Slave Nation - Serfdom in Modern America: April 2013

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

April 30, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas. With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

On Feminism: From Equal to Angel to Workhorse

Equity Feminism is rooted in classic liberal Enlightenment doctrines and aims for full civil and legal (sociopolitical) equality for women. Equity Feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment with no reference to biology, and most efforts by first wave feminists can be safely included under the equity umbrella, rather than the more contemporary gender feminism umbrella. (Great quick read on Equity v. Gender Feminism for quick contextualization here.)

First Wave equity feminists were responsible for most of the reforms to working conditions that affected poor women and children who had no legal protections from abuses by employers. Unfortunately, suffrage had barely been won when a new and radical form of feminism, Gender feminism, would change the nature of feminism (which had evolved to be a flourishing and protective union of women demanding sociopolitical equality) to the forebearer of what we see today.

Gender feminism, the darling of the second wave feminist movement, by contrast, is the “genocentric and misandric branch of feminism,” according to Christine Sommers, a contemporary equity feminist who believes that “most American women subscribe philosophically to the older first wave feminism whose main goal was equity for women, especially in politics and education.” Sommers faults contemporary (gender) feminism for ‘its irrational hostility to men, its recklessness with facts and its inability to accept that the sexes are equal but different.” Sommers, of course, is viciously attacked by the majority of gender feminists who currently monopolize the academic field on this subject.

By the time women had won suffrage, Alice Paul (a radical early gender feminist), leading the Women’s Party engineered the first version of the ERA in 1926 and suffrage leaders were outraged. Carrie Chapman Catt, a key coordinator of the suffrage movement, claimed it would strike down much of the needed protective legislation which protected women and children from working conditions in factories. Obtaining this much-needed legislation had been a life-long struggle for many of these women, who believed women needed special consideration because of their role as mothers. The ideal of women’s rights recognizes and promotes the role of motherhood and family in the lives of women; "equal rights" do not.

Fifty years later, inspired by the rhetoric of civil rights, and encouraged by a market-place that courts them, the great majority of feminists now believe that women should be treated as individuals, not as a sex, and that free and open competition with men in the market place is the goal. Gender feminism is a competitive model which asks for no special favors. Unfortunately for the majority of women and their children, the fact is that women cannot, ever, earn as much as men do in a market place where male wages are the standard unit of currency - ie - it takes $1000 'male' dollars to rent an apartment, but takes $1300 'female' dollars (courtesy of the wage gap and how much more time it takes her to earn an equal amount of spending power).

Until women take the reins and use the suffrage that their equity feminist fore-mothers fought for, they are doomed to earn 'female' wages. Until and unless that happens, and I do not believe it will, we need to honestly appraise the landscape of biology, personal choice and family necessities and arrive at strategies that will give women and children, and families, a better cultural model which embraces the necessity and rewards of a culture which supports homekeepers.

Monday, April 29, 2013

April 29, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

On Feminism - From Equal to Angel to Workhorse

The ascension of Queen Victoria (who called early feminist activities “this mad, wicked folly of Women’s Rights") to the throne made things even harder – much harder – for women as the mores of the era became increasingly more conservative and repressive for women to navigate. During Victoria’s reign, there was an increasing public sentiment of the “ideal woman’ beginning to emerge, including the omnipresent ‘Angel of the Hearth’ stereotype seen in so much art and writing of the era. This rise of middle class morality made it harder for women to obtain work in certain ‘unfeminine’ professions, causing a concentration of female workers in such areas as factory work and domestic service – occupations with long hours and low pay – all predecessors of today’s ‘pink collar’ industries.

Predictably, class became a certain indicator of a woman’s chances in the new Wage-economy market place. Upper class women who had been handed the ‘Angel of the Hearth’ cultural consolation prize (and financial security) in exchange for increasingly limited opportunities in a suffocating era were locked away behind closed doors in the ‘new’ feminine spaces of the middle class home, while lower class women, whose work opportunities were limited to low and unpredictable wages, fell into dangerous waters if they found themselves without a male breadwinner at their side.

An astonishing number of those women without breadwinners found themselves practicing prostitution, a working class profession, in order to feed their children and survive (estimated by the Westminster Review to number an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 women working in the sex business in England between 1857 – 1869). In a fascinating collaboration, prostitution and the double standard evidenced by the increasing emphasis on feminine virtue during a time of rampant vice would collide to form the nascent first wave of feminism.

As prostitution increased in England, syphilis spread rapidly through all sectors of society, and it became increasingly clear to women that there was a grave double standard in place. Authorities introduced the Contagious Disease Acts in the 1860’s in an attempt to stem the spread of syphilis. Under the acts (which had been originally proposed for all women in the general public, and later reduced to apply only to prostitutes who consorted with members of the Army), women could be forcibly taken from the streets to be subjected to humiliating examinations by male doctors for signs of syphilis.

