Rush out NOW and read this book.
EVERYTHING that Shannon advocates for in Radical Homemakers is what I've been about since I was 14 years old. Everything. It is downright amusing that a radical sociology book about taking back the home can make me CRY. But it does.
I feel validated for everything I have ever believed and striven for. And she describes the three stages of the process, and I can agree with her conclusion that if one spends too long in Step Two that one becomes subject to the kind of depression and futility that Betty Friedan wrote so passionately against.
She also argues against the wife-mother as chauffeur car culture that arose after the Second World War - which was totally foisted on us by the corporations. We are not here to drive our children from this and that or to buy this or that for the husband and 'the house'! That is not our role in life! But we have been pressurised into that role. Unless we rebel...
=) Here's to rebellion! and making a real home.
Viz:
Renouncing: increasingly aware of the illusory happiness of a consumer society. Recognise and question the compulsion to purchase goods and services that they feel they could provide for themselves 'if only...'
Reclaiming: Recovering many skills that enable one to build a life without a conventional income. This phase can take a few years or a lifetime and will perpetually be returned to as one builds ever more skills. If dwelt only in this phase for too long begin to manifest symptoms of Friedan's housewife's syndrome - 'what's all this for?'
Rebuilding: Take on genuine creative challenges, engagement with community, make significant contributions toward rebuilding a new society that reflects one's vision of a better world, through artwork, writing, farming, fine craftwork, social reform, activism, teaching, or a small business.
'The choice to become homemakers is not an act of submission or family servitude. It is an act of social transformation.... it is time we come to think of our hoes as living systems. Like sourdough starter, the home's survival requires constant attention. A true home pulses with nonhuman life - vegetable patches, yeast, backyard hens, blueberry bushes, culturing yoghurt, fermenting wine and sauerkraut, brewing beer, milk goats, cats, dogs, houseplants, kids' science projects, pet snakes and strawberry patches...'
2 comments:
So true to think of our homes as living systems...it seems lonely at home if there isn't all this life going on, even if it is just yeast!...sometimes I wonder who I am doing it for...of course myself, but for the collective remembering and holding of information. it stirs up other people to hear of my pursuits, and that, I believe, is an aspect of moving into step three discussed above. Thanks for framing it for me. p.s. been like this since teens also! But you prob. guessed that! christine b. in c'ville!
the whole way of housekeeping so radically changed with mass industrialisation - in the late 19th C. Even in towns before that people baked their own bread and so on. Of course out on the prairie one had to do.
And then there came 'modernisation' in the 1950s. Could we be any more removed from the actual processes of life (eating included)? (except for recently of course.
It pleases me NO END to see the return of the urban gardener and the living kitchen and living household. You are SO right, christine! =) And yes, I guessed that ;) all power to the distaff side!
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