The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon February 6th, 2012

Fairly often, when someone comes to our farm to make a purchase or do a job, the implicit assumption is that they should talk to Eric. The first time I remember seeing this was when we were farm shopping back a decade ago – we met our first realtor and visited our first farm, and the realtor led me into the house and then turned to Eric and said “Let me show you the barn.” My husband’s very calm response was “Sharon knows much more about barns than I do, I’m going to take our son for a walk.” This was the beginning of my experience with “farmer’s wife” syndrome.

Now on virtually all farms I have ever visited, everyone who lives there farms. The children help in the barns, the spouses share the duties – even if there is a gendered division of labor much of the time, as on Amish farms, the harvest or peak canning season overwhelm this and everyone who is present pitches in. It should go without saying that no farm can have anyone who isn’t competent to recapture lost livestock, fix a fence, handle an emergency birth or a medical crisis – because some days one person isn’t there. Nor can all knowledge rest in one person – because who milks or picks the beans when someone is ill, giving birth, caring for a family member or making the money that most farms don’t provide to pay taxes and bills?

Yet we cling stubbornly to the idea that instead of a family of farmers, all equally engaged with the land, if sometimes in largely different ways, that a farm family consists of a “farmer” and a “farmer’s wife” – and that the female partner is necessarily secondary. Gene Logsdon has a great essay about both why this is, and how that presumption is being disrupted by the growing number of independent women farmers:

Women rarely did the plowing however, and that seems to be the key difference. Lots of plowboys, nary a plowgirl. In other field work, women did more than their share. (I have theories but will leave it to someone smarter to explain why women didn’t plow.) The notion that males were the real farmers probably was rooted in the hunting and gathering stage of civilization where men brought home the game from afar (adventure time) and the women did the rest of the work at home (boring).

At any rate, after the plow became the symbol of agriculture in America, the role of women in farming did recede from the public eye. Women were supposed to stick to the kitchen and leave the real business of farming to their menfolks.

This prejudice was astonishingly apparent even at farm magazines. As a journalist working for Farm Journal magazine, I often sat in farm kitchens interviewing farmers and their wives about their business. It was amazing how often the wives answered my questions much better than their husbands and how they so often did this by diplomatically and cleverly putting words in their husbands’ mouths. It was obvious that most successful farms got that way because the wives were smarter and more articulate than the husbands. But the wives knew how to keep the male crest from falling by seeming to defer to their husbands on every occasion. The wives knew they had to make their mates look like top operators so that they could borrow the money they needed to keep on going. Bankers were no different from farm editors. They wanted to deal with men: women weren’t smart enough to run a business like farming.

The answer to the question about why women didn’t do the plowing is anthropological – when tillage was done with digging sticks and handtools, in many societies women were the primary tillers of soil. But as anthropologist Judith Brown long ago observed, there is virtually no society in human history where women’s primary work is incompatible with the care of young children – and plowing behind draft animals is tough to do with a babe in a sling, and hard to do when you may have to stop and nurse, or chase a toddler away from the horse’s feet. Tractors are not good places to haul babies and young kids for long stretches either, and I know from experience you don’t fit well behind the wheel in late pregnancy. Moreover, in the era of chemical agriculture any number of things that are part of the farm experience are best not touched by women who may be pregnant or nursing. For most of women’s history, being pregnant or nursing was a normative experience for many years.

Most of us don’t have a baby every three years anymore, so there isn’t any reason why tillage or organic no-till agriculture can’t be done by women (chemical agriculture is still tougher for women of childbearing age, since so many things accumulate in body fat and breast milk). So is small-scale farming without large equipment – with the modern digging sticks. In the meantime, independent women small farmers are the only fast-growing segment of American agriculture – an entity that we all know is going to have to grow fast just to keep up with the aging population of farmers, and all the more if we are to remove the fossil fuel inputs from our agriculture and untie food and oil.

We have used language to write women out of agriculture – out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the “housewifization” of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer’s wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.

I look around me at the farm families I know and see women and men with a host of skills that step outside of gender. Sherri, who lives with her aging mother cuts hay for a living. Alice handles the thousand pound draft horses on their farm with skill and grace. The sheep are Rosa’s, not her boyfriend’s, as is the market garden. Louise milked fifty cows a day to her husband’s fifty and drove the tractor while he tossed the hay bales for forty years.

This started out as my farm, with my husband who was happy to give me credit, happy to do the heavy lifting, but not so interested in plants. It has become a project of two overlapping people with related interests and the ability to do one another’s work. The bees are his. The native plants and herbs are mine, the livestock are both of ours, the work is shared inside and outside as preference, pleasure and ability define. The daily applied science of agriculture is worked out between us. The pride in it is shared, and neither of us would demean our contribution by suggesting it comes primarily through the other, as “farmer’s wife” does.

