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 18, 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

I found that most discussions about mothers earning income outside the home focused on issues that never analyzed whether it was in the best interest of the woman or her family for her to work. Most of the discussion I found was focused rigidly and exclusively on strategies to get employers and government to provide more ‘family friendly’ policies and the provision of ever more and more low-cost ‘high quality’ daycare, carefully chosen buzz words which numb our consciousness into forgetting that we are dumping our children into stranger care, no matter how family friendly or high quality that daycare may supposedly be. Ironically, these magical solutions to all problems are framed against the actual reality that daycare workers are among the lowest paid, least educated and most transient workers in the labor force.

In bizarre contrast to these discussions were the ones I found centered on Linda Hirschman’s strident, anti-child, anti-woman, anti-man, anti-family platform aimed at highly-educated “choicers.” For their own good, Hirschman describes in painful detail the professional and financial toll that leaving a career long enough to care for young children would confer on a woman unwise enough to do such a reckless thing, including the potential for the unthinkable – that she might have to depend on her husband. In this choicer universe it is a disadvantage in the business world to have babies, leaving them to be born as unwelcome intrusions to be managed around, rather than seen as the tangible, joyful, proof that our species survives, and that there will be a generation after our own to care for us as we inevitably age and begin to need help.

The former discussions concerned with family friendly policy and ‘quality’ low cost daycare are unsurprisingly aimed at women who work for low wages, while the latter which darkly caution women against risky professional behavior such as childbearing or raising, are generally aimed at – quelle suprise – privileged, ultra-educated, ambitious women. These women who work for any reason other than that they must to survive, come mostly from the ranks of well educated ‘third basers,’ (born on third base and think they hit a triple), women such as Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and would-be founder of a movement which will teach women to Lean In, a consciousness raising ‘movement’ designed to help women behave more like men in the workplace. Make that the Corporate workplace.

My search for thoughtful analysis about the need for women to stay home to raise their families and care for their homes generally went unrewarded. The few discussions I did find about the wisdom of a culture that embraces homekeepers were mostly driven by unhelpful ultra-religious or ultra-conservative political ideology that did not have the inclusiveness necessary for a true grassroots movement. Very few moderate discussions address the real great American tragedy of our times – the loss of the homekeeper, and the traditional division of labor in the family business of child-raising and survival.

Because this very real tragedy has been conflated with the tragedy of millions of children spending their very early years in daycare facilities the focus of any debate about homekeepers invariably centers on whether or not it is harmful for children to be raised by paid strangers during their earliest years, or whether or not that duty should only be carried out by parents and family members. 

Unfortunately, that means that when these sporadic discussions occur, they only consider one facet of homekeeping - childcare - to the exclusion of thoughtful examination of most of the other significant losses we are suffering due to the loss of our homefront workforce. This myopic focus unfortunately has effectively short-circuited discussion and thoughtful analysis about the true nature of what we have lost, by diverting us with a cultural ‘shiny thing.’ 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/