We had some friends to dinner the other night, and once again, Julie served a terrific salad made wholly from greens from her own garden. I've never had greens so fresh, and it makes a difference. One of our guests, remarking on how delicious the salad was said, "You grew even the herbs?" Yes, even the herbs.
She does this. Over the past two or three years, I've watched her grow (no pun intended) into quite the urban agrarian. Over the past few weeks, she and a friend from our parish have been coordinating a planting and beautification program on church grounds, and listening to her talking about it and planning it over the phone, I've often been taken aback by how much she knows about planting and growing things, and how all of it was self-taught. It's all so useful, and not just to our household.
This past weekend, I was standing at the sink doing the dishes, and caught sight out the back window of Julie working in her garden. I reflected on just how complex her managerial tasks are. If she had the garden to do alone, that would be difficult enough, at least to my mind. But she also homeschools a very challenging child, coordinates and executes taking the kids to their various appointments, pays our bills, cooks most of our meals, tends to the dog and the chickens, keeps me on track for the things I have to do, and so forth. Me, all I do is write, and serve in secondary ways around the house (e.g., some cooking, lawn-mowing, doing what Julie says I need to do in the backyard). Really, that's all I do, write. I don't mean to denigrate it -- what I do is serious and difficult work too -- but I couldn't do what she does. I founded and edited the Sunday commentary section of the Dallas Morning News, but after three years of that, I asked to go back to a full-time writing gig. I couldn't handle the managerial responsibilities, juggling all those necessary tasks to keep the section going each week. All I can do is write; I don't have the skills or the temperament to be a manager. It requires a real discipline, and even a gift.
I think Julie's job is quite more demanding, intellectually and otherwise, than my own, yet it is my job that is honored by the world. She's "just" a housewife, "wasting" her education by staying at home with the kids -- at least that's how many in the world see it. Yet if Julie disappeared tomorrow, it would all fall apart around here, and the ground of domestic order and nurture that makes my creative work possible would disappear as well. It's also the case, though, that my work is so remunerative that it gives Julie the freedom to be at home with the kids and the garden, and to become the cultivator of our family system. We work as a family in symbiosis, and Julie's work only appears second-rate to people who lack the discernment to see it for what it's worth. If our culture no longer places a premium on this kind of work, then we live in an impoverished culture, despite our material riches. We live in a culture out of balance, the kind of culture criticized in Matthew Crawford's brilliant new book, "Shop Class as Soulcraft," more on which I'll say here later.
We live in a culture in which the intellectuals and the professionals, and not only them, are people like the woman who wrote to Sharon Astyk. Excerpt from Sharon's post:
I thought
I got an email from a reader praising my work very kindly and in terms of great enthusiasm, and stating that she felt that various famous national magazines should be carrying my work. This was all very flattering, until she got to the main point of her letter, which was to offer me constructive criticism about my "obsession with the housewifely virtues crap." She asked that I stop "wasting myself" writing about food storage and preservation, cooking and parenting and write more of the "public intellectual" pieces that she so admires. She cited several examples, and hoped that I'd take the message in the spirit in which it was intended, because, after all, it was for my own good.I actually rather think I did take it as intended ;-). And I took it precisely as I take the largish number of emails I get from people who think I should stop trying to write policy, theoretical or intellectual pieces that were "too long" and "boring" and just concentrate on giving people practical advice that they can use, while leaving the big issues to the grownups - that is, I laughed. And being contrary, I went off to write precisely the sort of piece my correspondent hates. So I thank her for the inspiration.
The thing is, I am a housewife. I like to think I'm a bit of an intellectual, but much of my day to day life is that of mistress of the house - co leader with my husband (whose title also implies binding to the home) of a household. This is true regardless of whether I work professionally or only in the domestic sphere - I believe that holding house, with all its connotations of making a comfortable place to live, thift and all that other stuff is good and important work, which I have to do no matter what else I do. Yeah, I write, but I also do laundry. IMHO, the idea that these things are fundamentally split - that the life of the mind happens at the computer, maybe in the garden, but never, ever, while folding clothes, seems wrong, and kind of demeaning to all of us, male or female, who would rather not have the laundry piled up on the floor.