The question of where the next generation of farmers is going to come from is an important one, because we’re engaged in an experiment with no historical precedent – for the first time in history, the majority of new farmers will have to come from off the farm – for decades we have been able to reduce the number of farmers by drawing off many and destroying farm cultures and communities, while still having enough to meet our needs, but the farm population is rapidly aging, the next generation of farmer’s children have already left the farm, and now we must ask who will replace them?

The answer so far is that women are a part of the answer, and I hope this will be the end of farmer’s wife syndrome and the emergent recognition of the fact that farmers come in many packages, and that a way of life is something that circles round and encompasses everyone who lives it.

• agriculture , women
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Sharon October 10th, 2011

Perhaps the first widely read piece I wrote was entitled “Peak Oil is a Women’s Issue” and focused on the ways that an energy decline might affect women. At the time it was written (the earliest version appeared in 2004) the peak oil movement was largely a group of men, mostly geologists, oil men, a few economists and journalists interested in a growing issue.

My argument (more refined variations of which I’ve continued making for years) was that women need to organize around energy and environmental issues, because they stand to lose a great deal in a society that has fewer resources to go around.

At least one critic accused me of writing a “handmaid’s tale” and raising an alarm about nothing, which I find sort of funny, because we all *know* that in hard times women and children tend to suffer the most. Assuming that won’t be true requires an argument for why this time will be different.

The UN has already described the ways that the first and most profound victims of climate change will be women. Energy depletion, and the end economic growth will be no different, unless we act to make them different. We need a new women’s movement that has a profound understanding of the ways that energy has shaped women’s expectations and experience, and that can respond to a radically changing society.

Thanks to reader Vickey, we can see that thus far, events aren’t different – women are paying the price again.. Consider what’s happening in Topeka as a more extreme version of decisions being made all over the country:

In Topeka, Kansas city officials are considering a controversial move to decriminalize domestic violence in the city after the Shawnee County government offloaded domestic violence enforcement on to city governments. Cities facing budget cuts and lost revenue are turning to many different cost-cutting measures, but this is perhaps the most extreme. Already, the county government has turned away at least 30 domestic violence cases.

We know that most domestic violence isn’t reported, that most battering victims are so ashamed and afraid that they won ‘t call the police, so the 30 + cases that were turned away are just the tip of the iceberg – we know that women will die unless batterers can be stopped.

Legal protections for women and children should be fundamental, but we live in a society that regards them as optional luxuries to be abandoned in hard times. Without a shift in the way we regard women’s issues, we are likely to see more of this horror.

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Sharon August 30th, 2011

Over the last two weeks, my family has considered or accepted two foster placements that fell through – both of them sets of five children.  The first group consisted of five kids – 5, 4, 3, 1 and due any minute.  The second consisted of five children 6 1/2 to 5 1/2 weeks.  Both mothers were in their early 20s – the latter only 21.

Perhaps predictably, when I talk about these children (and we thought that the second group would be coming to us for the better part of a day), everyone’s first reaction is to be appalled at the fact that these young women have so many children that they can’t take care of.  I understand that – and the degree to which these children play on every stereotype about poor women.  Quite a number of people who heard about these kids spoke of the merits of forced sterilization – and those were some of the milder comments.  Despite the fact that I understood where they were coming from, and certainly could wish for the sake of both mothers and kids that they would choose to limit future fertility, the reactions also frustrated me, because so much of the emphasis was placed on “get these women some birth control” and so little on creating circumstances that would enable them to make different choices.

This resonates with me for several reasons.  The first was that instinctively, I felt very protective of these women – whatever their choices, they were going to be the mothers of children I cared for, and the rush to judgement bothered me on those grounds, regardless of its legitimacy or illegitimacy.  The second was that the “get those women some depo-provera” reactions struck me as revealing more about the speakers and about the assumptions we make from a still-comparatively wealthy and secure perspective than they do about any particular external reality.  Indeed, the circumstances of the poorest and most vulnerable women in America (and the poorest and most vulnerable people are almost always women and children) may have much more to do with our future than we think they will.  In order to have a future where women have choices about their fertility, we will have to recognize that family planning doesn’t begin in the clinic – it begins well ahead of that.

Let’s think about what needs to happen for women to control their fertility fully, and to make “good choices.”:

1. They need to have the full ability to give consent – to say “no” and have that “no” respected.  That means they must have men in their lives who wholly respect and support women, they must respect themselves enough to believe that their “no” should be honored.  They must be safe from domestic violence and sexual violence in the whole of their lives.  They must live in a society that supports women, including poor women and young women and women who are labelled negatively for their choices and  one that believes in making them safe and helping them achieve consent.

2.  The circumstances of women’s lives must be such that they do not have to trade sex for food, a place to sleep, basic comfort, safety, food for their children, or other needed supports, because those who depend on sex to get those things cannot say “no” or demand that contraception be used or safe sex be practiced.