If determined to have syphilis, the women were confined, involuntarily, to ‘Lock Hospitals,’ from which they would only be released once cured, and where they could be legally confined for up to one year. Incredibly, women were expected to pay their own keep in these hospitals, and were often sent to work hospitals to be able to continue to earn wages while confined.

One brave woman went far beyond merely perceiving injustice and feeling outrage: in the first known Victorian-era instance of a ‘virtuous’ women taking up the cause and rights of prostitutes, Josephine Butler, a middle-class mother, led a political campaign begun in 1864 to overturn the Acts in what would become a massive rejection of male right to determine female agency. Butler was also part of a tenacious group that successfully lobbied Parliament to have the age of consent changed from 13 to 16, something all the men in that august body had never before seen fit to do.

Butler’s political organization would eventually host more than 900 meetings of angry middle-class women who were fully aware that the Acts had originally been penned to include them in the random inspections and incarcerations. Since their existence in a culture of supposed virtue meant that the only way they could contract syphilis was through unfaithful, sexually active husbands, women did not fail to see that they could be subjected to random and humiliating examinations and imprisonment for something that their husbands had done. This anger and activism led to the organization of a female political structure which ultimately did defeat the Acts, and left a powerful and politically seasoned framework in place for later First Wave feminists to utilize.

Breaking down barriers to education and professional employment had already formed the backbone of early feminist thought in the 19^th c, with women in the United States and Britain having already gained admittance to colleges and professional schools, but this new outrage-driven movement had an entirely different aspect to it of privileged women acting protectively for other less privileged women.

This protective behavior naturally extended to children who were being increasingly exploited by industry, and true Equity Feminism - authentic Feminism based on women organizing politically in order to protect themselves and other less able women, and children, and to secure equal legal rights for women in the eyes of the law, including suffrage (Classical Liberalism) - soon was headed into its most productive, useful and meaningful years.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

April 28, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

On Feminism: From Equal to Angel to Workhorse

This all happened at the same time that the Artisan or Guild system, based on apprenticeships, began to negotiate its relationship with the new wage economy. Under the system which had traditionally determined wages male apprentices earned wages with the goal of buying tools and property for the time they became masters with their own apprentices; in contrast, female ‘apprentices’ (generally 'pink collar' type domestic workers) earned wages with the goal of earning dowries. To further complicate matters, at this point in time Europe had been battered by three centuries of death and destruction due to repeated incidences of the plague, of sweating sickness, of cholera, of small pox and finally, of syphilis, so that by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the population of England had still not regained safe population levels.

In one event known as the English sweating sickness in 1485, over 100,000 people in London died, along with half the populations of Oxford and Cambridge. Mass graves were filled with infectious victims in every city, and populations fell dramatically in all parts of the country, undoubtedly leaving survivors with tremendous collective ptsd, in addition weakened support systems. The sweating sickness would re-occur several more times into the early 1500's, ebbing and flowing over many frightening decades. Even without the waves of illness and catastrophic loss of life to disease, things would have been hard on a society that was trying to build its numbers: from 1350 to 1850 Europe suffered through a climate event known as the 'Little Ice Age,' which led to widespread famine and resultant population declines.

The merging factors of the artisan system culture (the social group which traditionally set wages in pre-wage-economy times), the new wage economy, and the decimated population created a social dynamic which I believe was ground zero from which the original gender wage gap originated. Because population growth was such an important national goal it became accepted practice that wages for women’s work should be kept sufficiently high enough to build dowries (and justify their absence from the family endeavors), but not high enough so that they might remain single – by definition, women’s wages must be too low for them to be self-supporting, because it would negatively affect population growth if women were allowed to remain single; women’s wages must be too low for self-support, in order to ensure that they would marry and have the children which were so desperately needed to rebuild the decimated population.

Additionally, because men had now become the primary wage earners in the family, it became necessary for women’s jobs to have a temporary character to them that allowed employers to prevent male unemployment and to adjust to changing patterns of demand. Women were kept ‘on call,’ as a work force, in order to afford the flexibility needed to keep men employed both in times of high or low labor needs. As a result of this lower wage, and temporary nature of their work, women’s voices in family economies began to decline, as their access to cash diminished and as their domestic contributions became increasing invisible not only to society but to their own families who were generally absent during the solitary hours they managed the home duties.

Further complicating matters and diminishing women’s voices were the doctrines of Coverture, developed in England in the High and Late Middle ages, originating in the Common Law legal reforms of Henry II (1133-1189), and subsequently enshrined in English and American law, until married women’s’ property acts began to be passed early in the 19^th c in both countries. Under the practice of Coverture married and single women existed as distinctly separate legal entities, with single women – femes sole (woman uncovered), and married women, feme coverture (woman under cover) having radically different amounts of control over their properties and assets. These laws, developed in England and transferred to all English speaking colonies, persisted until the 19^th century, forming the body of laws that would govern women in the United States after the American Revolution.

