This is why the article affected me. Being married, I often think about what I would do if we decided to have kids. What was traditionally a woman's job, raising a child can now be done a number of different ways thanks to gender equality. I could stay home, he could stay home, we could both work and let someone else watch our kid. Water birth, making my own baby food, and homeschooling are all valid options. As a woman, I often think about the balance I'd like to achieve in my home and marriage (how much should I work, what household tasks should I be responsible for, etc). And as a person, I often think about what things would make me happy in life, especially what I can do to make money in an unconventional way. All of this was written about in the article, though it didn't really go in-depth. Obviously, this is a blog about wellness - in the home, in what we eat, in how we treat other living beings. So I felt myself nodding in agreement with some comments in the article, and shaking my head "no" at others.
I will quickly mention that political notes are unnecessary and don't make sense by the end, and there are some contradicting statements (she says the terms "liberal and conservative barely seem to apply," yet goes on to use the word conservatism serveral times), but that is the English major in me speaking, and it isn't very relevant to what I'd like to talk about.
Moving on. I do not see this "DIY Domesticity" as an extremely large phenomenon, nor a proper term. Maybe among rich people in New York or hipsters in Portland, but not here in my world. I literally do not know of anyone that I could email these articles to and say "That's you! With your home made applesauce and cloth diapers and refusal to work a 9-5 job for The Man." Not even retired people. Any stay-at-home moms I know consistently buy packaged food and packaged diapers and send their kids to public school where they eat public school lunch. I've only seen one person, a friend of a friend, who sends their kid(s) to a Montessori school. And I can't say that's because I don't live in a large, progressive city. Because I do. I live in a city where "green restaurants" are the new big thing, farmer's markets and buying local and hand made make you smarter and more awesome. Eco-friendly is slowly blooming here, but a lot of people missed the memo. There aren't enough people here that are really into all the things mentioned in the article. Honestly, I think Pinterest might be the culprit for anyone considering something out-of-the-box, like chickens in the back yard or canning radishes. "Dabbling in all-natural" might be a better phrase to use.
This article applies to me more than anyone I know, even without kids. (But if I did, you know I'd be making their baby food myself, reusing cloth diapers, and sending them to the environmental school.) But I take issue with how generalized the article is. The first paragraph of the article holds a sentence I want to mentally debate in my free time: "...progressives are embracing home and hearth with new vigor under the guise of environmental sustainability, anti-consumerism, and better health." What are you implying? That I have some ulterior motive for being healthier than I was a year ago? What other reasons are there? Maybe I don't read enough and I'm missing some enlightening tidbit about how "breast is best" = "conservative gender norms" and not "healthy baby." Maybe I haven't yet discovered why spending time reading ingredient labels will kill my career.
If you read my first blog post here you'd know that I started caring about what I eat, and wellness in general, after my mom got cancer, and it spiraled from there. My mentality was "anything that can help her get healthy I will do myself." Unhealthy lifestyle = cancer, but healthy lifestyle = healthy family. So the idea that becoming healthier or more DIY (and especially the quote from Elisabeth Badinter) means becoming less feminist, or that keeping my family healthy is a bad thing...well, it gets on my nerves. The older I get, the more I care about stuff like "environmental sustainability" and "anti-consumerism," because the older you get, the more knowledge you gain. And the more you have to spend on these consumer products you just have to have. It seems only natural that I would move from boxed brownie mix to black bean brownies, clay cat litter to pine based ones, and so on. It isn't out of a need to be cool, or a desire to go against what everyone else is doing, or a desire to be more creative. It's simply because I know more now than I used to, and I choose to go the healthier route. When I have a hard time convincing someone to make their own windex, or they make a sour face at my black rice, I can hardly believe this lifestyle would be deemed conservative. It's anything but traditional and conformist. And the smarties I learned everything from (online, in books) are far from preachers, far from turning up their noses at anyone hesitant to jump right in and go full steam ahead.