3. Women need good access to medical care, both preventative and urgent.  They need to not be afraid that doctors will report them to immigration, will criticize their lives or judge their bodies and lifestyles harshly.  They need to be able to get medical care when they need it, without fear of losing a job because they took time off.  They need to have accessible care in their communities in places they can get to with people who treat them well.  They need to not have to walk through protesters and harassers in order to get basic reproductive and sexual health care.  They need to have full access to a full range of medical care – including treatment for substance abuse and mental illnesses that cloud judgement.

4. Women need to be educated about risks and benefits, and have a balanced, non-condescending, respectful presentation of information in languages they can understand.  They need to be able to afford reproductive and sexual medical care, and any devices or treatments they need.  They need know how to use these things safely and well.  At the same time, the power to control their bodies has to be placed respectfully in their hands – that includes the power of bodily integrity, the power to choose the kinds of medical care they will use, and the ability to make decisions about what they do and do not put in their bodies.

5. As children, girls and boys both need families to love and care for them, and to learn ways of receiving love and care that don’t involve giving birth to children.  They need to know, as they grow, that some adult will continue to be there for them and that others will provide love and care into adulthood, that they will have a place in the world and don’t have to invent that place wholly and alone.

6. Boys need to be taught to respect women, to respect the integrity of women’s bodies, and that fathering is an active verb, not a sexual act.  They need to see men who care for and nurture children. and to receive the message that they are fully responsible for their children and their partners.  They need to be able to choose love actively, not sex reflexively, and to honor and respect women and men.

7. We must respect the right of women to make choices about their bodies that we would not make.  ”Choice” does not mean “the requirement to have an abortion when everyone thinks you should” – any more than it means “no right to choose abortion.”  ”Family planning” doesn’t mean “give all poor black teenage girls an IUD” it means “allow women to make decisions, and then respect them.  That means allowing for people to choose differently than you would, and allowing for errors of judgement.  Coercion does not make women freer, and it doesn’t enable them to make better choices – fundamentally a society that respects and believes in women doesn’t have to approve of every decision women makes, but it must respect their right to make it.

8. In order for men and women to make good choices, society has to model good choices. We cannot take the most vulnerable, poorest, least well-educated people in our society and say to them “you made lousy choices and we will judge you and punish you” – society’s choices in regard to its poorest people have not been good either.  When we demand that people take responsibility for themselves, we must remember that someone failed to take responsiblity before – someone failed to adopt the 12 year old girl who eventually became a mother of five.  Someone failed to provide funding for the drug clinics that might have helped her get off drugs.  Someone taught the fathers and mothers the messages they learned about sex and children.  A thousand of us might have stepped up at any time and changed the way this worked – and each of us did not.  A whole society, a whole culture might have stepped up and offered more.  Those choices deserve judgement too – and they deserve consideration as we enter an era of less wealth and fewer resources. We are, in the end, mostly held responsible for our choices – but who pays the price changes over time.  Who will it be next time?

I don’t know either of the women in question – I may never meet either one.  I do not claim that I know anything of their personal circumstances.  I do know this, however, that if want to be able to care for our children in an era of diminishing resources, it will require sustained and conscious choice from all of us.  If we want to take care of the most vulnerable in our society, if we want to enable future generations to do better, despite our difficulties, we must provide supports that our society presently does not for many poor women.  As more of us become poor, as the future of our own sons and daughters is implicated, perhaps we can begin to do better – but we ought to have done better already, and must recognize the consequences of our own bad choices, both collectively and individually.

Sharon

• Uncategorized , population , sex , women
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Sharon October 8th, 2009

“Sukey will you be my bride? Say yes if you please

For I have got a dun cow, and you can make good cheese.

I have got a little pig, and you have got a sty.

Sukey, will you marry me? 

Oh aye, by and by!” – Traditional Nursery Rhyme

When I started participating in peak oil and climate change discussions in 2003, let’s just say that the whole thing was much more of a boy’s club than it is now (and in some measure it still is).  And one of the laments I most often heard was “we men would be glad to change our lives, but our wives won’t let us – they still want all the trappings of affluence.”  Or “No woman will date a man who just wants to farm and grow food.”  Whenever I heard these claims, I would laugh and think about how much some women I knew were struggling to get their husbands to give up their creature comforts. 

