Radical Homemakers - Shannon Hayes - Part 1

Radical Homemakers - Shannon Hayes

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 70

  March 11, 2017 

Book 23 - Radical Homemakers - Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture
by Shannon Hayes (2010)
 Part 1 - pages 1-48
Reading Time - 1 hour

I've been reading quite the mishmash of books, most of them with an ecological or environmental theme. I thought I'd try to get a few feminist books in there. Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir are on my list but I have to wait for the library books to arrive. Sooo... I came across this one and... given that I am a part-time housewife... I kind of liked the title of this one!

With the books that I've been reading, I've been wondering at how our society got into the predicament that it is in. We trade our time for money. With that money, we buy processed foods, take-out foods, factory-produced meat, clothes, plants, etc. With all those products we produce a huge amount of garbage. We also find ourselves overwhelmed... not enough time for house chores... or for gardening or for the kids. So we hire someone at a lower pay scale to do those things for us. We get a house-cleaner, a landscaper, a nanny... or we put our kids in day care. All because we trade our time for some money. It's not even healthy for us... or for the planet. What is the answer? Growing more of our own food? Eating locally produced vegetables and meats? Making our own clothes? Shopping the thrift stores? It just made me wonder.

And this book is right in line with that. We have gone from being a society of producers to a society of consumers. Yes... that makes sense. In the pre-industrial revolution era, a husband (house-bond - bonded to a house) and a housewife produced a LOT of what they needed to survive. There was a partnership of domestic life. But the industrial revolution changed that. Take the man out of the house and make the family spend his earnings on things that he would have done if he was home. And... make the family crave things that they never even knew they needed. But the housewife was still doing home production - gardens, canning, sewing - creating things. Fast-forward to the 1950s and the housewife deteriorated to a chauffeur for the kids, a shopper, a "cook" who bakes Duncan Hines cakes and a "cleaner" who uses Lysol to disinfect her home. Talk about an empty existence. Which is where Betty Friedan's book came in... no wonder housewives were bored and depressed. Send the women out into the workforce, so now there are two incomes to buy all those things. And no one at home... to cook meals, to garden, to harvest, to can, to create something from nothing. No one left at home to produce.

We have become worker bees in someone else's hive. So we hire other, poorer worker bees to do our housework... but that means they aren't at home caring for their hives. It's a vicious downward spiral.

The author notes that we are living, in the last 5000 years, in a society based on Empire. Based on domination. Can we move to a society that is based in partnership and productivity? The author says it's not just about getting back to basics of domestic productivity... it's about contributing to society... to transforming the world. That's a pretty good challenge... and one that would make a bigger difference to the world than working for a bank and selling people an over-priced chequing account or a line-of-credit so they can go deeper into debt.

I don't want to be a Consumer. I want to be a Producer!