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The Parish Hall => Family Life => Topic started by: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 10:46:15 AM

Title: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 10:46:15 AM
I found this a very interesting and, in some ways, a surprisingly refreshing read, if a bit long.

From New York magazine:

http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/

The Retro Wife
Feminists who say they're having it all—by choosing to stay home.

By Lisa Miller  Published Mar 17, 2013

When Kelly Makino was a little girl, she loved to go orienteering—to explore the wilderness near her rural Pennsylvania home, finding her way back with a compass and a map—and the future she imagined for herself was equally adventuresome. Until she was about 16, she wanted to be a CIA operative, a spy, she says, "like La Femme Nikita." She put herself through college at Georgia State working in bars and slinging burgers, planning that with her degree in social work, she would move abroad, to India or Africa, to do humanitarian work for a couple of years. Her husband would be nerdy-hip, and they'd settle down someplace like Williamsburg; when she eventually had children, she would continue working full time, like her mother did, moving up the nonprofit ladder to finally "run a United Way chapter or be the CEO." Kelly graduated from college magna cum laude and got an M.S.W. from Penn, again with honors, receiving an award for her negotiating skills.

Now Kelly is 33, and if dreams were winds, you might say that hers have shifted. She believes that every household needs one primary caretaker, that women are, broadly speaking, better at that job than men, and that no amount of professional success could possibly console her if she felt her two young children—¬Connor, 5, and Lillie, 4—were not being looked after the right way. The maternal instinct is a real thing, Kelly argues: Girls play with dolls from childhood, so "women are raised from the get-go to raise children successfully. When we are moms, we have a better toolbox." Women, she believes, are conditioned to be more patient with children, to be better multitaskers, to be more tolerant of the quotidian grind of playdates and temper tantrums; "women," she says, "keep it together better than guys do." So last summer, when her husband, Alvin, a management consultant, took a new position requiring more travel, she made a decision. They would live off his low-six-figure income, and she would quit her job running a program for at-risk kids in a public school to stay home full time.

Kelly is not a Martha Stewart spawn in pursuit of the perfectly engineered domestic stage set. On the day I met her, she was wearing an orange hoodie, plum-colored Converse low-tops, and a tiny silver stud in her nose. In the family's modest New Jersey home, the bedroom looked like a laundry explosion, and the morning's breakfast dishes were piled in the sink. But Kelly's priorities are nothing if not retrograde. She has given herself over entirely to the care and feeding of her family. Undistracted by office politics and unfettered by meetings or a nerve-fraying commute, she spends hours upon hours doing things that would make another kind of woman scream with boredom, chanting nursery rhymes and eating pretend cake beneath a giant Transformers poster. Her sacrifice of a salary tightened the Makinos' upper-middle-class budget, but the subversion of her personal drive pays them back in ways Kelly believes are priceless; she is now able to be there for her kids no matter what, cooking healthy meals, taking them hiking and to museums, helping patiently with homework, and devoting herself to teaching the life lessons—on littering, on manners, on good habits—that she believes every child should know. She introduces me as "Miss Lisa," and that's what the kids call me all day long.

Alvin benefits no less from his wife's domestic reign. Kelly keeps a list of his clothing sizes in her iPhone and, devoted to his cuteness, surprises him regularly with new items, like the dark-washed jeans he was wearing on the day I visited. She tracks down his favorite recipes online, recently discovering one for pineapple fried rice that he remembered from his childhood in Hawaii. A couple of times a month, Kelly suggests that they go to bed early and she soothes his work-stiffened muscles with a therapeutic massage. "I love him so much, I just want to spoil him," she says.

Kelly calls herself "a flaming liberal" and a feminist, too. "I want my daughter to be able to do anything she wants," she says. "But I also want to say, 'Have a career that you can walk away from at the drop of a hat.'?" And she is not alone. Far from the Bible Belt's conservative territories, in blue-state cities and suburbs, young, educated, married mothers find themselves not uninterested in the metaconversation about "having it all" but untouched by it. They are too busy mining their grandmothers' old-fashioned lives for values they can appropriate like heirlooms, then wear proudly as their own.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 10:47:31 AM
Feminism has fizzled, its promise only half-fulfilled. This is the revelation of the moment, hashed and rehashed on blogs and talk shows, a cause of grief for some, fury for others. American women are better educated than they've ever been, better educated now than men, but they get distracted during their prime earning years by the urge to procreate. As they mature, they earn less than men and are granted fewer responsibilities at work. Fifty years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, women represent only a tiny fraction of corporate and government leaders, and they still earn only 77 cents on the male dollar.

What to do? One solution is to deny the need for broader solutions or for any kind of sisterly help. It's every woman for herself, and may the best one win. "I don't, I think, have, sort of, the militant drive and, sort of, the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that," said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in an interview with PBS, in which she declined to label herself a "feminist." "I think it's too bad, but I do think that feminism has become in many ways a more negative word." (I went to Stanford, worked at Google, got pregnant, and still became the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, she seemed to say. If you're smart enough, so can you.) But ¬others, as you may have read, believe it's time for women to resume the good fight. In her much-discussed Atlantic piece, Anne-Marie Slaughter, by profession a policy wonk (now at Princeton, formerly at the State Department), calls for better workplace programs: more parental leave, more part-time and flextime options. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, in her new book, Lean In, acknowledges the need for better policies, but argues that the new revolution needs to start with women themselves, that what's needed to equalize U.S. workplaces is a generation of women tougher, stronger, wilier, more honest about their ambition, more strategic, and more determined to win than American women currently are.

But what if all the fighting is just too much? That is, what if a woman isn't earning Facebook money but the salary of a social worker? Or what if her husband works 80 hours a week, and her kid is acting out at school, and she's sick of the perpetual disarray in the closets and the endless battles over who's going to buy the milk and oversee the homework? Maybe most important, what if a woman doesn't have Sandberg-Slaughter-Mayer-level ambition but a more modest amount that neither drives nor defines her?

Reading The Feminine Mystique now, one is struck by the white-hot flame of Betty Friedan's professional hunger, which made her into a prophet and a pioneer. But it blinded her as well: She presumed that all her suburban-housewife sisters felt as imprisoned as she did and that the gratification she found in her work was attainable for all. That was never true, of course; the revolution that Friedan helped to spark both liberated women and allowed countless numbers of them to experience financial pressure and the profound dissatisfactions of the workaday grind. More women than ever earn some or all of the money their family lives on. But today, in the tumultuous 21st-century economy, depending on a career as a path to self-actualization can seem like a sucker's bet.