But they keep recurring.  Recently Dmitry Orlov wrote about how hard it is to please a woman – in this case, his wife, who wants more creature comforts than a simpler life can provide – and he terms it not so much as how to please his particular wife, but women in general:

“I have thought about this long and hard, and came to the conclusion that it all comes down to a very basic question: “How to please a girl?” After all, any modern, progressive, educated and attractive person begins to scoff if you take away her flush toilet and substitute a bucket, or if she has to go shopping leading a donkey, or if, instead of a shower, she is invited to go and stoke a sauna. From time immemorial status in society has been determined by access to luxury goods. As society becomes richer, luxuries turn into necessities. And when society starts to grow poorer again, it turns out that there is no going back. That is, there is a way back, but it is blocked by the innate tendencies of our clever species. My wife and I spent two years living aboard a very attractive and practical yacht slightly less than 10 meters in length at the waterline, and although the wife understands everything very well, even she cannot stop herself from casting a sideways glance when a yacht like Abramovich’s walks past us, and from making some comment, like “Oh, now this I understand, this is the real thing!” And there is no point in explaining to her that what we have here on board is a very high level of civilization, while Abramovich is just an ordinary consumer. It is very hard, gentlemen, to change the lifestyle, but not change the woman! If someone succeeds in this, then he is a hero and a genius, and we should all learn from him. In the meantime, we are going to live in an apartment, and put the boat on the hard, and install all sorts of solar panels, water heaters, and other technological junk.”

 Orlov phrases this in much the same way that many men have phrased it – male attractiveness is tied up in their ability to provide, and women want to be provided with a lot more than men.  And that’s probably a fair analysis in some ways – male status is both more and less fungible than female status – female status tends to be heavily tied to physical beauty, and if you don’t have that, there aren’t a lot of ways of compensating.  Male status tends to offer a range – you can be extremely attractive, extremely bright, extremely competetive, physically extremely strong and aggressive, or drive a really nice car – but for men who are not affluent and not unusually competetive or attractive, the whole thing rather sucks (I once had a lengthy debate about whether you are most hosed if you are a tall, heavy, extremely bright woman or if you are a beta-male, short, bald male – I concluded in the end that both rather suck if you are looking for love – and that I won the lottery with Eric.) 

Now my readership is  more than half female, so this sort of thing only occasionally shows up in the comments here – although it still does now and again.  But recently I’ve seen this sort of lament elsewhere, and it seems, more frequently - and I’ve seen a new variant of this – people lamenting that more women aren’t like me!  I’ve seen it mentioned in several blog posts and essays, and have gotten a few emails from husbands complaining about their wives and comparing them to their (idealized) version of life with me and my canning kettle.

My husband’s comment on the question of whether all women should be like me was “It would serve the men who say that right if they were.” (This is why I am married to my husband, because always says the right – and funny –  thing.) 

 I admit, given that I spent most of my younger years wishing that I was like some other woman (someone beautiful and graceful, ideally), the idea that I’ve set up as anyone’s model partner is just plain funny to me.  But it is also a little troubling – it is one thing for someone – male or female – to wish that *they* had my farm life (preferrably without the loud herd of children and probably without a whole of other realities that come with it) or my skill set.  It is another thing for someone to wish that their *wife* was like me.

A compelling example comes from Greg Jeffer’s farm blog, in which he rants about the culture of femininity and divorce that keeps farm-wantin’ men in Boca in line.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the compliment, even if I don’t agree with a good portion of his commentary:

So I thought I’d ask the question – are women really more reluctant than men to take on a new way of life?  Are women more attracted to creature comforts and more afraid of  the future?  Is this a gender thing at all?  I should note that among me email collection on this subject, I have at least two emails from lesbians, complaining that other lesbians talk about sustainability but don’t really want to live it, and one from a gay man complaining that gay men are all mostly concerned with status and affluence, and don’t want to live sustainably. 

My own take on this is that while collapse as a whole, with its radical dislocation of male roles and providers, is probably scarier and more destructive to men than to women; volunteering to live a low energy life probably is more frightening to many women than to men – and for pretty good reasons.  Because there’s an excellent chance that the reality is likely to be that the practical burdens of hauling groceries home on a donkey, emptying the composting toilet bucket and stoking the sauna are likely to become the wife’s chores.  I don’t think it is an accident that in many cases (and from what I know of him I am explicitly exempting Orlov from this), that the men making these complaints tend to be traditional sorts who don’t share in the household labor equitably.  Nor do I think it is coincidental that many women married to more traditional men are unthrilled with the vision of a low energy future, and a return to the bad old days, in which “men may work from sun to sun, but women’s work is never done.”

There’s a very funny description of this idea in a 2008 essay in Brain, Child about Shannon Hayes and her forthcoming book on Radical Homemaking (full disclosure, Shannon contacted me about being interviewed for the book, but somehow it never happened – she lives and farms half an hour from me and I can’t believe we’ve never met ) that probably describes the nightmare vision (and a fair bit of the reality) that haunts most women who think about a sustainable life:

“You’re up before dawn.  The cow is giving birth in the barn, the turnips are rotting in their beds from all the rain this harvest season, your organic cotton tampon has given way in the night.  Your fourth child is teething, and the sourdough starter needs to be turned.  You haven’t worn makeup, earned a paycheck, contributed to a 401K or signaled the waiter for another round in five years or more – and you couldn’t be happier.  You’re a radical homemaker and loving every minute of it.” (Brain, Child p. 32 Fall 2008 – and thank you Cindy, for sending this to me!)