I think the choice not to find domestic life interesting is, in fact a choice. That is, I don't find that laundry or dishes are inherently less interesting than, say, the annual business report - we have decided they are, but because we have done so, there's probably actually much more to be said about how to do the dishes quickly and well, or how to manage laundry well than has been. The reality is that these things matter - they take up our time and energy and money, and the flow of those things - resources, time, personal and fossil energies, are important. I keep waiting for permaculturists to start writing books about domestic management, because I think this is territory insufficiently explored and of a great deal of use. Until they do, I'll put it on my agenda.
There's a reason that Wendell Berry and Sharon Astyk are the secular patron saints of our household.
UPDATE: Behold, Julie is linked to chicken poop in today's edition of the Newspaper of Record:
Many gardeners are holding their noses and going closer to the source. "More and more people are keeping traditional farm animals in urban settings now," said Leslie Finical Halleck, a horticulturist and garden blogger in Dallas who is also the general manager of an independent garden center. "I was talking to my friend Julie the other day and she said, 'Do you want to take chicken poop home with you?' And I said, 'Of course I do!' This is what we talk about now."
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Housewifery as a career made a lot more sense to everyone when there were six, seven, eight or more children. If there are one or two, there isn't nearly as much work to be done.
If there were seven kids at home, no one got obsessive about waxing floors (you were lucky if the floor got swept) and no one sat around and wondered if the woman whose work made all this possible was wasting her time or not. I came from a small family, but most of my childhood friends were from families with at least six, usually more, and I spent a lot of happy time in those homes. Everyone worked hard, but a lot of fun was had too.
The mothers who survived this experience were very serene in old age, after the kids were gone. Seen it all, I guess.
My grandmother, who had 8 children, said the first three were the hardest. After that, the older ones helped out a lot with the younger ones.
But nobody seems to have noticed an entire wing of the women's movement that actually demanded payment for housework. Most people at the time thought that was just TOO radical and far-out, so it never really caught on.
As a divorce lawyer, however, I have a slightly different slant on things. While I would defend to my last breath my daughter's right to choose to be a stay-at-home mother, I'm really glad she didn't, because they fare very badly in divorce court, and not all that well in the probate courts (okay, a husband can promise not to abandon his wife, but he can't promise not to die.) At best, they will be granted a few months' worth of "rehabilitative alimony" (as if having been a full-time homemaker were a crippling illness.)
"I must admit though I don't entirely understand why you'd be a housewife if you have no kids and are able to have a rewarding career."
Uh... there is plenty to do around the home whether a woman has children or not. Gardening, cooking, cleaning, renovations, etc. take up a majority of my day, even though I suposedly have a "career" and my daughter is still in India. (We're adopting.) I am an artist, which is way cooler socially than being a housewife, but garners about the same amount of respect and pay.
Being a homemaker may be the most important job in the universe, but I find it to be very isolating. I'll be looking for a part-time job when my daughter is ready for pre-school just to be around other people. I moved to a new town and found that if you don't have a job, it is really, really, really hard to make friends.
Let me contribute an elegy to a MALE homemaker who was a dear friend of mine. Until he was killed in a car crash last year, he managed the household and cared for a child with a disability so that his wife could exercise her professional credentials as an educator. Because he wasn't "gainfully employed," the company that owned the truck that killed him was able to make a pitifully small settlement in his wrongful death suit. And now that he is gone, his widow has had to close down her education/consulting business and cut back 80% of her working hours in a school.
BTW, the public assistance authorities in Alaska are apparently willing to grant that a "traditional subsistence hunter" is "working," but will not allow the same latitude to a woman (or for that matter a man) who is a "traditional subsistence homemaker."
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