Meanwhile, what was once feminist blasphemy is now conventional wisdom: Generally speaking, mothers instinctively want to devote themselves to home more than fathers do. (Even Sandberg admits it. "Are there characteristics inherent in sex differences that make women more nurturing and men more assertive?" she asks. "Quite possibly.") If feminism is not only about creating an equitable society but also a means to fulfillment for individual women, and if the rewards of working are insufficient and uncertain, while the tug of motherhood is inexorable, then a new calculus can take hold: For some women, the solution to resolving the long-running tensions between work and life is not more parent-friendly offices or savvier career moves but the full embrace of domesticity. "The feminist revolution started in the workplace, and now it's happening at home," says Makino. "I feel like in today's society, women who don't work are bucking the convention we were raised with ... Why can't we just be girls? Why do we have to be boys and girls at the same time?" She and the legions like her offer a silent rejoinder to Sandberg's manifesto, raising the possibility that the best way for some mothers (and their loved ones) to have a happy life is to make home their highest achievement.

"What these women feel is that the trade-offs now between working and not working are becoming more and more unsustainable," says Stacy Morrison, editor-in-chief of BlogHer, a network of 3,000 blogs for and by women. "The conversation we hear over and over again is this: 'The sense of calm and control that we feel over our lives is so much better than what is currently on offer in our culture.' And they're not wrong." The number of stay-at-home mothers rose incrementally between 2010 and 2011, for the first time since the downturn of 2008. While staying home with children remains largely a privilege of the affluent (the greatest number of America's SAHMs live in families with incomes of $100,000 a year or more), some of the biggest increases have been among younger mothers, ages 25 to 35, and those whose family incomes range from $75,000 to $100,000 a year.

This is not the retreat from high-¬pressure workplaces of a previous generation but rather a more active awakening to the virtues of the way things used to be. Patricia Ireland, who lives on the Upper West Side, left her job as a wealth adviser in 2010 after her third child was born. Now, even though her husband, also in finance, has seen his income drop since the recession, she has no plans to go back to work. She feels it's a privilege to manage her children's lives—"not just what they do, but what they believe, how they talk to other children, what kind of story we read together. That's all dictated by me. Not by my nanny or my babysitter." Her husband's part of the arrangement is to go to work and deposit his paycheck in the joint account. "I'm really grateful that my husband and I have fallen into traditional gender roles without conflict," says Ireland. "I'm not bitter that I'm the one home and he goes to work. And he's very happy that he goes to work."

A lot of the new neo-traditionalists watched their own mothers strain under the second shift, and they regard Sandberg's lower-wattage mini-mes, rushing off to Big Jobs and back home with a wad of cash for the nanny, with something like pity. They don't want a return to the confines of the fifties; they treasure their freedoms, but see a third way. When Slaughter tours the lecture circuit, she is often approached, she says, by women younger than 30 who say, "I don't see a senior person in my world whose life I want." In researching her 2010 book The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work and Family, New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson found that, in spite of all the gains young women have made, about a quarter say they would choose a traditional domestic arrangement over the independence that comes with a career, believing not just "that only a parent can provide an acceptable level of care" but also that "they are the only parent available for the job."

The harried, stressed, multiarmed Kali goddess, with a laptop in one hand and homemade organic baby food in the -other, has been replaced with a domestic Madonna, content with her choices and placid in her sphere. "I was ... blessed," wrote one woman on the UrbanBaby message boards recently, "with the patience to truly enjoy being home with my kids and know that in the end family is what is important in life—not pushing papers at some crap job." When the UB community fired back with a fusillade of snark, the poster remained serene. "It's sacred work but not for everyone," she wrote. "I will never have regrets." In season three of The Good Wife, Caitlin D'arcy, the law firm's ambitious and strategically minded female associate, unexpectedly quits her job when she becomes pregnant, saying she wants to be a full-time wife and mother. Her mentor, Alicia Florrick—separated from her husband and a mother of two—tries to dissuade her. "You're smart and clever," she says. "If you give this up for someone, even someone important to you, you'll regret it."

"I'm not giving it up for my fiancé," says Caitlin. "I'm giving it up for myself. I like the law, but I love my fiancé."

"But you don't need to choose," protests Alicia. "There's no reason why you can't work, be a wife and a mother."

"But I want to choose," says Caitlin. "Maybe it's different for my generation, but I don't have to prove anything. Or if I have to, I don't want to. I'm in love."

In Friedan's day, housewives used novel technologies such as the automatic washing machine to ease the burden of their domestic work; today, technology helps them to avoid the isolation of their grandmothers and to show off the fruits of their labor. Across the Internet, on a million mommy blogs and Pinterest pages, these women—conceptual cousins of the bearded and suspendered artisanal bakers and brewers who reside in gentrified neighborhoods—are elevating homemaking to an art, crocheting baby hats, slow-roasting strawberries for after-school snacks ("taste like Twizzlers!"), and making their own laundry soap from scratch. Young mothers fill the daytime upholstery and pattern-making courses at Third Ward, a craftspace in Williamsburg, and take knitting classes at the Brooklyn Yarn Café in Bushwick while their kids are in school.

Home, to these women, is more than a place to watch TV at the end of the day and motherhood more than a partial identity. It is a demanding, full-time endeavor, requiring all of their creativity, energy, and ingenuity. Kelly Makino set up a giant mothers' group in northern Jersey, using her M.S.W. to help other parents pool time and resources. (Such "side projects," she says, have the added benefit of "keeping us sane.") Homeschooling, once the province of Christian conservatives, is now increasingly chosen by lefty families; in New York City, the number of children being taught in their apartments rose by nearly 10 percent over the past year.

For Rebecca Woolf, maternal ambition led to the creation of her website, Girl's Gone Child, in 2005, when she was 23 and had just given birth to her son Archer. She has since had three more children (a girl, Fable, and twins named Reverie and Boheme), and every day she posts staged photos of her kids that make her family life look like one big, wholesome-but-funky romp. Here are the twins wearing adorable handmade animal hats with ears! Here is a lesson in at-home bang trimming! Woolf, who lives in Los Angeles and whose husband is a television producer, points out that as the founder of a thriving blog, she does have a job. But the image of home life she presents for popular consumption is as glossy and idealized as the mythical feminine perfection Friedan rebelled against. It is perhaps no wonder that in the world of mommy blogs, tattooed Fort Greeners and Mormons unknowingly collide, trafficking the same sites and trading recipes on the same message boards. They may vote different tickets, but on the centrality of home and family to a satisfying life, their interests are aligned.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 10:48:20 AM
Before they marry, college students of both genders almost universally tell social scientists that they want marriages in which housework, child care, professional ambition, and moneymaking will be respectfully negotiated and fully shared. According to a 2008 report by the Families and Work Institute, two thirds of people younger than 29 imagine for themselves partnerships not defined by traditional gender roles. Maybe she'll change the lightbulbs; maybe he'll go part time for a while after the birth of the baby. Seventy-four percent of American employees say they believe that women who work outside the home can be as good at mothering as those who don't. The institute's data also indicates that "men today view the 'ideal' man as someone who is not only successful ... but also involved as a father, husband/partner, and son." Once married, the research shows, men are more contented over the long term, and women are happiest in an egalitarian union—so long as both parties agree about what egalitarian means.