My laughter was the laughter of recognition, but how on earth would I blame any woman for the bark of laughter that ends with “as if!”  Even for a woman with a full partnership with their spouse (and the reality is that women still do a majority of childcare, domestic labor and household management, so radically upping the scale of those chores will, in most cases, fall on the backs of women), in many cases, there is the underlying fear of divorce or widowhood.   A society that encourages divorce esssentially requires them to have their own money.

This is where I find Jeffer’s analysis most troubling – and where I least want to be held up as a model for women.   Those women in Boca may just be concerned about their nails, but for most women who aren’t millionaires, the fear of adding domestic chores is this – there are only two ways to do it. First, you give up sleep, freedom, time off and do the work at night, after the kids are in bed, after you come home from your job.  Or two, if you can and have that luxury, you give up the job – and know that if your spouse is disabled, if they die or, most likely, if you get divorced, you will be radically impoverished, and often left with the kids, if any.  Women with children suffer more after divorce in terms of loss of fiscal security, and they recover more slowly, and to lower levels (do not get me wrong, I know that men often lose full access  to their children, and that the stakes are high on both sides).

The culture of divorce is dangerous for both sides of the coin – and a tough nut to crack.  No one wants people in abusive or destructive marriages trapped there – which is what you get when you stigmatize divorce, or make it more difficult.  But no one wants what we’ve got now, either – it isn’t good for men, for women, for children, for families, or for the hope of the kind of deep and stable communities that we need going forward.  I don’t disagree wholly with Jeffers on this point, but I don’t quite know what to say about it either. 

And this is why I don’t particularly take it as a compliment to hear people say “oh, I wish women were more like you.”  Because the only way it works to be more like me is to be more like me *AND* Eric.  Right now, I’m working, and today is Eric’s day off.  Tonight we’ll be having dinner guests, and this weekend we have more guests coming.  While I work, Eric got up, fed the kids, milked the goats, dressed the kids, did dishes.  Now he’s taking the three kids to Agway to buy goat vaccine and chicken feed, stopping by a farmstand to pick up brussels sprouts (mine are still small), coming home, reheating last night’s dinner (which he made early in the morning before going to work) for lunch, homeschooling, rebuilding the sukkah that blew down in the wind, grinding cornmeal and making cornbread for tonight’s dinner and sweeping and tidying the house, before taking all four kids to Hebrew school, and trying to sneak some paper grading in around all this.  Like me, the man has a full time job, and a farm, and four kids.

Now this is awfully impressive. I’m impressed with him, and very few people meet us without realizing that I’m no wonder woman - I have a wondrous husband and a very fortunate marriage. 

The work that he is doing,  I did yesterday, when it was my day for the farm and the kids with the kids – but the fact is that you cannot offer a call to arms to women to come back to the kitchen unless everyone else goes with them.  If all of this domestic labor were entirely my responsibility, there is no freakin’ way that I’d be able to do it alone – my husband is a full partner in our domestic arrangement – and not a traditional partner, who does the heavy “guy stuff” but isn’t there for the endless daily cycle of chores.  I’m not afraid of laundering the cloth diapers, because I know my husband will change the diapers and rinse them out first.  I’m not afraid of taking on canning, because I know he’ll be homeschooling the kids.

Moreover, I’m able to take on not-very lucrative jobs like farming and writing because I can trust my husband deeply – I know he’s not going to leave me for another woman, I know that I can trust and rely on him.  So if I don’t contribute to a retirement account or pay that much into Social Security, I know barring death or disability, he’ll be there with and for me.  He’s not going to pick a pretty face with an air conditioner or a nicer farm – this is a permanent marriage.  I can’t say how I know this, merely that I do.  But if I wasn’t sure, if I wasn’t really sure that I’d seen his worst parts and he mine and we could do this, I’d be afraid to give up more reliable sources of income and take risks.  And no matter how deeply I trust him, trust isn’t really the operative issue when it comes to death, illness or injury, which can happen to anyone.  I am taking a risk – and a lesser one than a woman who doesn’t write and doesn’t have a foot in the formal economy. 

I think any man or woman, but especially a man, who dreams of a homestead needs to ask himself who he thinks will be doing the canning, the washing of the chicken manure off the porch and laundering those cloth diapers.  I do not claim that all men dream of a homestead where the domestic work is magically taken care of by a perfect wife, just like someone’s insane fantasy about who I am (which bears little resemblance to the actual me), but it is worth making sure you don’t have that dream – and making sure that your spouse, male or female, feels absolutely sure that you have done everything you can to ensure that this life will be secure.

But while that gives a sense of why women might be less inclined to choose a low energy life, I’m not sure it really answers the larger question posed – are there more men out there who dream of living a low energy, sustainable life?  Are women more attached to their creature comforts, even adjusting for their perfectly reasonable fear of being stuck with all the work, or getting covered in dirt and then being dumped for some nice clean woman? 

