You’ll notice I tend to use the word homemaker rather than housewife or stay at home mom (or that wonderful abbreviation SAHM). I do this after much thought, and I do it to emphasize what exactly it is that a woman does when she is at home working in the role of wife and mother. I also do it because while a homemaker might be a stay at home mom, she might not be a mother, and she might not exclusively work at home.
Housewife is a wonderful term, but like “charity” it has been debased by overuse and abuse, and has lost to a great extent its original meaning. If you are interested, consider the world “husband” [house-bound] and it’s history. Not so different than housewife, huh? And why do you think that is? Questions for another day, but important ones. As a hint, if you are looking for that information, it has to do with the fact that both terms originated prior to the Industrial Revolution, when the home was the productive unit of society, and one was either bound to a home or to a lord and his manor (i.e., you were a serf).
Meanwhile, back to the issue of housewives and homemakers. The big reason I use the term homemaker is that I want to emphasize the inherently productive nature of the homemaker. Let’s compare a couple of stereotypes. The first is Suzie the housewife-as-consumer. The beneficiary of numerous labor-saving devices and an industrial food complex, she no longer has to bake her own bread, sew her own clothes, or hand wash the laundry. Her children attend the public school, thereby relieving her of her role as primary educator of her children. Her role instead is to acquire those things that her family needs – i..e, she is the consumer extraordinaire! She “educates herself” with advertising, and buys buys buys. The more labor she is freed from, the more bored hours she has to fill with buying.
Next let’s look at Lucy the homemaker-as-producer. Lucy is well educated in the traditional sense, but more importantly she has the ability to figure it out. Toilet not working? Rather than pay someone to fix it for her, she goes to the library or searches the internet or asks a neighbor and figures out how to fix it. Her husband might make te money, but she uses very little of it, instead using her labor to stretch it as far as it will go. Plugged into her local community, she may not even need to buy the tools she uses so occasionally. She bakes her own bread from a 50 lb bag of flour she bought after carefully researching where best to buy it from… because she enjoys it, because it saves money, and because she and her family like it better than the store-bought stuff. She has a garden and grows a significant amount of her family’s produce. She homeschools her children, often teaching herself material in order to teach it to her children. She keeps her home a warm and inviting place which shelters the members of her family from a sometimes brutal world. It is the sanctuary to which her husband and her children return to refuel and renew prior to returning to engage the world once again. Having such a place allows them the security to develop a voice which is independent of the world.
I think a lot of the reason we look down on homemakers in our society is that it is Suzie not Lucy who is the predominant referent in these discussions. It is also because, as Lucy operates outside of the extractive economy, in which work is extracted from her so that she can get money, which she then uses to extract as much labor as possible from someone else to do things like fix the toilet, she fixed the toilet herself. Nowhere does it show up that she “made $100 as a plumber”. It is only a small shift in viewpoint before we realize just how valuable Lucy is. It has been said that penny saved is a penny earned. Really, though, a penny saved is about a penny and a half earned… the saved penny is not subject to tax.
No comments:
Post a Comment