That, of course, is where things get tricky. Despite their stated position, men still do far less housework than their spouses. In 2011, only 19 percent spent any time during the average day cleaning or doing laundry; among couples with kids younger than 6, men spent just 26 minutes a day doing what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls "physical care," which is to say bathing, feeding, or dressing children. (Women did more than twice as much.) In her research, Gerson found that in times of stress men overwhelmingly revert to the traditional provider role, allowing them to justify punting on the dishes. "All [men]," she says, "agree that no matter what the gender revolution prescribes, it is still paramount for men to earn a living and support their families, which also implies taking a backseat as caregiver." As a romantic college student, a man may imagine he will request an extended paternity leave, but it's very likely that he won't. The average amount of time a man takes off after the birth of a child is five days. "That's exactly what happened to me!" exclaimed Kelly Makino when I relayed that stat to her. Alvin had planned on taking a two-week leave after Lillie was born but was back at the office after half that time.

All those bachelors' vows of future bathroom cleanings, it turns out, may be no more than a contemporary mating call. "People espouse equality because they conform to the current normative values of our culture," says University of Texas evolutionary psychologist David Buss. "Any man who did not do so would alienate many women—yes, espousing values is partly a mating tactic, and this is just one example." At least in one area, there's scant penalty for this bait and switch. Last year, sociologists at the University of Washington found that the less cooking, cleaning, and laundry a married man does, the more frequently he gets laid.

Feminism has never fully relieved women from feeling that the domestic domain is theirs to manage, no matter what else they're juggling. There is a story, possibly apocryphal yet also believable, of an observer looking over Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's shoulder during a Cabinet meeting in the late nineties. On the pad before her, the secretary had written not "paths to peace in the Middle East" but "buy cottage cheese." (Albright declined to comment for this story, but while promoting a book in 2009, she told an audience that all her life she made it a point always to answer phone calls from her children, no matter what else she was doing. "Every woman's middle name is guilt," she said.) Those choices have a different tenor now, one that upholds the special importance of the maternal role. "My sense," says Buss, "is that younger women are more open to the idea that there might exist evolved psychological gender differences." Among my friends, many women behave as though the evolutionary imperative extends not just to birthing and breast-¬feeding but to administrative household tasks as well, as if only they can properly plan birthday parties, make doctors' appointments, wrap presents, communicate with the teacher, buy the new school shoes. A number of those I spoke to for this article reminded me of a 2010 British study showing that men lack the same mental bandwidth for multitasking as women. Male and female subjects were asked how they'd find a lost key, while also being given a number of unrelated chores to do—talk on the phone, read a map, complete a math problem. The women universally approached the hunt more efficiently. Joanna Goddard, who runs the women's lifestyle blog A Cup of Jo, says she hears this refrain among her friends. "I'll just do it. It'll be easier. I'll just do it. It'll be faster. I'll do the dishes. I know where everything goes."

Psychologists suggest that perhaps American women are heirs and slaves to some atavistic need to prove their worth through domestic perfectionism: "So many women want to control their husbands' parenting," says Barbara Kass, a therapist with a private practice in Brooklyn. "?'Oh, do you have the this? Did you do the that? Don't forget that she needs this. And make sure she naps.' Sexism is internalized." Perhaps this mentality explains the baffling result of a survey that the Families and Work Institute conducted last spring for Real Simple magazine. Women said they yearned for more free time and that they hated doing most housework. But when they got free time, they used it to do housework—convinced that no one else could do it as well.

If women and men are at odds with themselves over what they value most, if a woman says she wants a big job but also needs to be home by 5:30 to oversee homework, and her husband promises to pick up the kids from chess club but goes instead to the meeting with the boss, how can marriages with two working parents not wind up conflict-ridden? From Kelly Makino's perspective, it was a no-brainer. "Some days I just have to pinch myself," she says. "It's so easy, it's so rewarding to live this way."
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 10:49:03 AM
Kelly and Alvin decided to change their lives one night last spring during a mini-vacation to Washington, D.C. They were there to see the cherry blossoms, and Kelly was aware, all weekend long, of the ebbing of her anxiety. "I didn't have to worry about 500 people's lives. I had to worry about four people's lives."
Connor had been in a fight at school. Lillie had been having nightmares. After the kids were in bed, the Makinos retired to the bathroom of their hotel room. "We realized that neither one of us were happy. We were sleep deprived and stressed out all the time," says Kelly. If they scaled back, they reasoned, they could live on Alvin's salary. But first Kelly had to come to terms with her unfulfilled ambition—"I knew I had it in me to be the best"—and the disapproval of her parents. Her father worried that she'd be bored out of her mind. Her mother accused her of "mooching." It took Kelly three months to quit her job.

Sitting at their kitchen table, littered with the detritus from a birthday-party goody bag, the Makinos retrace how their relationship turned out the way it has. They met at a biker bar where Kelly was waitressing, and at first, when Alvin envisioned their collective future, he thought, "Oh, it's totally not going to be like my parents. We're going to do things equally. Both of us are working, and we'll take care of the kids together. It just seemed so simple in my mind."

"I remember you said you wanted us to be a power couple," says Kelly.

But there was tension. Alvin earned a lot more money. Kelly felt that her job contributed more good to the world, that its emergencies were more urgent. One time, she remembers, she was just leaving work when she found herself face-to-face with an anguished child. "It's 4:30, this 12-year-old girl tells me she has been raped." Kelly attended to the girl and contacted the school authorities; after she got home, she put her own kids to bed and then was on the phone making a report to protective services until midnight. It was exhausting work but gratifying. "Honestly, before I had kids," she says, "I kind of looked down on stay-at-home moms a little. I thought, You can't hack it. It was a prejudice that was wrong. I thought, Why can't you do it? You must've sucked at your job if you stay home."

Kelly's commitment to her career "put a lot more pressure on me to make sure I could pick up the kids and I could feed the kids," says Alvin. "As much as I tried to be really supportive, there were conflicts with schedule, with availability, with resource time. We would get home at 6:30 or seven, then we'd have to think about dinner. It's a rush to get the kids to bed. The time either of us had with the kids was short, hectic, stressful. Day to day, managing our schedules—sometimes my meeting would last two hours instead of twenty minutes—it put a lot of strain on our relationship." They got fat on takeout. At bedtime, they talked about "bills, plans, schedules, the next day, everything but spending time together," says Alvin. They never had sex, remembers Kelly. They rarely had any fun at all.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 10:50:08 AM
In 2006, British researchers studied work-life conflict in five European countries. They found a lot of strife in France, despite a high percentage of women in the workforce and widespread government policies aimed at helping women remain employed when their children are young: subsidized nursery schools, day-care collectives, and the like. What's more, the French expressed progressive, optimistic ideals about gender roles. Seventy-four percent of full-time employees in France disagreed with the following statement: "A man's job is to earn money, a woman's job is to look after the home and family."