I can’t run a statistical analysis here – my own readership tends slightly towards the female, and the stories I hear are much more about the trouble of getting husbands to change than wives, but I know it works the other way too.  It is certainly women who do the majority of the shopping and consumer culture – one study found that women either made or influenced 90% of all purchases – and not just the things stereotypes would assume, like food or clothing, but also cars, tools and homes and home repairs.   The culture of shopping is, in a large measure, a female culture.   In that sense, there’s certainly some truth in this. 

But so is the culture of making a stable home, of feeding people, of tending to basic needs.  For women, much of that has been integrated deeply into a consumer culture – you feed and clothe the people you love by shopping, perhaps by careful bargain shopping.  You make a home by buying products and researching good schools.  You tend needs by having the right things on hand.  But I think the reason this is so deeply tied to consumer culture is that the other, more traditional ways of doing these things have been taken from us – and disdained.  Retail therapy exists, of course, but I think it is worth asking to what extent it is a response to a gaping absence in our way of life, rather than an ingrained gender distinction.

The same might be worth asking about women’s preoccupation with male status and affluence – it is probably true that we see in affluence a measure of a man’s ability to supply stability and to provide for our family.  But do we see that in status symbols like cars and fancy houses because we are anthropologically cued to respond to any kind of flashy affluence, or because the traditional symbols of the ability to provide – a piece of land, a healthy body, gentleness with children, a goodly number of goats , facility with a spear, good mammoth barbecuing skills – are mostly gone, and we are using false cognates to substitute for something we could instinctively find superior?  That is, money is only status in a society that has discarded self-provisioning – will more women like men with dirt under their nails if self-provisioning makes a comeback?

What I do think is that male status markers change much more rapidly and fundamentally than female ones do – to use one example, think about the degree to which modern society largely eschews male violence.  Male physical prowess hasn’t been entirely overcome – but male aggressiveness has in some measures.  Instead of physical aggressiveness, status markers for men now emphasize economic aggressiveness, and domestic violence, while still a painful reality, is no longer as normative as it once was – in fact, most of the women I know believe that men who are gentle to women and children are more attractive than those who aren’t – something not up for discussion when violence between spouses and by parents was concealed as normative.  The rise of geek culture contains in it a truly radical overthrowing of masculine models – now some people may argue that this is emasculating, and certainly there are still plenty of women attracted to the physically aggressive alpha type.  But I still would argue that there is a fundamental shift under way – we are selecting for gentler men as a society.  This is non-trivial, if only partly underway.

Female status markers are much more fixed – standards of beauty have changed over time, but the fact of female beauty has tended to eclipse other factors  -  much as I’d love to see intellectual brillanc and the ability to make good cheese as major drawing factors for dating women, I’m not expecting it anytime soon. If there are to be changes, I think that it is more possible to change markers of male status – that is not to say that this is easy, merely that it is more viable. 

The really good thing is that we all exceed our genetic programming sometimes – witness the fact that I have an adorable, wonderful husband who thinks I’m beautiful, even though I’m not, and also really likes that I’m smart and mouthy.  I know a number of poor, short, bald men married to women who like them just that way, and find affluent guys with nice cars to be assholes.  A big part of the problem is finding the match – if you married on grounds other than your mutual taste for digging carrots, the discovery that digging carrots is part of the deal is going to be problematic.  Nor do we want this to be another unattainable standard – as in “Now I’ve got to be sexy, blond *and* milk a cow?”  Or “Now I’ve got to have ripped abs, provide her with a lovely home and get up at 5 am to pick rutabagas?”

Such a process will take a long time.  And since most of us didn’t pick our spouses on the grounds of their agrarian gifts (I have got a dun cow, and you can make good cheese), I suspect there will, for a long time, be men and women, each of them lamenting that men in general, or women in general, or the ones they meet or marry don’t seem to value the same things they do.

Sharon

• adapting in place , orlov , women
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Sharon July 8th, 2009

I was struck this morning by the implicit assumptions in a Washington Post article about Michelle Obama’s visit to Russia.  The headline reads “In Mother Russia, She’s 1st Lady of Gardening.”  And even in that terse bit of writing are a whole bunch of implicit assumptions – after all, why invoke “Mother” Russia, except to emphasize the backwardness of Russian women, who, we learn, are interested not in Obama’s education, her speeches or her Narciso Rodriguez dress (whatever that is).  Instead, they are interested in how she grows food and runs her domestic life.

The article is rather patronizing to Russian women.  Yes, they admit that Russian women also have degrees and education, but:

“Women here have long stood equal to men on a variety of fronts — one of the lasting aspects of the Soviet era — but they are also expected to tend the hearth, raise the children and maintain the family. Obama, a lawyer and former hospital executive, has described her White House role as mom in chief. That title, as well as her very public sowing and planting, speaks volumes in a culture where men and women relate in very traditional ways and women struggle to balance independence with homemaking.”

