If I’m wrong, I trust you’ll correct me; but if I’m right then it explains why feminist answers to women’s problems in the modern home seem to be making women less happy and less fulfilled, if more “free.” For such freedom would consist in women and their homes becoming more self-reliant and thus self-contained–these are the individualist’s definition of “freedom.” My intuition is that this is a less fulfilling and ultimately less effective manner of housekeeping than a more communal, interconnected one.

I hope I’ve cleared up any confusion, if not any controversy.

Men can handle cleaning adequately — but the question is what “adequately” means. Adequately for men is generally very much different from what it means for women. That’s the point.

That’s exactly the mentality that perpetuates the idea that men aren’t capable of handling domestic duties adequately. And it’s total bull! Several of my buds are, like me, far more persnickety about the cleanliness & appearance of their homes than their spouses.

I love her dearly, but my wife thinks swiping a Swiffer & a WetJet across the kitchen & dining room floors is an effective way to clean the tile floors. No, I haul out my semi-pro-grade, janitorial-style mop and Rubbermaid wheeled-bucket (with wringer!) to tackle that job. Is it overkill? Well, maybe it veers to the other end of the spectrum from her puny solution, but by golly, I never fret about our toddler adhering to the “5 second rule” on dropped mealtime morsels.

(Oh sure, I definitely fret about the post-meal mess, but that’s another rant for another day!)

Bonus benefit: Slinging that heavy old-school mop around is as good an upper-body workout as any you’d pay a gym for!

Anyway, point is, I think you’ll find that pure laziness is more often the reason more men don’t get involved in household chores rather than inability. Of course, there are those douchebags who gleefully foster that inept guy image just to avoid doing any work…

Members of which sex are more likely to adhere to the notion “cleanliness is next to Godliness”? That is to say, who is more likely to want a perfectly clean home? How many American women will be content with the job their husband does with cleaning? …

Labor = force = mass*acceleration

I do far more of it than my wife by that metric :)

A society that isn’t heavily subsidized by cheap goods made by a bunch of slaves utilizing massive amounts of energy is doomed to be shallow.

Caleb seems to be the only one here that grasps this.

There is a scene in the Jungle where the protagonist is expanding his socialist consciousness by stopping his stopping down the pub and staying up late reading.

If you want localism it will mean backbreaking labor for man and wife and if you want them to “develop” they will have to stay up late and do it by spending what little capital they have on books instead of booze.

Please elaborate, since it appears that your statement rests on some controversial if not theologically unsupportable assumptions.

The upshot is that women are the keepers of the spirit of a people,”

As a woman,I must say that is one heavy burden to bear. I would be more inclined to say women are the organizers of a family and in doing such organization they hold the family together. But I can agree with your more poetically put statement. However, there is nothing in “keeping spirit” that should require any female to deny her God given talents and desire to express those talents. Being a “keeper of spirit” doesn’t just mean raising children and cooking. Not to mention that “keeping spirit” gets tough when you are exhausted and frustrated.

But more important I think is that this notion of female as the home keeper has deprived men of the joys of parenting as well as the ability to know and influence their children. Men have more to offer their sons and daughters than what the paycheck buys or the weekend. All that matters to a man, his interests, his experiences, have more value to a child than all the money in the world. So just as the female has something to contribute to her community beyond child raising, the male has more to contribute to his children than providing for them. In the absence of truly local communities the question of how we can manage the total workload in a way which allows the female to express her total self as well as offer the male the opportunity to fully be a parent is an important one. This is why I think work arrangements such as job sharing and more family friendly corporate policies are so important – Dads need to spend time with their kids too just as Moms need time to make other contributions to the community.

I read that Benedict said that the washing machine was one of the most important inventions in terms of freeing women. The remarks drew a lot of snarky responses but I am inclined to agree with our Pontiff. Much of the drudgery of houekeeping has been eliminated although none of the boredom. But just as Caleb notes that feminism has often turned into more fuel for the consumer culture, so has stay at home Momdom. Relieved of the time it used to take to care for a home and kids, as Kathleen notes,the stay at home Mom is as equal force in the consumer society as her working Mom counterpart. It is the “Martha Stewart Syndrome” which certainly made Martha a wealthy woman.

D.W. I agree totally with you. I feel betrayed by a feminism which seems to require we abandon that which is vital to us as females so we can be one of the guys suceeding in the rat race. I had hoped that the women’s movement would make us all reconsider the rat race even abandon it.

In a post agrarian society the world of work is no longer connected to the world of home and children. Besides leaving women isolated in the home it also isolated men from their children. In agrarian societies women not only raised the children – men did too. And men not only brought home the bacon – women played a role in the family economy. They sold their eggs and surplus candles to the local stores. They made clothe and lace. They too were workers.
It is this balance – for both men and women – which I for certain would like to see restroed. Call it a local, agrarian FPR feminism.

Please elaborate.

It’s my intuition (and it’s merely that) that much of the frustration suffered by women working in the home stems from the relatively new isolation of it. Lacking, as we do, front porches, literally and figuratively; lacking, as we do, past generations of family members in the home; lacking, as we do, reasons and excuses for housewives to interact while doing daily work–I think an older system of sorority between wives and mothers and grandmothers at home has been mostly hacked apart. It was the wives, typically, who would knit neighboring homes together into a community, through regular everyday interaction while taking care of their individual homes. Now there are telephone chatfests (if I may stereotype) that pour into the gap but are too empty, ultimately, to fill it.

Since every school of feminism is really just a breed of individualism, I’d say feminism in principle is at best blind to these traditional structures and often antagonistic to them.

I suppose now I shall have to dip into my hoary bag of mormon insults…….Funny how the Jack mormon side of the family coughed up more material than the Catholic side….sometimes.

At times, we must insult what we esteem, just don’t tell anybody. Then again, sometimes we must insult the eminently insultable…and the list is growing because wisdom has been pronounced old fashioned.

when they asked me what there was to eat when Ma was out and I simply pointed to the kitchen…and looked in later to see what maelstrom of destruction I had wrought.

I’m trying to put off cleaning up one of those right now. I was instructed to choose between two drinks which teams of girls had prepared for me, one of which was some kind of hot cocoa/fruit concoction, the other being some kind of blueberry slurpee. The kitchen sink provides evidence of just how seriously they took their task. Oy.

Caleb is correct.

Good for you, Marchmaine, for standing up for the truth as you understand it! Choosing sides is always cathartic.