The explanation for the disconnect, the researchers surmised, was that French people, like Americans, lie to themselves about what they want. French women (like their American counterparts) do the bulk of the domestic work, and the majority also work full time. Quoting from colleagues' earlier work, the sociologists showed that sexism in France is as much a part of the culture as great bread, wine, and a long lunch hour. In France, "there were numerous men who were available to look after children during the week when their partner was employed ... but nevertheless did not take responsibility for child care even when they were free." They were saying one thing and doing another, which in marriage, says the historian Stephanie Coontz, is "a recipe for instability and unhappiness."

That same year, an American sociologist published a paper describing similar results. Predictors of marital unhappiness, found Bradford Wilcox at the University of Virginia, included wives who earned a large share of household income and wives who perceived the division of labor at home as unfair. Predictors of marital happiness were couples who shared a commitment to the institutional idea of marriage and couples who went to religious services together. "Our findings suggest," he wrote, "that increased departures from a male-breadwinning-female-homemaking model may also account for declines in marital quality, insofar as men and women continue to tacitly value gendered patterns of behavior in marriage." It's an idea that thrives especially in conservative religious circles: The things that specific men and women may selfishly want for themselves (sex, money, status, notoriety) must for the good of the family be put aside. Feminists widely critiqued Wilcox's findings, saying it puts the onus on women to suck it up in marriage, when men should be under more pressure to change. But these days you'll find echoes of Wilcox's thesis in unlikely places. "We look at straight people," a gay friend said to me recently as we were comparing anecdotes about husbands, "and we think marriage must be so much easier for them."

When I look at Kelly and Alvin Makino, I feel the same way. I have worked full time for almost all my daughter's nine years, and only very rarely have I ever felt that nature required anything else of me. I love my job and have found work to be gratifying and even calming during periods when other parts of my life are far less so. Like 65 percent of American couples, my husband and I both work to pay our bills, but my commitment to my career extends way beyond financial necessity. My self-sufficiency sets a good example for my daughter (or so we tell ourselves), which is one reason why even if we were to win the lotto, staying at home would not likely be a course I'd choose.

And yet. I am not immune to the notion that I have powers and responsibilities as a mother that my husband does not have. I prepare our daughter's lunch box every morning with ritualistic care, as if sending her off to school with a bologna sandwich made by me can work as an amulet against all the pain of my irregular, inevitable absences. I believe that I have a special gift for arranging playdates, pediatrician appointments, and piano lessons, and I yearn sometimes for the vast swaths of time Kelly Makino has given herself to keep her family's affairs in order. In an egalitarian marriage, every aspect of home life is open to renegotiation. When two people need to leave the house at 6 a.m., who gets the children ready for school? When two people have to work late, who will meet that inflexible day-care pickup time? And who, finally, has the energy for those constant transactions?

Two of the fastest-growing religious movements in America are Mormonism and Orthodox Judaism, which clearly define gender roles along traditional lines. It's difficult not to see the appeal—if only as a fleeting fantasy. How delicious might our weeknight dinners be, how straight the part in our daughter's hair, how much more carefree my marriage, if only I spent a fraction of the time cultivating our domestic landscape that I do at work.

This veneration of motherhood is fed by popular culture. On critically praised TV shows, ambitious women are nutty and single (Claire Danes in Homeland, Tina Fey on 30 Rock), while good mothers are chopping veggies with a big glass of Chardonnay at their elbow. Beyoncé and Marissa Mayer never explain how they do it all, I suspect, because they have teams of nannies and housekeepers on the payroll—and realize that outing themselves as women who rely on servants will taint them, somehow, as bad parents. (Sandberg places this feeling within "the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.") In my Facebook feed, Michelle Obama is an object of obsession not for the causes she's pursued as First Lady but for her child-rearing tactics: two mandatory sports (one chosen by them and one chosen by her) and no screen time on weeknights. When her husband first ran for president, he delivered speeches proclaiming the heroism of the working mother: "I don't accept an America that makes women choose between their kids and their careers." Four years later, against an opponent whose home life looked like a Disney production, Obama took a sanctity-of-motherhood tack: There is "no tougher job than being a mom."

Even Anne-Marie Slaughter would say that her maternal drive ultimately superseded her professional one, which is why she was unable to achieve more in her huge State Department job. She had a troubled kid at home. Thus the policy solutions she proposes do not dispel the mind-sets that continue to haunt American couples: In a world where men still run things and women still feel drawn to the kitchen and the nursery, an army of flextime females might lock in a second-class tier of workers who will never be able to compete with men for the top jobs. "That's the criticism of my piece that I worry most about," Slaughter says. "If that turns out to be true, I'll have to live with it forever."

Even as she enjoys her new life, Kelly Makino misses certain things about her old one. She misses getting dressed for work in clothes that have buttons and hems and sexy shoes to match. She misses "eating lunch with chopsticks," a euphemism for a universe of cuisine beyond chopped fruit and yogurt cups. She acknowledges the little luxuries of an office: a desk, a quiet cup of coffee, sick days. She misses her work friends—it is vexing trying to find the same hours free—and the validation that bosses and colleagues offer for a job well done. "There is no way my wonderful, loving family can fill that need," she says. In February, a few months after I met the Makinos at their home in New Jersey, they moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., for Alvin's job. Out of her element and detached from her old network, she is, for the first time since quitting work, bored.

Kelly loved her old profession and does not want to be painted as betraying the goals of feminism. She prefers to see herself as reaching beyond conventional ideas about what women should do. "I feel like we are evolving into something that is not defined by those who came before us," she says. By making domesticity her career, she and the other stay-at-home mothers she knows are standing up for values, such as patience, and kindness, and respectful attention to the needs of others, that have little currency in the world of work. Professional status is not the only sign of importance, she says, and financial independence is not the only measure of success.

I press her on this point. What if Alvin dies or leaves her? What if, as her children grow up, she finds herself resenting the fact that all the public accolades accrue to her husband? Kelly wrestles with these questions all the time, but for now she's convinced she's chosen the right path. "I know this investment in my family will be paid back when the time is right." When her kids don't need her anymore, she'll figure out what she wants to pursue next. Someday, she's sure, she'll have the chance to "play leapfrog" with Alvin; she'll wind up with a brilliant career, or be a writer, or go back to school. "You have to live in the now. I will deal with later when later comes. I'll find a way," she says. "Who knows? Maybe I will be home for ever and ever. Maybe I will have the best-kept lawn on the block for the rest of my life."

Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Bonaventure on March 20, 2013, 10:52:13 AM
Quote from: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 10:49:03 AM
Kelly and Alvin decided to change their lives one night last spring during a mini-vacation to Washington, D.C. They were there to see the cherry blossoms, and Kelly was aware, all weekend long, of the ebbing of her anxiety. "I didn't have to worry about 500 people's lives. I had to worry about four people's lives."
Connor had been in a fight at school. Lillie had been having nightmares. After the kids were in bed, the Makinos retired to the bathroom of their hotel room. "We realized that neither one of us were happy. We were sleep deprived and stressed out all the time," says Kelly. If they scaled back, they reasoned, they could live on Alvin's salary. But first Kelly had to come to terms with her unfulfilled ambition—"I knew I had it in me to be the best"—and the disapproval of her parents. Her father worried that she'd be bored out of her mind. Her mother accused her of "mooching." It took Kelly three months to quit her job.
Sitting at their kitchen table, littered with the detritus from a birthday-party goody bag, the Makinos retrace how their relationship turned out the way it has. They met at a biker bar where Kelly was waitressing, and at first, when Alvin envisioned their collective future, he thought, "Oh, it's totally not going to be like my parents. We're going to do things equally. Both of us are working, and we'll take care of the kids together. It just seemed so simple in my mind."