Oh gosh, I wonder what that would be like – a society where women struggle to balance independence with homemaking, and where women have to do the vast majority of the work in tending the hearth, raising the children and maintaining the family?  I can’t imagine such a shocking situation happening anywhere.  Next you’ll tell me that a major national newspaper in Russia has so little respect for women that an article about Obama’s reputation contains half a paragraph about what she’s wearing, and less than a single sentence about what she has said.  Oh, wait, that’s the Washington Post.

Yes, there are real cultural differences between the US and Russia, but is hard to see them clearly because our own prejudices are showing so clearly.  Consider this quotation by a Russian teacher,

“The dacha is something important in our life and something present in our life all the time,” says Alla Lapidus, 52, a teacher at a music school. Obama is appealing not only because she has a career but also because “she can work with her hands,” Lapidus says.”

Try to imagine an American – almost any American, saying that about their first lady – that she’s appealing because she is not afraid of manual labor.  There are parts of American culture where that is a term of praise still, but it stretches the imagination to conceive of someone applying it to Michelle Obama – simply because we are told that the primary grounds on which to admire a woman who takes on the fraught and uncertain job of first lady is her education and policy talent.

But, of course,  she hasn’t been elected to anything, and for the duration of her husband’s presidency is expected to devote herself to parenting, redecorating the White House, doing Oprah and posing for publicity shots far more than policy work.   We don’t actually like it much when highly educated and competent women who happen to be married to presidents actually intervene in public affairs – witness Hillary Clinton during her husband’s tenure.  The role is still very narrow, but we are expected not to admire her for her domestic skills or willingness to work, but for her willingness to look attractive (the Washington Post article contrasts the lack of interest in Russia in her clothing with Europe’s fascination, and manages to slip in that she “wore flats” at the tomb of the unknown soldier, perhaps the least useful information on earth that could be appended to any fact).  We are supposed to see in her fashion sense and her Oprah interviews the keen legal intellect, and admire her for it. 

This represents a fundamental intellectual problem – one’s intellect does not reside in one’s choice of shoes.  Of course we know Michelle Obama is brilliant and talented.  We also know that for the next 3-7 years, she’s going to be set up as first domestic in the land, whether she’s enthusiastic about the job or not.  Redbook is going to show her Christmas tree, people are going to judge her on her parenting and her clothing, she’s going to have to make sure to tell everyone her favorite recipes, and odds are, if she actually steps in in any major policy role, she’ll be criticized for it.  And to the woman’s enormous credit (because I find it very hard to imagine that any bright woman enters this deal with the devil with anything other than deep ambivalence), she’s done a pretty good job with it – she’s still smart and funny, but she’s also expanding the role of first domestic to include gardening.  She’s blunt that her children still have to do chores, and that she doesn’t think that a little thing like your husband being president gets you out of weeding the garden.  She’s in a difficult spot, and she’s doing it very well.

And of course, it is just a smaller version of the reality of women in general.  We all know that it isn’t just Russian women who live in a country where it is hard to balance independence with domestic life, where women have to work with their hands – or want to.  It isn’t just in Russia where women are torn between tending the hearth and family and going out to work and make money in the formal economy.  The game of being first lady is damned if you do, damned if you don’t – and the practice you get for that job is to be a woman – or occasionally (and increasingly frequently) a man – who does domestic work.

The reality is that all of us are in the situation the the paper implies is exclusively the territory of Russian women, who have not sufficiently evolved – and if there’s less attention on us, well, we most of us don’t have a working staff to handle the cleaning and cooking, either.  There are several ways one can navigate the problem of domestic life – I’m sure I’m overstating the difficulties in some cases, but I think there’s some truth in these broad categories established with in our nuclear family structure:

1. Both the adults in the household work full time by choice or necessity.  They make enough money to outsource any domestic work that needs doing, except what actually can’t be skipped or sold.  The/one of the woman/women if any probably does much of that, although there are exceptions.  There is sometimes money, and never any time.  Most of the work doesn’t get done to anyone’s satisfaction, and many people feel bad about it.  Children, if any, spend a lot of time with paid caregivers and unless they are very good (and usually, the parents very affluent) or family, everyone feels guilty, but usually mostly the female parent.  Domestic skills needed in a changing future are frantically gathered as best can be, and again, guilt reigns.

 2. One member of the adult household works, the other one stays home and does the domestic work,  and that person is female.  The domestic work gets done, but there is often an economic cost, and often a time cost – in many families the breadwinner works long hours to compensate for the loss of a full time earner, with predictable cost to his time with his children.  The domestic worker often finds herself isolated and struggling with a large burden, particularly if she is trying to gain skills and self-sufficiency and has children.  People ask her “What is it you do?” and then wander off when she struggles to explain, or say loftily and condescendingly, ”Oh, I couldn’t do what you do…I work.” 

