Posted by sallysunshine on 2004-11-23 12:32:51
Post Subject:
It used to be a big issue 30 years ago, but you never hear about it anymore.
I agree it's not as big an issue as it was 30 years ago, but I feel like feminists are the only people I ever hear talk about it. If you go to a meeting of a non-feminist lefty group and raise the issue of women doing all sorts of uncompensated labor in the home, they'll dismiss that as a private, personal issue, not real exploitation. And you'll notice that both feminists and non-feminists offer only private solutions to the problems of household labor, and they're generally solutions that put all the impetus on women. It is women's responsibility to choose whether to hire domestic help, and if a family does make that choice, it is the woman, not the man, who is practicing exploitation. It's a woman's job to cajole her husband into doing his share of the housework. It's a woman's job to find a partner in the first place who is committed to doing his share. On that issue, feminists like Barbara Ehrenreich and anti-feminists like Caitlin Flanagan are in total agreement. So much for "the personal is political."
But I think your post went against the general spirit of this thread, amelia, which is to criticize the feminists of thirty years ago for being mean about domesticity. It was, for instance, mean to point out that being a homemaker was risky, since if a homemaker should ever find herself single, her skills would have very little value on the job market. Feminists never said the skills had no *real* value: they merely pointed out that a lot of women were finding themselves impoverished because those skills were *socially* devalued. But it is hurtful to suggest to women that their marriages might not last, so feminists were being mean by talking about this. Even though it was demonstrably a problem. I feel like feminists got in trouble on these issues partly because people didn't understand their critique and partly because people didn't want to hear what they had to say.
I'm not denying that a lot of feminists have thought really kooky and insulting things, but the basic feminist critique of domesticity has never been that domestic tasks are useless. It's been that they're *devalued*, and that it is bad when women as a class are assigned work that is not seen as real work. There are lots of ways to deal with that, including assigning value to housework, and like it or not, in this society that means assigning monetary value to it. (Is that acquiescing to capitalism? Yes. But I'm not willing to buy into the old Marxist party line that women will just have to suffer until the Revolution.) That was what was behind the wages for housework movement, although there was no way that was going to go anywhere. Interestingly enough, hiring someone to do your housework is one way of recognizing that it is actual work with economic value. Or else you can argue that it should stay outside the market and not be compensated, but then you have to figure out ways to make sure that men are as likely to do it as women.
Incidentally, MlleEmily, I basically agree that the discussion here is about the fun stuff, but I'd argue that cooking falls somewhere in between. I generally like to cook, and I think it's a lot more creative and fun than mopping the bathroom floor. But I also have to cook, because I can't afford to eat out. It's not really a hobby, although it's generally a pleasant chore.