"I remember you said you wanted us to be a power couple," says Kelly.

But there was tension. Alvin earned a lot more money. Kelly felt that her job contributed more good to the world, that its emergencies were more urgent. One time, she remembers, she was just leaving work when she found herself face-to-face with an anguished child. "It's 4:30, this 12-year-old girl tells me she has been raped." Kelly attended to the girl and contacted the school authorities; after she got home, she put her own kids to bed and then was on the phone making a report to protective services until midnight. It was exhausting work but gratifying. "Honestly, before I had kids," she says, "I kind of looked down on stay-at-home moms a little. I thought, You can't hack it. It was a prejudice that was wrong. I thought, Why can't you do it? You must've sucked at your job if you stay home."

Kelly's commitment to her career "put a lot more pressure on me to make sure I could pick up the kids and I could feed the kids," says Alvin. "As much as I tried to be really supportive, there were conflicts with schedule, with availability, with resource time. We would get home at 6:30 or seven, then we'd have to think about dinner. It's a rush to get the kids to bed. The time either of us had with the kids was short, hectic, stressful. Day to day, managing our schedules—sometimes my meeting would last two hours instead of twenty minutes—it put a lot of strain on our relationship." They got fat on takeout. At bedtime, they talked about "bills, plans, schedules, the next day, everything but spending time together," says Alvin. They never had sex, remembers Kelly. They rarely had any fun at all.

Aside from the stress of dealing with the raped little girl, this looks like a lot of First World Problems. They look weak. Oh, we're stressed out for having to take the kids to school, so we aren't even havig sex.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Graham on March 20, 2013, 11:05:19 AM
This new feminist tack is hegelian. It is as refreshing as SP.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 11:11:45 AM
I just thought it was nice that people finally seem to be catching on to some of the fallacies of feminism, that women in particular are realizing that the sort of life feminists have idealized is not so fulfilling in reality, and that being a wife and mother is being valorized again, even if not as fully as it should be or for all the right reasons.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 12:24:05 PM
Quote from: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 11:11:45 AM
I just thought it was nice that people finally seem to be catching on to some of the fallacies of feminism, that women in particular are realizing that the sort of life feminists have idealized is not so fulfilling in reality, and that being a wife and mother is being valorized again, even if not as fully as it should be or for all the right reasons.

Yeah, though they aren't quite willing to throw in the towel on Feminism itself.  But the questioning has started, because Feminism hasn't delivered the goods it promised.  Because, of course, it's contrary to our nature.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 12:30:16 PM
Quote from: Bonaventure on March 20, 2013, 10:52:13 AM
Aside from the stress of dealing with the raped little girl, this looks like a lot of First World Problems. They look weak. Oh, we're stressed out for having to take the kids to school, so we aren't even havig sex.

I think it goes deeper than that.

Work, especially when it's a "career" and not just a McJob, expects to be your number one.  Children expect to be your number one.  When both people in the couple are trying to put both things first it's a ton of tension.

When there isn't an agreement about who does what, there's tension.  Man goes to work, wife makes dinner is a lot less tension than both go to work and we hash it out every day over who makes dinner.  And then, in the end, we get pizza because we're so darn sick of fighting. 

ALL the couples I know who set out to "share the housework" fight a lot.  Because every little thing is a dispute.  Who's going to pick up after the dog -- "I did it last time."  Who's going to sweep the floor?  "It doesn't even need sweeping."  Growing up, I never considered it ideal.  I considered it a strange approach, because it wasn't how I was raised.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: erin is nice on March 20, 2013, 02:02:50 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 12:30:16 PM
ALL the couples I know who set out to "share the housework" fight a lot.  Because every little thing is a dispute.  Who's going to pick up after the dog -- "I did it last time."  Who's going to sweep the floor?  "It doesn't even need sweeping."  Growing up, I never considered it ideal.  I considered it a strange approach, because it wasn't how I was raised.

I've never had to fight about housework. Nothing is a dispute, because we are respectful and not nasty when we ask each other to do various things around the house.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 03:28:13 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 20, 2013, 02:02:50 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 12:30:16 PM
ALL the couples I know who set out to "share the housework" fight a lot.  Because every little thing is a dispute.  Who's going to pick up after the dog -- "I did it last time."  Who's going to sweep the floor?  "It doesn't even need sweeping."  Growing up, I never considered it ideal.  I considered it a strange approach, because it wasn't how I was raised.

I've never had to fight about housework. Nothing is a dispute, because we are respectful and not nasty when we ask each other to do various things around the house.

How does it get decided, though?  Does each person have their own set jobs or do you work it out as you go along?  It seems to me that it would be easy to get bogged down in the planning and in trying to make it equal rather than just each doing their jobs.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Graham on March 20, 2013, 04:57:03 PM
Quote from: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 11:11:45 AM
I just thought it was nice that people finally seem to be catching on to some of the fallacies of feminism, that women in particular are realizing that the sort of life feminists have idealized is not so fulfilling in reality, and that being a wife and mother is being valorized again, even if not as fully as it should be or for all the right reasons.

Fair enough. However, despite the nod to sex differences, it's being framed, after the post-modern "more choice is always better" fashion, as a personal preference: "For some women, the solution to resolving the long-running tensions between work and life is not more parent-friendly offices or savvier career moves but the full embrace of domesticity."

So the foundation is erroneous. Maybe it is step one of the rectification, but likely not - it seems to lead more in the direction of "more choice [for women] is always better."
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 05:25:11 PM
Quote from: Graham on March 20, 2013, 04:57:03 PM
Quote from: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 11:11:45 AM
I just thought it was nice that people finally seem to be catching on to some of the fallacies of feminism, that women in particular are realizing that the sort of life feminists have idealized is not so fulfilling in reality, and that being a wife and mother is being valorized again, even if not as fully as it should be or for all the right reasons.

Fair enough. However, despite the nod to sex differences, it's being framed, after the post-modern "more choice is always better" fashion, as a personal preference: "For some women, the solution to resolving the long-running tensions between work and life is not more parent-friendly offices or savvier career moves but the full embrace of domesticity."

So the foundation is erroneous. Maybe it is step one of the rectification, but likely not - it seems to lead more in the direction of "more choice [for women] is always better."

