options. The same held true for the women in my family: they (by and large) loved their role, but they had few other choices. I hope my daughter has the chance to be a full-time mother. But I also hope she has the chance to be a dentist or a chemist or a cellist. You know me: it’s all about the choices.

   To get to your questions: a) I think my mother did a bang-up job with me and my siblings. But she felt trapped — by a number of factors — and longed to go back to the profession that she loved. In a sense, I value what she did as a parent more than she does, and I’ve consciously sought to make a choice that would give my children the kind of childhood I had. b) I don’t own “Home Comforts.” But I am a flyguy (www.flylady.com)

   -RD