Let's then address the idea that these lifestyle changes (changes a small percentage of women are actually making - there are no statistics in this article) that are different from the decades past and present, those of canned formula and births in hospitals, not making anything from scratch and working as much as men, are examples of women regressing, so to speak. The woman who has twelve kids in the Midwest that is using Etsy to keep herself occupied while her man makes the moolah is not the example for all women becoming more "domestic." I'll use myself and my ancestry as an example. My mother and father worked an equal amount, gave me the best of everything in moderation, and did what they thought was best in every category, from baby food to college. My mother sewed, my father cleaned cat litter. They spent equal amounts of time with me. But they were far from making my baby food themselves and putting me in cloth diapers. I never went to a holistic doctor or learned how to cook random strange foods like lingonberries. Their parents, however, born in the early 1900's, did quite the opposite. The best of everything, even in moderation, was not something they could afford. Almost everything was home made, but out of necessity, due to finances and what was available. Products they used were not laden with chemicals, food was not highly processed, and the majority of births were still at home - that was their culture in America, but also as 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Things were not so advanced as they are now, so they knew a lot more - like how to wash clothes with borax and how to catch a wild bird for dinner (my grandmother liked to cook our state bird). And let's not forget, most women were stay at home moms in the early 1900's. A few decades later, thanks to gender equality, my mom was able to have a baby and work, and my parents shared in household chores, raising me, and bills. If the nation had gone through with gender equality and not changed the way food is farmed and sold at roughly the same time period, and had not advanced consumerism, these lifestyle changes women (and men) make now would not be in question. We wouldn't be asking why people are becoming more domestic and if it's making women regress to a state of "The Angel of the Household" again. However, seeing as that did happen, and our nation did start letting doctors decide what's best for babies (as opposed to midwives) and let the meat and dairy industry decide our nutritional needs, isn't it our responsibility as a nation, as a culture, and as individuals to start questioning the way things are and deciding whats best for us? As I see it, our culture is now questioning past mistakes and trying to find a happy medium between the convenient, equal-opportunity, fast-paced yet no-time life we have now and the healthy, more informed life our ancestors had before this age of GMO's, cancer running rampant, and store-bought-everything-under-the-sun. Am I just speaking for myself?
With that in mind, I agree with the statement "the fact that domesticity is so appealing speaks to the failure of [the government and institutions]." Because they really aren't very trustworthy anymore. But is it really domesticity in the way readers are likely to imagine it? "Domestic" is an awful term to use to describe what our culture is moving toward. We're all domestic to start with. It's in our nature. But the examples of housewives in the article are not balanced by examples of why everyone else is jumping on the DIY/all natural/domestic goodness bandwagon. The comments for the article bring up good points about feminism being the right to choose to stay home and the good and bad of being more domestic. And it's good to think about these things. However, I think this movement is more about living a healthy life than it is about traditional gender roles or politics. Men and women, liberals and conservatives alike are considering these changes and modifications to the life they were used to. There's no mention of families in which both the husband and wife are equal participants in this lifestyle change, no mention of husbands and wives who both bring in steady incomes but also tend the garden together, cook fresh meals together, make home made glass cleaner together and are both determined to homeschool with equal responsibility. The title doesn't hint at what it really implies.
There's a link in the article to Michael Pollan's criticism that "feminism killed home cooking," (this is just quoting the last article, as I don't believe that was his sole intention) in his article "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch," and I think Emily Matchar's article is a subtle reverse statement: "Home cooking killed feminism." While it's true that both parents working will lead to less time in the kitchen (or anywhere else for that matter) there's nothing to say sharing the workload wouldn't make things a little easier, that everything, including home cooking, can get done when both husband and wife put in equal effort. I know my parents did it. There is too much emphasis in Matchar's article on women who stay at home to do the cooking, DIY projects and child rearing, and not enough mention of couples doing the same, of dads doing the same, of single parents doing the same. In my grandmother's day, women had no choice but to cook. Today everyone has the opportunity to either cook, DIY, do yoga, sell crafts on Etsy, be a "home maker" or anything else they want to do, or not. Also, today everyone has resources at their fingertips to inform them of bad ingredients, how-to's and online shops. Let's call it "domesticity made fun."
Pollan blames the decline of home cooking on women working outside the home (partly accurate), food companies cooking for us (correct), and technological advances (also correct). I think it's a mix of companies cooking for us and the choice to be individuals, male and female, that may or may not like to cook. It is not about women getting in or out of the
Maybe all the eco-friendly, anti-consumerism, back to nature, crafty local businesses and healthy home cooking ventures are actually a sign that our culture is getting smarter and more caring, and maybe there's nothing political or "uncomfortably retro" about it at all.
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