Though perhaps that will lead to them hearing us out and not just dismissing our ideas automatically.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: erin is nice on March 21, 2013, 06:25:46 AM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 03:28:13 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 20, 2013, 02:02:50 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 12:30:16 PM
ALL the couples I know who set out to "share the housework" fight a lot.  Because every little thing is a dispute.  Who's going to pick up after the dog -- "I did it last time."  Who's going to sweep the floor?  "It doesn't even need sweeping."  Growing up, I never considered it ideal.  I considered it a strange approach, because it wasn't how I was raised.

I've never had to fight about housework. Nothing is a dispute, because we are respectful and not nasty when we ask each other to do various things around the house.

How does it get decided, though?  Does each person have their own set jobs or do you work it out as you go along?  It seems to me that it would be easy to get bogged down in the planning and in trying to make it equal rather than just each doing their jobs.

Mostly we each do what we are the most efficient at, so we have more time to spend together and with the kids. For example, my husband is the fastest, and neatest laundry folder ever, so he folds all the clothes. On Saturdays, we go over what needs to be done that day, and just split it up (with the kids too, of course). We all make the messes, so we all work together to clean it up.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 21, 2013, 02:55:03 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 21, 2013, 06:25:46 AM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 03:28:13 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 20, 2013, 02:02:50 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 12:30:16 PM
ALL the couples I know who set out to "share the housework" fight a lot.  Because every little thing is a dispute.  Who's going to pick up after the dog -- "I did it last time."  Who's going to sweep the floor?  "It doesn't even need sweeping."  Growing up, I never considered it ideal.  I considered it a strange approach, because it wasn't how I was raised.

I've never had to fight about housework. Nothing is a dispute, because we are respectful and not nasty when we ask each other to do various things around the house.

How does it get decided, though?  Does each person have their own set jobs or do you work it out as you go along?  It seems to me that it would be easy to get bogged down in the planning and in trying to make it equal rather than just each doing their jobs.

Mostly we each do what we are the most efficient at, so we have more time to spend together and with the kids. For example, my husband is the fastest, and neatest laundry folder ever, so he folds all the clothes. On Saturdays, we go over what needs to be done that day, and just split it up (with the kids too, of course). We all make the messes, so we all work together to clean it up.

"We all make the messes" seems strange to me unless it also comes with "we all spend the money."
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Magnificat on March 21, 2013, 03:27:20 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 05:25:11 PM
Quote from: Graham on March 20, 2013, 04:57:03 PM
Quote from: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 11:11:45 AM
I just thought it was nice that people finally seem to be catching on to some of the fallacies of feminism, that women in particular are realizing that the sort of life feminists have idealized is not so fulfilling in reality, and that being a wife and mother is being valorized again, even if not as fully as it should be or for all the right reasons.

Fair enough. However, despite the nod to sex differences, it's being framed, after the post-modern "more choice is always better" fashion, as a personal preference: "For some women, the solution to resolving the long-running tensions between work and life is not more parent-friendly offices or savvier career moves but the full embrace of domesticity."

So the foundation is erroneous. Maybe it is step one of the rectification, but likely not - it seems to lead more in the direction of "more choice [for women] is always better."

Though perhaps that will lead to them hearing us out and not just dismissing our ideas automatically.

You would hope so and I think it does bring a little more "softness" to many women when they can focus on their motherhood. But it does come down to a different, newer version of feminism that realizes they should keep ALL options open; hat they were being hypocrites to their own cause by essentially disallowing women to be stay-at-home moms. Though they are home, many still espouse all the philosophies of feminism. Because of that I find that I can only keep a more superficial friendship with the moms in my area. You can talk about your kids and temporal motherly issues but stay clear of any spiritual uplifting. And I mean spiritual as in Catholic spirituality. If you want to spout feel-good motivational quotes and mantras about some vague non-denominational spirituality, that's ok. But try and get down to the meat and potatoes that trad mothers live on, Catholic spirituality, our vocations as mothers, raising our children with an eye on eternity and sanctity, and it just doesn't fly.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Magnificat on March 21, 2013, 03:55:52 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 03:28:13 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 20, 2013, 02:02:50 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 12:30:16 PM
ALL the couples I know who set out to "share the housework" fight a lot.  Because every little thing is a dispute.  Who's going to pick up after the dog -- "I did it last time."  Who's going to sweep the floor?  "It doesn't even need sweeping."  Growing up, I never considered it ideal.  I considered it a strange approach, because it wasn't how I was raised.

I've never had to fight about housework. Nothing is a dispute, because we are respectful and not nasty when we ask each other to do various things around the house.

How does it get decided, though?  Does each person have their own set jobs or do you work it out as you go along?  It seems to me that it would be easy to get bogged down in the planning and in trying to make it equal rather than just each doing their jobs.

We share housework too but it's about helping each other out. My husband runs a business but is a terrible organizer. I keep him and his paperwork in the best order for him to be successful. In order for me to have the energy -- not so much the time, because I could just do it at midnight -- but the energy to do it all, he will pitch in with the kids or the house or whatever he can do to lighten my load. We work together. He is provider, business owner, I pitch in my strength. I am mother, housewife, he gets in the trenches to make sure I am not overwhelmed. He's an excellent cook and on some days, to have him take over preparing a meal, it makes all the difference in the world. Or maybe he'll do dishes or take the kids out of the house for a bit. I think that's what makes a team, knowing where you can lend the best support for the whole.

And kids make a difference. He was so much more "pampered"* before kids. :D But my health is not so great and it's worse during pregnancy, as well as about 6 months postpartum. We get help but not for the whole time. I am very lucky and so grateful that he pulls a lot of my weight when I am in such a vulnerable state.

It doesn't mean we've never argued or have never been overwhelmed or too exhausted to lift a finger, don't get me wrong! But I think whether a couple possesses a basic peace depends on their mentality behind it. We know he is the father -- the leader and provider, I am the mother, the housewife and nurturer. So we aren't trying to erase our natures or go against them, we are simply lending support where it is needed.   

*Edited to put pampered in quotation marks. A man who works hard and is shown appreciation by his wife is not pampered. It's only just. It might seem like a silly thing to edit as I meant it as a wink-wink but I have been trying to catch myself even in joking about putting down men. It's tough. I am surprised by how much I have to catch myself. You don't realize just how engrained it is in our culture until you really pay attention.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 21, 2013, 04:21:04 PM
Quote from: Magnificat on March 21, 2013, 03:27:20 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 20, 2013, 05:25:11 PM
Quote from: Graham on March 20, 2013, 04:57:03 PM
Quote from: Ancilla Domini on March 20, 2013, 11:11:45 AM
I just thought it was nice that people finally seem to be catching on to some of the fallacies of feminism, that women in particular are realizing that the sort of life feminists have idealized is not so fulfilling in reality, and that being a wife and mother is being valorized again, even if not as fully as it should be or for all the right reasons.

Fair enough. However, despite the nod to sex differences, it's being framed, after the post-modern "more choice is always better" fashion, as a personal preference: "For some women, the solution to resolving the long-running tensions between work and life is not more parent-friendly offices or savvier career moves but the full embrace of domesticity."

