It's the money, stupid
posted by bitchphd
Sigh.
Take it from this former-professor-turned-stay-home-mom-with-gardening-aspirations: "feminists" didn't "denigrate foodwork."
Nor are "untold generations of men" to blame for "not getting into the kitchen." If you want to blame untold generations of men, blame them for creating capitalism, dammit, not for refusing to cook.
The real issue for modern feminisM is, and always was, the social and economic s tatus of women *as a class*. Housework comes into it because housework, in a capitalist society, is unpaid--which means that "women's work" makes "women" both economically vulnerable/dependent and socially inferior. Housework, in fact, doesn't count as "work" because it doesn't generate income.
THAT's the issue. And that's why all the locavore / slow-cooking stuff, at this point, is associated with the upper middle class: because it only "counts" socially if it generates money. Reduce/reuse/recycle, same thing: sure, poor people have done this all along, but no one's writing about that shit: it's only important socially if it can somehow be monetized, either in terms of savings or by getting consumers to purchase recycled goods (which, like organic / locavore food, bizarrely cost *more*--and yes, I understand why, but again: not when poor people do it, it doesn't).
Which is why, although I liked Lindsay's take on this NYT article, I ultimately wasn't entirely comfortable with it (and hence started and abandoned a blog post about it back when it was published a couple of months ago). Being a stay-home-mom is *not* an economically sensible move, no matter how much damn money you think you're "saving" by growing your own vegetables and keeping chickens.
But it is--or at least, has the potential to be--a kind of critique of capitalism, if not an actual political movement. To fulfill that potential, urban gardeners and (shudder) "femivores" would have to start recognizing and making common cause with farmworkers and domestic workers. Envirohipsters would have to start forming alliances with the poor people they shop alongside at Goodwill.
I wonder, though, if it works the other way (and I'm hoping Taddy and Delia, specifically, will comment on this, as the bloggers who work in farming and political advocacy, respectively). I don't see that farmworkers and domestics, who already have political organizations and representation, need to do any kind of "outreach" to suburban gardeners in order to establish themselves *as* political players--though I wonder if that kind of move might (or is, for all I know) generate new donors. And while I think that educated, environmentally aware urbanites are fairly likely to be politically active, and even to think of themselves as poor, I don't think that that young, dumpster-diving urbanites, as a group, are particularly likely to actively support, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Children's Defense Fund. (Although even as I'm writing this, I'm realizing that in fact most of the poor young people I know are extremely involved in local organizing, so I'm quite likely wrong. Still, what I'm trying to get at is the kind of duality that The Onion mocks here, where young, single, educated, white folks organize "for" groups that are often older, parents, less educated and browner. Or am I stereotyping?)
In any case. My point is that it irritates the hell out of me when I see an argument about feminism in which neither side seems to actually remember that feminism isn't about what women or men "choose" to do: it's about the way society is structured.
Take it from this former-professor-turned-stay-home-mom-with-gardening-aspirations: "feminists" didn't "denigrate foodwork."
Nor are "untold generations of men" to blame for "not getting into the kitchen." If you want to blame untold generations of men, blame them for creating capitalism, dammit, not for refusing to cook.
The real issue for modern feminisM is, and always was, the social and economic s tatus of women *as a class*. Housework comes into it because housework, in a capitalist society, is unpaid--which means that "women's work" makes "women" both economically vulnerable/dependent and socially inferior. Housework, in fact, doesn't count as "work" because it doesn't generate income.
THAT's the issue. And that's why all the locavore / slow-cooking stuff, at this point, is associated with the upper middle class: because it only "counts" socially if it generates money. Reduce/reuse/recycle, same thing: sure, poor people have done this all along, but no one's writing about that shit: it's only important socially if it can somehow be monetized, either in terms of savings or by getting consumers to purchase recycled goods (which, like organic / locavore food, bizarrely cost *more*--and yes, I understand why, but again: not when poor people do it, it doesn't).
Which is why, although I liked Lindsay's take on this NYT article, I ultimately wasn't entirely comfortable with it (and hence started and abandoned a blog post about it back when it was published a couple of months ago). Being a stay-home-mom is *not* an economically sensible move, no matter how much damn money you think you're "saving" by growing your own vegetables and keeping chickens.
But it is--or at least, has the potential to be--a kind of critique of capitalism, if not an actual political movement. To fulfill that potential, urban gardeners and (shudder) "femivores" would have to start recognizing and making common cause with farmworkers and domestic workers. Envirohipsters would have to start forming alliances with the poor people they shop alongside at Goodwill.
I wonder, though, if it works the other way (and I'm hoping Taddy and Delia, specifically, will comment on this, as the bloggers who work in farming and political advocacy, respectively). I don't see that farmworkers and domestics, who already have political organizations and representation, need to do any kind of "outreach" to suburban gardeners in order to establish themselves *as* political players--though I wonder if that kind of move might (or is, for all I know) generate new donors. And while I think that educated, environmentally aware urbanites are fairly likely to be politically active, and even to think of themselves as poor, I don't think that that young, dumpster-diving urbanites, as a group, are particularly likely to actively support, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Children's Defense Fund. (Although even as I'm writing this, I'm realizing that in fact most of the poor young people I know are extremely involved in local organizing, so I'm quite likely wrong. Still, what I'm trying to get at is the kind of duality that The Onion mocks here, where young, single, educated, white folks organize "for" groups that are often older, parents, less educated and browner. Or am I stereotyping?)
In any case. My point is that it irritates the hell out of me when I see an argument about feminism in which neither side seems to actually remember that feminism isn't about what women or men "choose" to do: it's about the way society is structured.
Posted at 12:05 PM
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