The Goods Are Odd

On a quiet day last fall I flipped to an article in the latest Harper’s entitled “American Electra: Feminism’s ritual matricide” It didn’t really seem like an uplifting topic, but I was pulled into reading. I often find discussions about feminism relevant to the topic of cooking and other disappearing domestic skills. It’s a tricky association that comes out of the reality that these important skills are diminishing due to the fact that homes are left empty for wages.  For wage earners to be able to function without these skills, they rely on a constant stream of convenience products or others’ labor. There is an uncomfortable historical relationship with feminism and consumerism which has resulted in the confusing realization that to be anti-consumer is to somehow reject the advances of women in society. To reduce your dependence on consumption, you must be more self sufficient, more productive. This production is home-based, and often in the kitchen. The Harper’s piece brings up this relationship and the ways in which consumer culture influenced feminist movements, which resulted in a rejection of, ironically, the mother.

Author Susan Faludi explains that just after the success of suffrage, at the turn of the century, “The forces arrayed against the mother were many. Some of her antagonists would be presented as allies, sympathetic “experts” who knew better than she did how to do her job. Mothers, the new and reigning “behavioralist” psychologists held, knew nothing about “scientific” child rearing and would do irreparable harm to children if they followed their own instincts instead of the male authorities.”

I consider consumer culture and science/technology two sides of the same coin considering how scientific and technology advances led to the massive increase in consumer goods and gadgets. All such advances have been marketed to undermine the wisdom and necessity of the domestic world, a world that women, for better or worse, ruled. Of course the cultural trend sided on “worse” for the sake of showing that women have potential beyond the home, but the market was all too quick to fill the void.

…In advertisements for mass-produced products that mothers used to make themselves—from dresses to baked goods—the message resounded that mothers’ skills were obsolete, unsound, and unnutritional. Young women were urged to learn their housekeeping and cooking skills from “professionals” instead of mothers—at homemaking and cooking “institutes” established by corporate entities like GE and Westinghouse. “Daughters, fresh from domestic science in school,” sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd reported in their 1929 classic, Middletown, “ridicule the mothers’ inherited rule-of-thumb practices as ‘old fashioned.’?”

Mothers were deemed incapable even of advising their daughters on menstruation, which was now the province of the new “feminine hygiene” industry. Johnson & Johnson’s first ad campaign for Modess sanitary napkins in the 1920s, called “Modernizing Mother,” showcased vibrant young girls making fun of their stick-in-the-mud mothers for shrinking from the latest consumer goods and styles, with captions like, “Don’t be a ’Fraid-Cat, Mother, There’s No Danger” and “Step on It, Mother—This Isn’t the Polka.” The accompanying text paid homage to “the modern daughter” who “is the champion of every new device which adds to the pleasure and ease of existence” and “will not tolerate the traditions and drudgeries which held her mother in bondage.”

As I read these last lines, the phone rang. I had a hunch. It was my mother. I told her about the piece I was reading, but I really wasn’t sure what her take on it would be. My mother was a do-everything woman, kids, lots of education, professional career, costume seamstress, baker, cook, cleaner, chauffeur (the last three were certainly split with my dad, but still…) I had always assumed she kind of towed the feminist line since she seem to live its image. Turned out, the points raised by Faludi resonated with her very much. In the early 1970’s she was raising two kids surrounded by childless peers who had soundly rejected and looked down upon the drudgery of homemaking. The efforts she took to cook and make clothes, while also working, meant greater self sufficiency, but this was, apparently, not a widely held value. To her, self-sufficiency was the ultimate way to live in a low-impact and simple way yet her rejection of aspects of modern consumerism were understood as a a regression to less enlightened ways.

This very dilemma was addressed fully and expertly by Shannon Hayes in her book Radical Homemakers. Hayes gives an important historical perspective on why the work within the domestic realm became depressive drudgery, not necessarily because of the work itself, which was highly skilled and of great necessity, but because it was no longer valued. Today’s New York Times has a piece about this very issue, that while the homemaker seems like the quintessential image for the 50’s decade, it was really a time when this role was least respected and a hard image to maintain happily. The home, and by extension, whoever has responsibility for it, was a consumer not a creator and I think we’re learning, that isn’t a role that fills us with much sense of purpose. Again, that sneaky consumerism markets away the home as a place of production and the women its master. It’s all fine and good that the type of work we do is (sort of) not (as) limited to your gender. That really isn’t the issue. The problem is that the home has been lost as a source of production and self-sufficiency regardless of gender (In fact Hayes points out that both genders were pushed out for wage earning, and both suffer because of it). But it makes sense that given the rocky relationship with this role, women are still conflicted about taking any of it back.

Peggy Orenstein covers Hayes’ book and the relationship of feminism and self-sufficiency, particularly when it comes to food, in an article called the Femivore’s Dilemma. How totally unappealing the word “femivore” is and that it should never be used beyond quoting this article aside, Orenstein provides additional proof that the domestic is in fact a place where feminism does belong, in fact it’s more productive there than manipulated by marketers.

Honestly, I simply don’t like the world that is created by the relationship of feminism and consumerism. For one, it has only helped the latter. The home is where we take responsibility for our basic needs, it should never be considered beneath anyone to cook, clean, and care for their family. Not only is there a tendency to undervalue those who do this for their own household  but the people hired to do this work are of a lower status. Even when we need them for things we should be able to do ourselves. The role of mother, the giver of life, the nurturer is undervalued in the world-view of our society and that judgement has deep and wide repercussions. Despite my resistance to any current feminist movement, I got a lot out of feminist political theory, specifically in college the amazing Falguni Sheth, who moved discussions of feminism beyond disapproving certain lifestyles or activities from hijab or high heals to homemaking and offered up the core idea that love is a legitimate political tool. Wendell Berry, in The Unsettling of America Culture and Agriculture, addresses the need for the nuturer in a much larger sense, and touches on the sad irony of taking the feminine out of feminism: “the women’s movement…when its energies are most accurately placed, is arguing the cause of nurture; other times it is arguing the right of women to be exploiters”

The home is an important place of power for a more sustainable and low-impact life, and the nurturer is a very powerful role that is sorely missing from our cultural values. Mother’s day seems to be just the right day to honor both and to take them back.