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
My Heart is in Boston
Serfdom in Modern America:
Forging Our Own Chains
As I began to refine my
argument for why we should nurture a grass-roots social movement to return to
our most functionally sustainable model of a family unit – the single wage
earner/homekeeper model – I searched for discussion on the topic of homekeeping.
Most discussions about homekeeping as an actual “job” were negative and rigidly
focused on child-watching, as if the only real service a homekeeper performed
was child-care, generally ignoring the plethora of other valuable but mostly
invisible acts of service these women routinely provide.
Curiously, considering
that the three eight-hour shifts of care needed for a child each day would be
exorbitantly expensive by nearly anyone’s standards if purchased from a
provider, these arguments didn't assign any greater value to that part of
homekeeping than it did to scrubbing toilets, a service which can be purchased
cheaply. Other than the media’s annual totaling up of the value for these
services around Mother’s Day each year, the actual art of homekeeping is
generally invisible in public discussion, probably because it suffers from a
terrible image problem.
Occasionally I would
find discussion about The “Second Shift,” the landmark research by U.C. Berkeley
professor Arlie Hochschild, which asserts that women who work outside the home
labor an additional 720 hours per year in addition to their regulare paid employment.
Discussion I found regarding the “Second Shift” never calculated the market value of those 720 hours of labor
provided by these women, and were crafted more to point out how much less than
their ‘share’ men contribute to homekeeping.
Naturally these conversations ignored the fact that as a rule, men make more money in the market place, and that it is therefore more efficient for the
family economy for them to spend their efforts there.
The main takeaway points
from most discussions about the labor a homekeeper performs are that it is
mindless, boring, unrewarding, repetitive, unappreciated work, and is beneath
most women’s educational levels. Funny, that is exactly how I would describe my
time spent in my last “real job,” at a large non-profit organization as a
program director, whereas the time I spend at home is spent at my own direction
(except for child care, which is 24/7, period), is spent improving my life and
my family’s lives, is calming and rewarding and allows me to be able to feed my
family healthy, low-cost meals, while providing a comfortable home from which
we all can grow, achieve and prosper.
Nothing, including the level of income I earned, was better about that frankly horrible job than being at home. And of course, after I paid the costs related to working, direct and indirect, I came away having lost to the House.
Nothing, including the level of income I earned, was better about that frankly horrible job than being at home. And of course, after I paid the costs related to working, direct and indirect, I came away having lost to the House.
http://livingwage.mit.edu/