Under Coverture, a single woman had the right to own and dispose of property and to make contracts on her own behalf. Conversely, a feme coverture, a woman under cover (of her husband because they became one legal entity at marriage as only one could be recognized under Common law in legal issues), would have no legal right to dispose of her own property, or even her own wages. She could not make contracts, and was essentially at the mercy of a good or bad husband..

In the United States women were waging a war on coverture from before the American Revolution. Early feminism began here in the United States as equity feminist Abigail Adams penned Remember the Ladies to her husband before the Revolution and pointedly assured him that if they did not remember the ladies the ladies would take up revolution, because their security should not depend on whether or not they had a kind husband, but should be ensured by law. Equity Feminism is a doctrine of ideology rooted in classical liberalism that aims for full civil and legal equality for women based on a moral doctrine requiring equal treatment. The time was right and an avalanche of laws from 1809 (mere decades after the revolution) through 1920 would effectively destroy the institution of Coverture by ensuring women's rights to divorce, protection of personal property, child custody, alimony and admittance to professional schools. Women had won the equity war by the time they won the vote, in all practical, legal ways.

Prior to the Wage economy this would have had relatively little significance for femes coverture in terms of their real power within the family. Their work previously was visible and valued, genderized work did not automatically mean devalued work, and women had more access to cash in the previous barter and family economy. While women may not have had the right legally to buy or dispose of property or to make contracts, they had a voice in their family that was based on sound economic footing, and their goals would have likely been advanced more satisfactorily before the Wage economy than they would have been after, as their voices became harder and harder to hear without the hard cash necessary to back them up (as women began their long uncontrolled slide into institutionalized poverty - along with their children).

Saturday, April 27, 2013

April 27, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains
On Feminism - From Equal to Angel to Workhorse

First Wave feminism, more aptly described as Equity Feminism, was a high-minded response to a need which grew out of the changing economy which allowed serious abuse of workers in factories. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most work was done within the construct of the “Family Economy,” where all members of the family made their own contributions to the unit’s survival. Work in a Family Economy could be gendered, but not rigidly, and female work was not immediately devalued because it was done in the open and was ‘visible,’ as was all other work in this economy.

In a Family Economy women’s work was often associated with the generation of cash, and with very high public visibility; in a barter society women developed streams of industry (raising poultry, selling excess butter, weaving cloth at home) which brought cash into the family economy. This work was often done communally, with many women working together, even occasionally to benefit one of the group at a particular time – such as would be the case with many women working together to construct a woman’s dowry or trousseau, those household items she would need to bring with her into a marriage in order to establish her new home. On the whole, women were seen in a far more positive light than they soon would be with the origin of a wage economy where they would forever and ever, amen, earn less than men (at least for the almost 200 years so far since this experiment began).

With the emergence of wages and the transition from the Family Economy to the Wage Economy, during the IR we see an entirely different dynamic begin to control the perception of the value of ‘women’s work.’ Ironically, the emergence of a wage economy devalued female domestic contributions by making them invisible to society and to their families. Factory and mill owners needed the cheap labor these females represented, and lured them into low-paying jobs; however, female work was always considered temporary and was always done in addition to responsibilities for domestic work on behalf of their families.

Even though women could go ‘out’ to earn a small wage, rather than produce a product or service at home for cash, that work took second place to their unpaid, unwaged domestic responsibilities at home, which were now done by women alone, rather than in concert with other family or community members (by now other women and most men had now entered factory work and domestic work became a solitary labor for the most part). At this point lower female wages, or lack of wages, ironically contributed to the devaluation of their efforts on behalf of the family, and their attendant loss of status, as the new ‘wage’ mentality automatically devalued work for which no wage was earned, which now meant the majority of all household work. Ominously, women had more access to cash in a barter economy than they would have in the new wage economy.

Another dynamic which emerged as the result of the new wage economy was a change in how wages were apportioned between men and women and how that structure reflected the changing nature and purpose of dowries. Traditionally, dowries were that portion that a woman brought into her marriage. Immediately prior to the IR that would have been possibly a small amount of cash, along with the household objects and items that were invariably provided by the new wife upon her marriage to her new household economy. As women began to enter the factories and earn wages their paychecks began to replace their dowries as they saved their earnings for future marriage.

Friday, April 26, 2013

April 26, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

On Feminism

From Equal to Angel to Workhorse

A History of the Recent Rights of Women

It would be impossible to write a manifesto calling for women to return to their home fronts without including a discussion of feminism. I quickly discovered that the problem with that proposition is to know whose feminism, in which century, and most importantly, for the benefit of which group, I would discuss. Because there are two diametrically-opposed movements which occurred in the United States across two different centuries with the interests of two entirely different classes of women at their heart, it soon became clear that a simple discussion of “feminism” would be anything but simple.

In order to provide some clarity I will outline “feminist” activity in terms of “waves.” First Wave and Second Wave feminism refer to mostly female-driven social movements during the 1800s, in the case of the former, and in the mid-1900s for the latter. I will discuss how First Wave and Second Wave feminism are polar opposites of each other, and how they should in no way ever be confused as having even remotely similar goals, or target beneficiary populations. Unfortunately, in the rare instances that most people are even aware of First Wave feminism it is unlikely that they would resist the natural temptation to believe it was merely the ideologically similar precursor to Second Wave feminism – known now by the sadly ironic moniker “Women’s Liberation.”

