Throwback: Stop 'Making Homes'

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Since my blog's offline anyway, I feel like maybe I can be less restrictive than I usually am, work out the answers to a couple of questions that have been bugging me for a long time.

The most annoying of these questions is something I've been chucking under the "choice and cultural feminism is stupid and sucks" umbrella for a long time, but I need to know if I'm justified in thinking that way.

"Respect homemaking and the choice to be a housewife."

Why?

1. Homemaking is important and involves a lot of labour and we should respect and acknowledge that.

We should acknowledge it, but I honestly don't feel like we should be respecting or encouraging such a choice. Now, people may agree with the not encouraging bit, while balking at the not respecting bit.

Now there's no doubt that homemaking is an insane amount of work - menial physical, as well as emotional. The greater the number of family members, the worse it gets. And there is no pay.

Even if one were to look at it from an economic perspective and suggest that so and so's food, clothing, housing, shopping and medical care is all taken care of in return for the labour of sweeping, mopping, cooking, trash management, childbirth, child rearing - feeding, teaching, emotional and physical growth all inclusive, laundry along with emotional labour provided as and when required...

Well, for starters that's not a salary, that's compensation for the work you've no choice but to do.
And secondly, that compensation remains more or less fixed. Regardless of how many rooms your house has, how many mouths you have to cook for and feed, how many children you've brought up - your compensation doesn't expand with the size of your family or your house. Your compensation doesn't reflect the nature of your husband or his family. You don't get a bigger payout for dealing with an abusive rapist husband, for example. In fact, because of the nature of such a husband, your payout may end up being far less than that received by a woman married to a nice guy, with one kid and an average sized house.

Someone once joked that I was going to work just to be able to afford going to work, back when I lived far from my office. And they were right. As far as I can tell, the same goes for the life of a homemaker. If her house is a beautiful duplex, she has to expend that extra energy making sure it's clean and presentable.

(Because God forbid Anything on this disgustingly polluted earth be anything less than clean and presentable.)

The money she gets from her husband is expended on household expenditures, including house help, on clothes she's expected to wear and make up she's expected to put on in order to maintain a certain image that goes with the duplex. The car she drives is used to drop her kids to school and activities, to shop for the household and, assuming she has time left over, to engage in whatever leisure activities would be considered appropriate for a woman of her status in society.

I've mainly used the ideal of a happy family in my projections here. It doesn't take much of a stretch to realize that the less happy a family is, the worse it gets.

Okay, jumpy mind. Next post, next sub topic, same mental thread.

~ March 3, 2017

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