May 14, 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

Back at my desk

Family matters have diverted me from blogging for the past two weeks. Things are calming down - and summer is nearly here. This will be my third summer devoted to a writing project, and actually the second one devoted to Slave Nation. My ultimate hope for this manifesto is to have it published, and here in my daily blogs I am doing the closest, finest editing of the material I have been putting together for almost two years now. Ideally, the blog will also stimulate discussion which will help me to hone my points.

As a result of some of this continuous editing some of the posts you have previously read will have been altered in form, though certainly not in substance. New posting will begin this week, possibly as early as today. Thank you again for reading - and would love to hear your comments on the state of the family in your country, and how women particularly are treated (economically, politically, culturally). Most of all, I would love to hear from both sides of the aisle - are you a stay at home mom? Are you a professional working mom? I know and love people on both sides of that aisle, and would love to take a moment to clarify that I am not in the rabble-rousing (or judging) business. This is a serious discussion about some pretty bad stuff that is going on in this country that is not being seriously addressed by policy makers or by media (except when they can wrangle a juicy Mommy-wars story out of it).

That isn't what this about, here on this blog. This is about the economic, political and health reasons why the vast majority of women would be better off as practicing homekeepers than they are in the wage-earning market place. I provide facts to back up my thesis from reliable and reputable sources, which I will cite as appropriate (please comment anywhere you would like a cite; I do try to embed further info in links, but if I miss something you would like to see - lmk).

Women and children are not doing well in America. Families are not doing well in America. That is what this discussion is about - that and brainstorming about how to change the paradigm.

Here is a link to an article from NBC News, 05.13.13, discussing the economics of staying home, a choice being made increasingly by lower-wage earning women (the majority of working women) who have seen in their own lives that it costs them more to work than to stay home: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/opt-out-or-left-out-economics-stay-home-moms-1C9881635

April 24, 2013 - Special Greeting to Readers

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

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.

April 21, 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

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/

April 20, 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

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/