There were significant events leading up to First Wave and occurring long after Second Wave that must be considered in order to begin to see the full picture of where feminism has been, what its separate camps’ goals are, what was accomplished (and how), where both went wrong, and where both are now. Where feminism will go from here is a matter which will deeply affect all Americans in the near future and we all have a vested interest in defining and supporting a type of feminism that strengthens women and families.

In order to do that we need to understand that feminism in one form is good for society, and that other forms of feminism – such as 'Women’s Lib,' the lable applied to Second Wave feminism - is not only destructive, but is not actually true feminism at all (if female-friendly is part of your definition, at least). This mis-named movement has caused almost unimaginable harm and destruction to our families and communities by propagandizing the ‘progressive’ society where both parents in a family work for wages. Sadly, the people who have been most harmed by this powerful, intellectually-dishonest, wrong-thinking movement have been women themselves, followed closely by their children.

A look at the goals of the original feminists will demonstrate that the vast majority of their activism was in pursuit of protective legislation in the Industrial Revolution marketplace for women and children. As the weakest members of society they were naturally exploited by the new manufacturing industry, abuses which were well-documented in the literature of the era. With no laws to regulate wages or working conditions these vulnerable populations were reduced to grave poverty and exposed to significant danger in the workplace.

The early feminists were middle class women who saw these abuses and organized together to persuade male legislators into crafting laws such as the ten hour work day, a minimum age at which children could work, and workplace safety regulations. Many of these early women, such as Annie Besant, took an active role in organizing strikes in factories which led to early forms of unions which gave workers a slightly more fair, slightly less dangerous shake in the workplace.

First Wave feminism originally grew out of the abolitionist movement in the Northeast, and continually championed the causes of oppressed groups as it gathered strength through the 19^th century, ultimately culminating in winning suffrage for women in 1920 with the enactment of the 19^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Women had not originally sought suffrage, and in fact the majority of women who attended the first Women’s Convention in Seneca Falls in 1854 were shocked and actually appalled when Elizabeth Cady Stanton first called for the group to strategize toward that end.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

April 25, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

There are more reasons I will develop further for why we need women to stay home (or men, if their wives earn more - there is no gender angle here except for the absolute fact that women earn less money than men and families should plan accordingly to maximize their efforts), and why there needs to be a revival movement for homekeeping in the United States. One incredibly important reason is the economy, and I will lay out my arguments and suggestions for reversing the two income earner per family trend to the single living wage model, in a conscious, volunteer, social policy implementation at a grass-roots' level. This grass-roots effort would help to stabilize the financial crises that we have suffered through for so many years now by strengthening individual family finances with the end goal being to achieve true sustainability, which cannot be achieved when it actually costs women to more to work than they truthfully bring back to their families.

For the last several years, as we moved further and further into the Second Great Depression which has gripped our economy, the talking heads have assured us that more jobs and more employment are the answers to all problems – the more people we can get earning paychecks, the better! Then we can keep the ball rolling by spending! Higher employment and consumption will save us! I say: nonsense. We need fewer workers, who make more pay and consume fewer things. We need as many people to leave the workforce as possible, leaving more opportunities for those who stay to be able to earn the lost, illusive, living wage that once existed, courtesy of our old friends, Supply and Demand. As mentioned before, this would decrease the amount of taxes available to government agencies, which would have the additional benefit of shrinking government.

What the United States needs is not more jobs, but fewer people competing for those jobs in the labor market. It is time for the country that is famous for “rugged individualism” to quit being so sheepishly obedient to their corporate masters, to reject the philosophy of consumerism, and to carve their own good life out of the morass that the politicians and the businessmen have created.

My final thought for this introduction is to remind my reader that in the United States, the number one predictor that a woman will have to declare bankruptcy at some point in her life is that she has children, so what does that say? This kind of degrading poverty was unknown prior to women entering the work force, and is one of the primary reasons they should reject it for the evil, soul-sucking trap that it is. In short, I disagree with, or would at least amend what Dostoyevsky said about judging a civilization: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” I think the degree of our civilization can be judged by our female and child poverty rates, by our broken families, by our 41% illegitimacy rate and by our abandoned elders.

In the following pages I will outline and prove how the loss of our homekeepers is crippling us, and then I will present my plans for a strategic female withdrawal from the workforce. This manifesto is a call to families and communities to return to the lifestyle and the quality of life that lifestyle afforded when we had designated homekeepers. That lifestyle has been taken from us to enrich others at our great expense, and it is time to stand up for ourselves by refusing to participate in our own enslavement any longer.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

April 24, 2013 - Special Greeting to Readers

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

Special Hello to Readers! Thank you to my readers from the U.S., Russia, Spain, Finland, Italy, Germany, U.K., South Korea and even Albania! I am so excited to see that I am having new readers and return readers, too, as the page counts grow every day (thank you, thank you!). It is very gratifying after having worked on this project so hard for so long to see the response in the numbers of you who are 'tuning in,' daily. Please don't be shy - please leave a comment and I will certainly respond. One of the goals for me in writing Slave Nation was to stimulate a conversation that would challenge the current climate of draconian and unfriendly attitudes and policies which affect women and their 'work' in the United States.