So the foundation is erroneous. Maybe it is step one of the rectification, but likely not - it seems to lead more in the direction of "more choice [for women] is always better."

Though perhaps that will lead to them hearing us out and not just dismissing our ideas automatically.

You would hope so and I think it does bring a little more "softness" to many women when they can focus on their motherhood. But it does come down to a different, newer version of feminism that realizes they should keep ALL options open; hat they were being hypocrites to their own cause by essentially disallowing women to be stay-at-home moms. Though they are home, many still espouse all the philosophies of feminism. Because of that I find that I can only keep a more superficial friendship with the moms in my area. You can talk about your kids and temporal motherly issues but stay clear of any spiritual uplifting. And I mean spiritual as in Catholic spirituality. If you want to spout feel-good motivational quotes and mantras about some vague non-denominational spirituality, that's ok. But try and get down to the meat and potatoes that trad mothers live on, Catholic spirituality, our vocations as mothers, raising our children with an eye on eternity and sanctity, and it just doesn't fly.

Yeah -- I find it harder and harder to hang out with non-Trads.  Just, the things they say.  In my Novus Ordo days, I was much more "live and let live" about things like contraception (never abortion, though) and feminism and living together before marriage and the like. 

It's especially hard around other writers -- they often tell me to add sex scenes, etc.  The most wtfreak of any comment I ever got was about a character of mine cheating on his girlfriend by kissing another girl.  "Is it even cheating?  I mean, if he hasn't even had sex with [main character's name], then it isn't really a relationship, is it?"  I didn't even know that secular types took it to that much of an extreme.  The same critiquer wanted me to have the main character walk in on her (soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend actually having sex with this other girl instead of just kissing.  In a young adult book. 

My reply was, "When I was that age, I struggled to find books without sexually graphic material.  I'd like to give teens that option, so I choose not to include scenes like that."  It's *a* truth but it isn't *the* truth, if that makes any sense.  And that's how I often end up handling those situations, for better or for worse.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Magnificat on March 21, 2013, 04:32:18 PM
I can see how that would also be difficult. It doesn't seem to matter what we are doing, we all face the same obstacles, just expressed in different ways.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 07:09:43 AM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 21, 2013, 02:55:03 PM

"We all make the messes" seems strange to me unless it also comes with "we all spend the money."

I guess, if you look at marriage as some kind of business contract-- he makes money, you pay him back with cleaning and sex.

That idea of family disgusts me.

I was at Mass last night for the feast of St. Benedict, and part of the sermon was about how important it was to St. Benedict that people living together work together, especially in the kitchen. He believed it would foster a deeper spiritual bond.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: stitchmom on March 22, 2013, 09:44:25 AM
If everyone in the home would spend 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes before they go to bed doing some basic picking up after themselves there would not be overwhelming housework. I support a formal division of housework to the wife but I also think people can learn not to be slobs. There is no reason why everyone over 4 can't wipe down the bathroom sink after they brush, hang their towels back up, make sure their clothes get into the hamper, if there is no shampoo left to throw the bottle away, take out the trash when they leave the house, spend 2 minutes before bed picking up the water bottles and stray papers, things like that.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: stitchmom on March 22, 2013, 09:59:09 AM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 21, 2013, 06:25:46 AM
We all make the messes, so we all work together to clean it up.

I agree with this 100%. I think the home should be the wife's area but everyone can pitch in and for sure everyone can do small things to pick up after themselves.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 11:54:30 AM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 07:09:43 AM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 21, 2013, 02:55:03 PM

"We all make the messes" seems strange to me unless it also comes with "we all spend the money."

I guess, if you look at marriage as some kind of business contract-- he makes money, you pay him back with cleaning and sex.

That idea of family disgusts me.

I was at Mass last night for the feast of St. Benedict, and part of the sermon was about how important it was to St. Benedict that people living together work together, especially in the kitchen. He believed it would foster a deeper spiritual bond.

I don't look at marriage as a business contract -- it's a sacrament.  You demean that sacrament when you suggest that a) everyone who follows a more traditional American model of marriage looks at it as a [only] contract and b) that this is somehow disgusting. (After all, arranged marriage has a history in the Church.  It may not be popular now, but it's certainly valid.)

I assume that the people who the good saint preached to had more than 4 feet of workspace, without the "panty" directly under said workspace -- don't get me wrong, I actually like having a small kitchen (more efficient), but the idea of working with someone else in it at the same time sounds like a recipe for a) a major slow down in the getting things done department, followed by b) war.

However, if the wife has the right to ask or demand help in the kitchen, then does the husband have the right to ask or demand help with his duties?  If not, why not?
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 12:09:30 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 11:54:30 AM
However, if the wife has the right to ask or demand help in the kitchen, then does the husband have the right to ask or demand help with his duties?  If not, why not?

No one but you has said anything about "rights" and "demands".  And what exactly do you mean by "his duties"? Yardwork? What?
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 12:16:34 PM
Quote from: stitchmom on March 22, 2013, 09:44:25 AM
If everyone in the home would spend 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes before they go to bed doing some basic picking up after themselves there would not be overwhelming housework. I support a formal division of housework to the wife but I also think people can learn not to be slobs. There is no reason why everyone over 4 can't wipe down the bathroom sink after they brush, hang their towels back up, make sure their clothes get into the hamper, if there is no shampoo left to throw the bottle away, take out the trash when they leave the house, spend 2 minutes before bed picking up the water bottles and stray papers, things like that.

Well, I don't think it should need to take 20 minutes a day, especially if you do things "as you go," which my husband does.  But I also don't think we should kid ourselves about throwing away a coke can when you stand up being work.

As for taking out the trash, I always thought trash duty was man's work.  My husband was raised that way as well -- heavy lifting and trash are for the gents.  To the point that he was stunned to see women after a church supper dealing with HUGE bags of trash without any guys stepping in.  (We're fairly new to the parsh -- he stepped in, of course, but the fact that no one ever had before was a bit of a shock.) 

He does yard work, trash duty, and is our general Mr. Fix It (both for hardware and technology).  He also works 8+ hours a day and spends 2+ hours in the car.  I'd be remiss if I asked him for help with things I can do myself.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 12:18:13 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 12:09:30 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 11:54:30 AM
However, if the wife has the right to ask or demand help in the kitchen, then does the husband have the right to ask or demand help with his duties?  If not, why not?

No one but you has said anything about "rights" and "demands".  And what exactly do you mean by "his duties"? Yardwork? What?

You seem to think -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that the wife can ask her husband for help in the kitchen and he should go for it.  So can he ask her to take over making the money for a while?
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 12:37:22 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 12:18:13 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 12:09:30 PM
Quote from: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 11:54:30 AM
However, if the wife has the right to ask or demand help in the kitchen, then does the husband have the right to ask or demand help with his duties?  If not, why not?

No one but you has said anything about "rights" and "demands".  And what exactly do you mean by "his duties"? Yardwork? What?

