April 13, 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

In the beginning, armed with premises which I now understand were faulty, I had originally planned to write In Defense of the Homemaker, a stirring call to women to abandon the insanity of the workforce and to return to their hearths, their children, their gardens – my book was to be a manifesto for modern domesticity and its multiple, detailed, social benefits – and for a fresh start for a culture which clearly is in grave trouble. 

I felt, and do still feel that women returning to homekeeping would be the solution to many of our current social ills, but as I plunged into my research I began to realize that I had the right solution, but for the wrong reason. My plan to rally readers around a unifying concept of the nuclear family, harking back to the days when Dad worked, and Mom baked pies, and we could afford to send our children to college, even if we had not gone ourselves, wasn’t a bad plan, it just blamed the wrong people for the problem we needed to fix.

I planned for my book to be a harsh repudiation of books like Linda R. Hirshman’s Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which I consider hopelessly cruel, anti-woman and anti-family for its message that “opting out” of the workplace is a form of deliberate self-betrayal, and that security can only be derived from paid employment, rather than from family bonds. Hirshman argues that Feminism failed in its transformative mission because it hasn’t insisted that women work. 

Naturally Hirshman’s message was aimed at upper middle class, college-educated women who could earn far more than the vast majority of their less-educated sisters, who would automatically reject this manufactured debate as entirely ridiculous (the lowly-paid sisters who make up the majority of the female work force would instantly recognize the eerily Marxist ‘glorification of labor’ propaganda and dismiss it with the contempt it deserved).

Hirshman presents ‘rules’ to women, to revive Feminism’s transformative mission; one is to have one child – if you must – but not two, and second, to force your husband to do his ‘share’ of the household chores (cruelly ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the lowest-paid women in the work force are single mothers). Many of these women who earn pitifully low wages will likely need their children’s support in their elderly years, and Hirshman’s advice to diminish their families below what well could be their own future subsistence levels indicates the dismissal of these women which shines through clearly in her exhortations. Her total ignorance about the fact that our birthrate has been below replacement levels since the mid-1970’s shines yet more light on her ‘choicer’ class tunnel vision which does not require her to wonder from where the women will come who will be so happy to live for work in the future.

Hirshman also wastes little ink on how children actually fare in daycare, or how the majority of women workers actually fare in their perpetually under-rewarded efforts in the market, as they continue to earn substantially less pay across all fields, decade after decade, in an infinitely predictable arc across the decades. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

March 13, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

The fifty-year abandonment of the traditional single-earner plus homekeeper partnership model of family economics and division of labor, has negatively and dramatically affected family security, health, and wealth, and is at the root of most of the challenges we currently face as a society.  Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, I ask this question: Are we better off now than we were fifty years ago? Sixty years ago? Seventy? Is life now better by measurable indicators than it was then? Have the changes in the way we live conferred a better quality of life, stronger families, or greater family wealth upon us since our homekeepers entered the wage market?

Has our shift from an economic and family management model that depended on one partner working outside, and one inside of the home, to a family model that depends on two income earners outside of the home, led to more prosperous or secure lives for families? Are we happier? Healthier? Are our children ok? The answer, based on statistics that outline a grim picture of child and female poverty, and overall declines in Americans’ health (made orders of magnitude worse by the current economic situation), is a resounding no. We are not better for these changes; we are actually much worse for them. Our national health and wealth have suffered dramatic losses over the last fifty-plus years, due to the negative effects of the most dramatic shift in family social structure to ever occur in our culture, or to our economy: the flight of our homekeepers into the labor market.

Slave Nation is an analysis of what has happened to those women, and their families, in the wake of the great diaspora from the home into the labor force, and into what we, the authors, term modern day serfdom. This serfdom is due to many factors, including an overcrowded labor market, unequal pay, work and government policies that unfairly affect women, loss of security nets and the additional taxes that families pay in order to have their mothers in the workforce. We believe that the facts we will present here clearly demonstrate that the flood into the marketplace of ‘paid’ (wage) labor was the end of freedom for these women, and the beginning of an era of unimaginable loss of wealth and security for their families.

In Slave Nation, we will address the loss to the family structure, the social fabric, our health, our wealth, our social justice apparatus, our critical thinking skills, our ability to self-govern, and our knowledge base that has occurred in the wake of homekeepers being alternately pushed and lured into the marketplace - by economic necessity in the case of the former and by employers who were salivating for the cheap, reasonably educated workforce the women represented, in the latter. We will then expose the falsehood of the economic ‘necessity’ of having two income earners in a family by detailing how little of the second paycheck (if any) is left over once a family adjusts for the wage gap, taxes, lost social security survivor’s benefits after a spouse dies, transportation expenses, wardrobe costs, and additional services that have to be purchased due to the absent homekeeper, in a game that is guaranteed to be lose-lose for families.

We will examine how these losses have weakened the family unit and we will look at who is gaining what we are losing, and what measures they employ to orchestrate that reverse of fortune. We will explore reasons why we as a society passively allow this theft, and we will outline specific values and truths that we need to promote to strengthen our families and communities so that we cease to be vulnerable to those who intend to exploit us if they can.

We will then propose methods that we can employ to reconstruct the society (and the protections for women and children which used to be an inherent part of that society) which fell apart in the wake of the homekeeper diaspora. The methods, are multi-pronged, using withdrawal from the labor force by as many workers as possible combined with voter-driven policy change to make homekeeping a more accessible choice for families than it has been these last many decades.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/