To start that conversation off I will sum up how life is for most non-professional American women under our current political, economic and social system in one sentence: They MUST work (for discounted wages), they MAY have children (If dumb enough to have more than one (unless they are wealthy), that is due to their own lack of self-control or planning and is going to cost plenty more in daycare*) and they WILL be the primary provider of all things domestic in the home, regardless of how many hours labored in the marketplace. And it is much worse if you are a black or Hispanic woman. What kind of an incentive plan is that for women to do anything but refuse to have children? What do you think?

If you are a reader from out of the states, I would be very interested to hear about life for women and children in your country, and what your perspective is on the wealth gap in America and how it harms our women and children (especially our elderly women).

*(Despite the fact that our birth rate has been below replacement levels for four solid decades, and we need children now more than ever; they should not be considered shocking lapses of judgment that must be stoically managed around, these are the children who will support us collectively and individually in our old age - skimping on children is a bad plan for our future.)

Now, on to our regularly scheduled programming:

Another very serious and very grave reason for a homekeeper revival would be the actual health of our children, both mental and physical. The gift of being raised by your own mother is a gift that never stops giving, even down through generations. Consider what has happened to the actual physical health of our children since the flight of homekeepers into the job market. I believe that the obesity epidemic in our country can be directly traced to the flight, and I will argue it is the number one reason our youth now face this crisis. (Closely related to the obesity crisis is the female and child poverty rate in this country which is shameful, and is a critical reason why women should leave the paid work place: because it has impoverished them and their children.)

Now add to that the tsunami of "disorder" diagnoses which have made American children the most medicated and most-highly narcotized group of juveniles on the entire planet, and ask yourself, is this really better than what we abandoned? Is this really going to be worth the lost generation (or more) of children who will struggle with socially-induced drug addiction as they pass from childhood into adulthood with full-blown addictions to these medications? Did we go to work so that our children could be fat and narcotized to keep them docile and manageable while we warehouse them so that we can go to same employment (paying large portions of our salaries to taxes to operate the behemoth public school industry - a prime example of 'forging our own chains if ever there was one)? Did we really have our children so that they could become guinea rats in the highly profitable mass-pharma experimentation which is now being conducted sub rosa on their persons?

Related to the obesity crisis is the empty neighborhood crisis. Without a parent at home “latch-key” children are less likely to go outside and play. This is the result of not only the fact that children need to be prodded sometimes to get fresh air, but because of actual safety concerns. When women stay home they are a constant presence in the neighborhood and less mischief in general is likely to happen where it can be easily observed. Homekeepers help keep neighborhoods safe and free of crime when they are present in large enough numbers, leaving neighborhoods safe for children to play and exercise (another benefit of safe neighborhoods is higher home values).

I challenge mothers (or fathers, if their wives can earn more through employment for the family than they can) to find a way to stay home with their children. To argue that your child would rather have dollars than your presence, to have objects rather than to be able to come home from school to his own home, is disingenuous and not worth serious discussion (ask them!); it will be a challenge, and the work will be hard, no doubt, but it is what is best for your children and your family and for these years individualism is not a good pairing with parenting.

The primary challenge for women to do this is obviously the financial part of the equation. I doubt there are too many women who work who feel that they could afford to leave their job, but I challenge them to really scrutinize the costs of working, and the costs of items like prepared foods (honest accounting here will mean calculating the future medical bills that will accompany eating these kinds of food), the skyrocketing costs of transportation and work clothing. As I said before, frugality has always been the backbone of the single income earner model. You can learn to be frugal; you just have to be conscious of what you want in exchange for your efforts.

A larger social benefit of living simply is that by leaving the workforce (if you can) you can collectively raise the wages and prospects for those who can't - single mothers head over half of the households in the U.S. that are deemed to be below the Federal poverty level; if female labor were not so cheap and plentiful they would be able to command higher wages, giving their families a chance to climb out of poverty which would benefit all of us who aren't 1%'ers.

You can also look at your assets – sell things that you can, downsize your home, move to a less expensive part of the country, have your mom live with you for childcare while you work part time. There are literally thousands of internet sites and blogs dedicated to this frugal movement; you can find plenty of ideas to move in the right direction online, and I will discuss them in further chapters dedicated to the “how to” portion of this radical exiting of the workforce I envision. Americans used to be ridiculously creative - I'm sure enough of a vestige of that creativity remains to turn the tide that has nearly destroyed the American family. I hope so.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

April 23, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

To make matters even worse, if they could be, the illusory extra income, while the illusion lasted, was spent in bidding wars against other families for homes in neighborhoods with the “good” schools, or on second and third cars, bigger televisions, obscenely large homes (McMansions, defined by Urban Dictionary as 'a large and pretentious house, typically of shoddy construction') and expensive restaurants and hobbies.