You seem to think -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that the wife can ask her husband for help in the kitchen and he should go for it.  So can he ask her to take over making the money for a while?

It would depend on if there were kids who needed someone at home, wouldn't it? I don't have a problem with a dad staying home with kids, I just think it's important for one parent to be there for them.

But if there are no kids in the picture, I think it's ridiculous for a woman to stay home and 'play house'. So lazy!

Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 01:11:10 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 12:37:22 PM

But if there are no kids in the picture, I think it's ridiculous for a woman to stay home and 'play house'. So lazy!

There are a lot of factors in choosing to work or not, and children are only one factor.

In this economy, I would feel bad taking one of the jobs that I would be qualified for away from someone else who might be poor or need that job to get through school or something like that.  It would seem greedy to us. 

For the first part of our marriage, my husband was unable to renew his driver's license due to the Great Paperwork Mix-up -- so I was his ride to work for those four months.  It was too far -- and too much gas -- for me to go home and then come back to pick him up, so I spent a lot of time in the public library working on a novel.

When that came to a end, we went month-to-month on our apartment and threw ourselves full force into trying to find a house.  We'd considered my getting a job once we knew where we'd be living, but over time my husband decided that wasn't what he wanted.  He was enjoying food from scratch and would rather I work on editing the novel rather than working a low pay/part time job.  And, in the end, it was a relief to me -- working outside the home wasn't something I was attached to, by any means.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 02:16:15 PM
Hey, if you have found someone willing to support you while you play Julia Child and "work on your novel", more power to you  :lol:
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: OCLittleFlower on March 22, 2013, 02:33:24 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 02:16:15 PM
Hey, if you have found someone willing to support you while you play Julia Child and "work on your novel", more power to you  :lol:

Wow -- nice personal attack and implication that I married my husband for money.  How "nice" of you.   :)
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Joromi on March 22, 2013, 04:53:14 PM
I think we've just seen a perfect demonstration of the feminist point of view:  "A woman should be able to choose her own path in life, unless that choice goes against the feminist agenda.  All choices are valid except for the choice to be a full time housewife.  In that case, she is just 'lazy' or 'playing'."
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Bonaventure on March 23, 2013, 07:43:29 AM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 02:16:15 PM
Hey, if you have found someone willing to support you while you play Julia Child and "work on your novel", more power to you  :lol:

This is uncalled for.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: erin is nice on March 23, 2013, 07:51:17 AM
Did OCLF report me again?  ::)
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Bonaventure on March 23, 2013, 08:19:51 AM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 23, 2013, 07:51:17 AM
Did OCLF report me again?  ::)

Well should she have? You tell me. Can you just leave the personal history and attacks off the forum. They don't help anyone, and you're better than that.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Der Kaiser on March 23, 2013, 04:57:39 PM
Interesting article, but its kinda like Jewish Nazi or African KKK grand wizard.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Der Kaiser on March 23, 2013, 05:00:31 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 22, 2013, 02:16:15 PM
Hey, if you have found someone willing to support you while you play Julia Child and "work on your novel", more power to you  :lol:

Ahh gotta love an angry bitter feminist. They are so adorable!
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Der Kaiser on March 23, 2013, 05:01:41 PM
Quote from: erin is nice on March 23, 2013, 07:51:17 AM
Did OCLF report me again?  ::)

Not sure, but I did. Attacking a woman who just wants to stay home and be a wife is uncalled for even for a feminist. Though feminists aren't known for their ladyness, quite the opposite actually. As the comment demonstrated.
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Jayne on March 24, 2013, 04:10:33 AM
I came across an article this week (although it is years old) on a similar theme to the OP:  http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2007/mar/07032009 (http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2007/mar/07032009)
QuoteBERLIN, Germany, March 20, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A leading German TV-moderator and anchorwoman of the country's top newscast caused an uproar last year when she admitted to regretting her three divorces, and condemned abortion, Die-Tagespost reported.

  Eva Herman published her account of the fatal flaws in a career-oriented lifestyle in a bestselling book entitled "The Eva-Principle: Towards a New Femininity", released last year. Now she's published a second book, this one containing letters from women supporting her rejection of feminist self-fulfillment propaganda, reported The Spiegal news magazine.

  Her sequel, Dear Eva Herman, captures the responses of women who welcomed the admission that professional success had not compensated for the loss of genuine family life.

"The fact you've been criticized as being a traitor towards women shows just what sort of femi-fascism we have to live under nowadays," one woman wrote.

  In The Eva-Principle, Herman tore open the issue of abortion as a violation of the woman, blaming pro-abortion laws for minimizing the trauma of abortion as nothing worse than going to the dentist.

  Her book was founded on a rejection of the feminist goals of emancipation, career success and self-fulfillment, replacing them instead with the "radical" goals of motherhood, home-maker and marriage-partner.

"Let's just say it loud," Herman wrote. "We women have overburdened ourselves—we allowed ourselves to be too easily seduced by career opportunities."

  Herman's books are part of a new wave of anti-feminism in Germany, The Speigel reported, with growing numbers of professional women rejecting the feminist drive for career success in favor of a return to family life and motherhood.

  Herman encouraged women to leave professional work environments for the "colorful world of children" and discover their "destiny of nurturing the home environment."

  Response to her revelatory work was extreme, with feminists in outrage over the perceived betrayal of one of their own. Others found Herman's statements a relief.

  With the lowest birthrate in Europe at just 1.3 children per woman, the country's reproductive crisis lends weight to the arguments of the "new feminism"—despite a massive government-funded initiative to encourage women to have more children, Germany's birthrate has failed to improve significantly.

It is interesting to see people able to discover the flaws of feminism just by reason even without the benefit of Christian teaching. 
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Theophilus on March 24, 2013, 02:33:47 PM
Thanks for the article.  It brings to mind the irony that God has created an ordered world and given us laws.  If we rebel and try to do things our way, I think (and in my own life it has happened) we eventually come to the realization that His way is best. 
For example, breaking the Ten Commandments going to be worse for you spiritually AND temporally, but sometimes we learn this the hard way, like adultery which leads to the divorce of the parents, the raising of kids in two homes, the way  this affects the kids upbringing, etc. 

In this case, feminists said "no, you can be men, go to work, leave your kids with the nannies, baby-sitters, schools...the men will have to do your work."  but what has happened?  More tension and stress at home with women now having to work and take care of the home, not to mention kids who hate it and are now grown-ups saying "that is not the way I'm going to raise my kids."

Susie Lloyd had a funny take on this in her book, Bless me Father, for I have kids where cavemen are discussing the cultural revolution and women going off to work where the one wife wants to be "liberated" and bring in another income AND do all the housework and what will be required of him...wash dishes once in a while...his answer "you go girl!!!"
Title: Re: The Feminist Housewife?
Post by: Jayne on March 24, 2013, 03:11:00 PM
Usually I think about how wrong feminism is, but these articles remind me that it is stupid too.