I Am So Popular: Removing Sex From the Equation

Thirty-four years later, I’m recalling this disparity as I read the most awesome book, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity From a Consumer Culture, by Shannon Hayes. Of all the many facets of the “gender wars” and the “fallout of feminism,” that Hayes tackles, perhaps the most ongoing source of heated debate is the one that revolves around whether women staying at home to run houses and raise kids is “good” or “bad.”

I’ve been both fascinated and irritated by the “mommy wars” ever since they surfaced, and I’m convinced that much of the hullabaloo is media-created to “keep the catfight going” and keep women divided. I, personally, never had a “choice” between staying at home and going to work. As a single mother, it fell to me to both run the ship and keep it afloat. I was fortunate enough to mostly avoid 9-to-5 gigs. And though the budget was tighter than skinny jeans, the benefit of schedule flexibility allowed me to spend tons of time with my kid. Fuck the so-called “mommy wars.” I wished more people could find a way to follow their own interpretation of my model—stay at home AND work, recognize kids are kids for but a very short time, and do everything possible to enjoy the hell out of them while you can.

I cannot encapsulate here all that Hayes explains in Radical Homemakers—really, you should read it yourself—but I’m inspired enough that I want to share some important points. First, understand that Hayes was raised and educated to “conquer the world in a big way,” as she puts it. Well-educated, including a Ph.D from Cornell, she’s hardly one of those caricature women that come to mind when terms like “soccer mom” and “stay at home mom” are bandied about. She certainly did not envision herself, in her college days, as someone who would write a book like Radical Homemakers.

But somewhere along the way, Hayes started thinking about the bigger picture, not one in which women who stay at home must, by default, be dominated, enslaved and isolated like some modern version of Mad Men’s Betty Draper. She looks back in history, to a time when both men and women focused primarily on the homestead, had a wide spectrum of skills to run it, and there was equality even if division of labor existed. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, first pulling men away from home to work in factories, and then replacing things like far more nourishing home grown and home prepared, from-scratch meals with all the processed shit out there today.

Her theory about Radical Homemaking is that all of us would be better off if at least one adult in a household could focus on making a home truly a home. This person can be male or female, doesn’t matter. But the way things stand for so many people is that they are enslaved by their jobs, working endless hours to support a house and the things in it, at the expense of actually having little time to enjoy that home and all those things, so many of them acquired to futilely offer comfort in the face of anxiety ironically brought on by the high-pressure, unsatisfying jobs needed to pay for them.

Hayes understood, from the outset, the criticism she would face as a proponent of homemaking, noting that for a long time now, the “homemaker banner has come to represent two primary struggles.” The first is that if a woman stays home, she surely must be subservient. The second is that women who work outside the home are pitted against women who work exclusively inside the home. This latter argument does bring up the valid point that if a woman relies solely on a man’s income, and then the man bails, the woman will be up shit’s creek.

I admit, I could never, ever learn to rely on living on someone else’s dime, even if it were framed as cooperative living and even if my household-running skills were recognized as being of at-least-equal value. I grew up dominated by a man who insisted all rules were his to make because he put a roof over our heads and food on the table. That message stuck—I vowed to never trade independence for food and roof, and it’s a self-promise I’ve stuck to for going on thirty years now.

But Hayes’ call for radical homemaking steps outside the domination model, and points out the benefits— and costs— of having at least one member of the household dedicated to tasks like growing a lot of your own food. One huge benefit is a chance to escape the confines of corporate drudgery. One huge cost, or at least something that might seem like a cost until you get used to it, is parting ways with the consumer mentality that runs rampant.

Become more of a producer and less of a consumer—that’s the idea. Don’t spend, spend, spend. Grow your own food, can it, barter for stuff whenever you can, use the library, drive less to save on fuel. One chapter is dedicated to the fascinating history of how marketing folks wickedly manipulate us into thinking we can find happiness in products. I already knew this, but the specific examples Hayes offers reminded me that despite my own best efforts, I, too, sometimes still get totally get sucked into “retail therapy.”

In the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, author Barbara Kingsolver details how she and her family spent a year living almost exclusively on food they grew themselves or purchased from local sources. She mentions but plays down some distinct advantages she had—namely a book advance and a forty-acre farm at her disposal. Similarly, Hayes and her husband and kids share land with her parents, and they work together. I’m not begrudging either family these “built in benefits”—you could hand me my own forty acres and a couple of mules and I wouldn’t know what to do with them. But I think it is important to note that these already-in-place factors allowed both authors to present their cases from a perch not all of us have access, too.

And both earn income from writing, which happens to be one of those flex-jobs you can do at home. Not everyone can earn money like this, and I don’t care how radical you are, in this society, you need some cash flow to participate.

Still, I take tremendous inspiration from both books. In particular, Hayes erases any residual doubt I’ve wrestled with over the years, ever since those home-ec classes and the underlying suggestion that, even in the 70s, girls were still being groomed to stay-at-home, a notion I ran screaming from. I’ve often said I would’ve made a great housewife—I can cook like a mofo, sew a little, knit brilliantly, grow a garden, raise kids, and do all that other housewifely stuff. But as a feminist, it took a long time for me to understand I needn’t throw the baby (all those “female” talents) out with the bathwater (the theory that using them meant I was somehow letting down myself and all the hard work it took for women to make some progress.)

Hayes makes the great point that being dominated by a corporate job and keeping up with the Joneses is just as awful as being dominated by a man. The Radical Homemaking model offers all of us an opportunity, regardless of sex, to contemplate a lifestyle of self-sufficiency—in full or part— that falls well outside gender politics and “mommy wars.” It’s an ideal, to be sure, but you needn’t start raising goats in the backyard or milling your own flour to join in. A little box garden, fewer purchases, a dedicated day off each week from driving— these are the sorts of baby steps off the rat wheel you can take, banking less cash, certainly, but realizing, in a hands-on fashion, there really are happier options.

Spike Gillespie knits, gardens, composts, collects rainwater, makes her own yogurt, and sometimes keeps chicken al in the name of being radical. She blogs for JetBlue, KnitBuzz, and herself. And she shares some of her home economics genius at her summer camps for kids.