When the illusion of the “extra” income faded and reality set in, the families were frequently saddled with debt that enslaved their wives and mothers for the duration, rather than until the economy gained strength and they were able to return home, as they always had in the past after saving the family finances (ironically, the economy would gain strength - because of the large, cheap, fresh labor supply of women, but debt and increased appetites for consumption and conveniences sealed their fates). In 2013 full time homekeepers are so rare that there are only an estimated five million of them left (and falling), and they are demographically younger, less educated and far more likely to be foreign-born than the housewives of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

So, why does it matter? Why shouldn’t women work in the market place exactly the same as men? The answer to that is simple - because most female workers do not earn a fair or equal wage; if they could earn a living wage, this would be an entirely different conversation, but would still be based around reclaiming a society where one income can sustain a family in reasonable security and comfort. With nine out of ten women employed in the lowly-paid service sector, it is safe to say that these women are not earning anything that approaches a fair living wage, especially when you consider that even they, at the very lowest rung of the employed economic ladder make less than men in their same classifications. The gender wage gap is blind to class, too; professional women suffer the same overall beginning ratio of underpayment as non-professional women, only at higher income levels with professional women earning $8000 less in their first jobs after graduation, than their male counterparts, initiating a gap which actually widens over time.

The next question is: Who needs homekeepers, anyway? The answer is simple: we all do, especially our children, especially in their infancy. In my own experience as a mother I have always known in my heart of hearts that it would be very unlikely that I would step in front of a speeding car to save another woman’s child, unless I had an extraordinarily close connection to the woman or child. It would have been unfair to my own who needed me; my first priority would always be to my own children.

Therefore, I had to ask myself, how could I pretend to myself that it would be ok for another woman to have the main responsibility of keeping my children safe? When I took my children to the city pool, or to the beach, I never considered it the life guard’s responsibility to make sure my children didn’t drown. He was good back-up, but they were my progeny, my future, not his. No lawsuit or settlement would ever bring my children back if someone else didn’t do their job. And in fact, it wasn’t the lifeguard’s job, anyway, it was mine and mine alone. Parents are the people best-suited to raise their own children – because they have the biggest investment in their children’s survival.

We also need homekeepers to raise our children to be good and productive citizens who are able to manage this democracy the way it was intended to be managed – prudently, by an informed electorate who would hold the elected responsible for their actions. The state of our government in this country is a tragedy. We are now going on a third generation of voters (if they even vote, which is a different and even more tragic outcome) who have been raised from pre-K to college by strangers instead of their parents. Children enter daycare as young as two weeks old; from there they graduate to public schools that are better at crowd control and mass testing than they are at teaching the basics of critical thinking necessary for self-governance, or basic skills necessary for life. It is inevitable that the influences of strangers will eventually affect our children’s world view, and not necessarily in ways that match our own.

Equally harmful to our children and our way of life is the single most necessary element to control the large gatherings of children in one place that are a signature of our collectivist childcare system: conditioned obedience. A herd mentality is not only encouraged but vigorously insisted upon, and harshly enforced in our child care centers - at whatever age or grade children may be (public schools are the number one form of subsidized childcare in our nation).

Critical thinkers, learning questioners and children who are just too active for the sedentary school environment are labeled as troublemakers, and learn to endure a constant stream of disapproval. Children who are not suited to the rigid, highly-regulated environment that is our public school system are now routinely drugged with highly addictive narcotics which make them passive and sedate, often at the insistence of the school personnel – in order to be “focused” enough to absorb the material they need to be able to regurgitate during “testing,” so that they can eventually be “successful.” It is just easier to control a room full of 30+ students when they are toned down with their daily dose of chemical compliance. Drugged obedience, and herd mentality are not the building blocks of a healthy and prosperous democracy. I just can’t say it any more plainly than that.

Monday, April 22, 2013

April 22, 2013 Special Edition - Why you should buy American made products whenever possible

The overall message of Slave Nation is that we had something (freedom to live reasonably comfortable lives with time for family, learning, hobbies and general well-being because most people in society had one wage earner who could earn an amount that would sustain their family) and we lost it in exchange for massive losses of good American jobs and we exchanged it for the right to be permanently enslaved by the debt that comes from working for less than a living wage, the new 'normal' in Americans' earnings, especially for women. That choice by American corporations to sell out their labor force, and by the American people to buy low-priced goods from their own competitors eventually has been one of the major factors leading to one of the most obscene income and wealth gaps known in any of the industrialized nations of the world.

Therefore, it is more important now than ever for Americans to buy American. At a fair price. Not for a third-world, human-rights ignoring price, but for a living wage, for what it would cost to live here. It is not too much to ask. It is not too much to demand for our children as they grow and replace us in the labor force.

