Betty Friedan
When I took the intro to women’s studies class in college, Betty Friedan was hardly mentioned. To the extent that she was discussed, she was mostly dismissed for focusing exclusively on the needs of straight, white, middle-class women. To some degree, the problem was that she had succeeded so well — to my generation of younhg women, the idea that anyone would take satisfaction in gleaming floors was pretty much incomprehensible, so her insights seemed obvious.
And yet, here I am, in 2006, writing on a semi-regular basis about who vacuums the floor and picks up the dirty socks. In some ways the world has been radically transformed since in 1963; in other ways, not so much.
Last month, Sandy at the imponderabilia of actual life wondered whether yesterday’s "housewives" are the same as today’s "SAH-moms." I do think, for better or worse, the feminist revolution made it harder for women to take pride in a well-kept house. But, in a world where children’s success can’t be taken for granted, regardless of their parents’ situation, investing time and effort in childrearing makes more sense.
The problem, however, is that childrearing is much less predictable than housecleaning. Housecleaning is sometimes tiring, often boring, always repetitive. But you can pretty much guarantee that if you put in the effort, you’ll get the results. There’s something satisfying about knowing that. (I can’t be the only one who scrubs the stove or the tub when angry or frustrated.) Childrearing is ultimately not predictable in the same way.
February 6th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
I was a moody, aimless tthirteen-year-old with no ambition or even a notion of what I wanted to do in life. What was the big deal, I wondered? I can always stay home with my kids, right? This frustrated my mother to no end, and one day she sat me down, pulled a battered copy of “The Feminine Mystique from the shelf and said, “Read this. This is what’s going to happen to you if you don’t decide to make something of yourself.” I rolled my eyes and muttered the 1978 equivalent of “whatEVER,” but I read it.
Hoo boy, did it have a galvanizing effect! I read those descriptions of bored, frustrated housewives and something in me woke up and said, No, thank you! It was going to be world travel and adventure and a job for me – and then (maybe) marriage, but I certainly wasn’t going to stay home with my kids, no sir!
Well, after the world travel and the adventure and the many jobs, here I am, at home with my kids. And yet, I don’t feel like a housewife. Maybe because of everything I did before kids, but mostly because cleaning house is – as it was to my mother before me – not high on my list of priorities or talents. Even so, I completely agree that on those occasions where I do tackle some nasty chore around the home, there is a level of satisfaction that is far more predictable than a lot of my interactions with the kids.
(The strange thing is that my mother was a “housewife” herself, and didn’t seem to mind being one in the slightest. But many things are not apparent to a teenager).
February 6th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Well, I think that Darla Shine would tell you that your children deserve a clean *and* stylish home, so how can you do anything less? And then she’d pull out a study showing a correlation between better grades for kids and cleaner houses. Never mind that correlation doesn’t equal causation, or that the study doesn’t look at who’s doing the cleaning.
Meh. I may take a certain satisfaction in having clean toilets and floors, and even enjoy doing it if I’m a zen kind of mood, but it just doesn’t engage one intellectually, as Friedan pointed out. Despite Darla’s step #5 (Bond with your home), I doubt that most of us can truly embrace something perceived as “drudge work” at the expense of more rewarding pursuits, whether it’s reading to your child, blogging, or getting paid for something else.
February 6th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
I was working for my dad’s company during high school, doing some mindless programming edits and waiting for programs to compile. There was a copy of The Feminine Mystique in my cube, so I read it. And then went home and talked about it with my mom. Did she feel like this? “No,” she said. “I chose to stay home with you kids. And I don’t allow myself to feel any pressure to have a perfect house.” When she wasn’t taking care of us she wrote. I can remember her sitting at the table with her typewriter, writing poems and mothering manifestos.
So here I am, having chosen (inasmuch as that’s actually possible) to stay home with my kids, with an apartment that’ll never be a showplace, writing my thoughts.
Hooray for Betty Friedan for writing the book and forcing discussion.