In order to help promote this goal, and to be 'part of the solution,' I am going to begin listing great American-made products that I have found on a regular basis in this blog. I am not being reimbursed in any way for recommending these products; I am just sharing information. By buying American we can raise the living wage for all, and help toward the ultimate goal of Slave Nation, which is to help families be able to afford to have a homekeeper again. Buying American is an act of self-defense and should be a major priority in our purchasing decisions.

The first product I am recommending is "Up & Up Fresh Citrus Handwash" available at Target stores.

Pros: * very reasonably priced at or just under $1 * great product; works well, smells wonderful, attractive packaging, lasts quite a while * Does not make skin itchy or dry * Made in the U.S.

Cons: * There is no refill option making plastic use excessive * Some of the components are made out of the U.S. * Target is a large multi-national, non-unionized, non-local company

On the whole, I still feel like it is a great product and do recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good American handsoap.

April 22, 2913

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

The term “latch keykid” was coined, and a new industry, known as “daycare” was born for children who had previously been raised at home by their mothers. Organized child care facilities had previously only existed in primarily communist nations that deliberately separated children from their parents for ideological and economic reasons (weakened family ties contributed to state security, as did female labor participation); now they were to become the new “normal” in American child rearing.

As women entered the workforce families and society struggled to replace the ghost of the missing mother. Services and conveniences exploded in the market place at this time, gaining momentum as we morphed into the greed-based culture of the 1980’s. A slew of consumer products now were absolutely necessary for the “working mom” to be able to put in her 40 hour week and still remain the primary care and service provider in the home, which countless future studies would prove she would be.

Women worked more than they ever had been before, and now were paying for services that only the wealthy had utilized in previous years. They paid for cooking (but it was bad - HamburgerHelper, Pop Tarts, frozen microwave dinners and fast-food drive-through meals hardly replaced the nutritious cooking Moms once provided, and came at a much higher cost), they paid for laundry (husband’s shirts now went to the cleaner along with Mom’s work clothes), they paid for childcare like they had never paid before, and on top of all that, the women who entered the workforce paid taxes.

Where their work had never been taxed before, and belonged only to themselves and their families, it was now a commodity of the government: “employed” workers pay taxes. Previously, 100% of these women’s efforts had accrued to their families; now, depending on tax rates, only 50 – 60% of the pay for 100% of their efforts would find its way into use by the family, resulting in a huge net loss to women and to families (the gender pay gap never goes away, so taxes diminish what is a small piece of the pie to start).

In fact, by the time women paid for the costs of employment – taxes, the costs of services at home to replace a fraction of the work they had done for the family in the past (despite the need for the cruel and inhumane “second shift” which immediately developed), the actual costs of working, such as transportation and wardrobes and worst of all, the loss of the safety net a non-employed adult represented as a reservoir of potential income in times of emergency, it is hard to believe that all of this could be accomplished on a fraction of the pay that men were earning for the same work, and still make it worthwhile for the family unit for the mother to go out of the home for paid employment. And it couldn't.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Sunday, April 21, 2013

April 21, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

Homekeepers bore the children that would support their generation as it aged. They kept their own houses, socialized their children, cooked their family’s meals, made certain the children went to school clean and fed, volunteered in their local communities, and watched out for problems in their neighborhoods such as sick or elderly neighbors who might need help. By not hiring help, they were able to live on one income, raise their own children and be a benefit to their families and their communities.

One of the most valuable parts of this arrangement was that if something were to happen to the key income earner in the family the mom could work part time until the family situation stabilized before returning to the home that she had been able to help preserve through a lay-off or sickness. She was a blanket insurance policy for her family, in effect - she was a “card up the sleeve” during times of family adversity. Until the 1970’s there was no stigma attached to this sort of traditional lifestyle, and it was considered an honorable and sensible way for a woman to “support” herself, through her service to family and community, in addition to realizing the benefits of raising her progeny in the most supportive available construct. Contrary to the home being the site of oppression, home was the site of a small family business, with women managing and caring for family assets.

These women would typically marry men from their same social and economic class, and typically men who would be involved in some form of blue-collar factory work, or low-level service field such as mail carrier or bank teller. The men did not have college educations, but they had skills and increasingly well-paying jobs as America roared back from World War II.

Union membership strengthened the sector that worked for it and during the fifties and sixties the working class family was making more money than ever and was now realistically able to send their kids – boys and girls - to college for a very brief and fleeting moment in history. And then the ride ended. Manufacturing work in the U.S. declined abruptly and dramatically between 1960 and 1975, with the new practice of corporate “outsourcing,” which meant sending millions of jobs that had previously been performed by Americans to countries with more cheaply priced (and far less protected) labor pools.

At that point the scarcity of jobs put downward pressure on the family wage and the loss of buying power began to force these women, these providers of all things domestic and these insurance policies against disaster, out of their homes into low paid ‘pink collar’ jobs. Their budgets became pinched to the point that they no longer had a choice: they had to enter the labor market, increasingly on a full-time basis, as periods of under- or un-employment occurred in their husbands’ work lives.

As the economy worsened (ironically the flood of new workers could only have the effect of pushing down wages while raising prices for goods and services), as the inflation of the 1970’s stripped more and ever more buying power from the family budget these families had to send out their women to work and saw their quality of life seriously deteriorate as a result.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Saturday, April 20, 2013

April 20, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

There is another very real social tension over the worth of a supported woman who doesn’t “work,” whether or not she must to survive, as seen in the recent case of Anne Romney being called out for ‘never working a day in her life.’ That tension is part and parcel of the social culture of gender-feminist-driven “choice,” and “individualism” that has permeated society for the last fifty-plus years. Its propaganda clouds our thinking when it comes to homekeepers, casting them in the roll of an almost willful parasite - unemployable at best, weak or stereotypically self-indulgent or lazy, at worst - rather than as some of society’s toughest and most valuable human capital.

In short, we have confused the value of women’s actual contributions to their families and communities with the act of earning income, mistakenly assigning value in direct proportion to earnings, somehow managing the mental acrobatics necessary to ignore the numerous services the homekeeper provides when we assign ‘worth.’ Because of this we value women who do not earn income less than we value those who do, which is not exactly an incentive package for these women to jump into the unpaid avocation of homekeeping. At a time when we need to woo women across all economic and educational sectors back into the home we need to do better by them in terms of respect, at the very least.

And while we are examining our values and beliefs, how did it become an accepted part of who we are and how we live that we farm the majority of our children out to so-called “child care,” rather than pay ourselves to raise them at home? Although I make the case that child-caring is only one facet of homekeeping, it is nonetheless one of the most important jobs a homekeeper performs, and the results of how that job is done resonates through our culture. Therefore, I ask: How can we thrive as a democracy when the lowest paid members of society are the main care-givers during infancy and early childhood for our future voters and decision makers? Why do we allow our children’s values to potentially be shaped and formed by the least educated, lowest paid and most transient members of the workforce? Why do we accept the “inevitability” and consequences of stranger childcare as if there were not a perfectly good alternate solution to raising children – a model that worked very well for millennia?

I also want to ponder our actual quality of life in the United States in 2013.To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are you better off now than you were fifty years ago? Is life better now by measurable indicators? I would argue not. We have gone from being one of the healthiest countries in the world to one that is raising children who are currently projected to have shorter life expectancy's than their parents, courtesy of a raging epidemic of self-induced obesity.

We are now a country where appointed Supreme Court justices uphold the rights of corporations, whose lawfully mandated goal is to create profit, to spend without limit in elections (predicated on the farce that corporations are people, fully imbued with 1^st Amendment rights), thereby allowing elections to be sold to the highest bidder, regardless of whether or not that will result in policies that will make life better or worse for families.

Women and children are poorer now than they have been in the last 90 years in this country. I want to repeat that: Women and Children are poorer now than they have been in the last 90 years in this country, with 22% of children living under the laughably defined Federal Poverty Level. In short, we have lost ground in every way that matters. We are poorer, sicker and less protected than ever from instability in our home and national life. We did not do what we needed to as a society to retain our homekeepers, and we are suffering the consequences.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Friday, April 19, 2013

April 19, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

Because so many women (un-choicers) must leave their children in daycare because of true financial necessity this debate is guaranteed to ignite a firestorm of frustration and emotion whenever it rears its ugly head. Defensive about our choices (and frustrated due to our lack of choices) we commit to defending whichever “team” we belong to, be it working or stay at home mother, with the resulting nasty free for all that can be seen in the comments section of any online commentary on the topic.

Because of this one-dimensional angst-driven focus on the outcomes for children and inflammatory debates over the appropriateness or inappropriateness of our childcare or work choices we seem to entirely miss the forest for the trees – all of society is harmed by the loss of a traditional homekeeper, not just children. Men are harmed, women are harmed, elders and children are most certainly harmed – the entire family suffers, as do entire communities. Our stubborn, childish refusal to discuss the realities of this truth will only further delay the work we must eventually commit to doing to restore the health and wealth of our families and our country.

We have harmed ourselves from the bottom up for the past fifty-plus years in the wake of deep anti-marriage gender feminism that swept through American society in the late 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s. The disdain for marriage, seen by a divorce rate that doubled in ten short years, coupled with the loss of working-class manufacturing jobs set us on an unsustainable social course. The present-day fruits of those anti-family choices and anti-family economics are now painfully clear, from the explosion of new “diagnoses” of children who “need” to be medicated for “attention” disorders, to the childhood obesity epidemic that plagues the children of even our middle income families, to the deepest child and female poverty ever known in America, and lastly to the unchecked greed and materialism which has become the signature of life in our times.

These are only a few of the many ways that I will prove that we have been harmed by our disintegrated division of labor tradition which draws heavily on shared and separate responsibilities of parents and an inherent frugality and self-reliance which allows for the one income earner model.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/