 3. The gender roles are reversed and the father or male partner is the primary domestic figure.  He gets all the disadvantages of being at home, plus the reality that if there is a female partner, she probably micromanages a lot more than a comparable male spouse would , and the fact that almost no one thinks he should be doing this work.  This is particularly unpleasant for people who did not choose this situation, but had it thrust upon them due to unemployment.  If there are children, he gets the dubious delight of being the only guy at the playground, and thus gets more than his share of discussions of mastitis, the side effects of pregnancy and other joys.  Otherwise, the situation is the same, except that every single woman in the world is impressed if he can just dress his children in the morning and keep them out of the road, except, of course, his spouse or partner ).  The woman is assumed to be an unnatural parent and probably secretly to have a penis or a complex, because she makes more money than her partner and doesn’t love her children enough to stay home with them . 

4. The parents/partners divide the domestic and employed work, and probably argue about it a fair bit.  Either one works days and the other nights, and they are never together and always exhausted, or both work from home and constantly struggle with privacy, space and whose turn it is to take the kid to the potty, or something.  Both of them do without sleep and free time, while also attempting to build a sustainable future until they go completely mad.  

5. There is only one adult in the household and he or she gets all the fun.  He or she is held morally responsible for not being there for the kids, not doing enough domestic work, not making enough money and not providing another parent.  He or she knows that they are also not doing enough to prepare for incoming zombies, but figures that he/she is already a zombie from lack of sleep and stress, so perhaps they’ll be able to pass.

I’m going to guess that these variations on this are available to women in Russia as well, with one important difference – many of the Russians I know live in extended families with their parents or in-laws.  I have no doubt that this comes with many disadvantages – a neighbor of mine, for example, who married not a Russian, but Ukrainian woman, found it very difficult now that they were living in the US to clearly explain why the parents could not hang pictures of Joseph Stalin in their living room. On the other hand, the grandparents helped cook, gardened, cleaned and helped tend their grandchildren.   The reality of a household with three, four or more adults is very different than one with one or two people and enough labor for 10.

I realize it isn’t just women who get screwed here – men at least have a place where they can win, but of course, are terribly vulnerable to losing that place.  But I think it is fascinating to see how turbulent and troubled our relationship to domestic life and its work are, and how deeply gendered that turbulence is. The article unintentionally turns a microscope not on Russian attitudes, but on American ones.  Consider the opening paragraph:

 ”On her second international trip as first lady, the welcoming cover stories and street chatter here have focused on her White House kitchen garden rather than her clothes, her Ivy League pedigree or her interest in promoting public service. The current cover of Ogonyok, for example, a weekly magazine focusing on politics and culture, carries a candid photograph of the first lady dressed in a burgundy windbreaker with her hair pulled back, working in the garden with students from Bancroft Elementary School in the District. The cover line reads: “The Queen of the Fields: Michelle Obama and her husband can overturn our understanding of America.” It’s accompanied by an extensive story about gardening culture in the United States. Tomatoes, apparently, now serve as tools for diplomacy.”

The article assumes that “public service” doesn’t include helping develop schoolyard gardens, and that there’s something weird and trivial about tomatoes having anything to do with the understanding of the US that Russia has.  Her public service couldn’t include something as domestic as the garden, because when she touches dirt, we don’t see her education – we’ve been trained to see dirt touching as the territory of near-illiterates, so of course we can’t see her law degree and “spunky independence” when she’s got a hoe in her hand. 

And of course, engagement with her food could never be vital, exciting, and truly a diplomatic tool – that’s just proof that Russians again, are backwards, they worry about stupid little things like food.  Of course it couldn’t be important to the world for them to see us as like them, as caring about food security and doing the hard work involved in creating it – better we remain in everyone’s view rich, fashion conscious and talking about self-esteem, rather than dinner.

And of course, even though in its function, the role of first lady still carries heavy domestic assumptions, it is implied there’s something wrong about Michelle Obama embracing and expanding those to any extent.  And definitely, there’s something weird about people responding to her because she does those things, and does them well.  We are told in the article that people are more interested in how she raises her children than in her speeches – well, first of all, that’s almost certainly true of Americans as well, otherwise “Inside the White House” wouldn’t be in so many magazines.  Americans want to know what the front-face of American motherhood and domestic life actually does – that’s why all the photo spreads. 

Some interest is obviously gossipy trivialities or celebrity worship, but some of it isn’t.  Some of it is genuinely reasonable – after all, fair or no, being first lady means taking on a public domestic role – people cared that Eleanor Roosevelt stopped serving coffee in the White House during rationing and that they ate what everyone else ate, people cared that the Clintons seemed to be mostly good parents, if not always good people.  And they don’t care just for bad reasons – they care because they know that domestic life didn’t disappear just because we stopped talking about it, or implying that it took intelligence, skill and strength to manage. 

The truth is that someone does have to parent Sasha and Malia Obama, and it won’t be their Dad, for the most part – he’s got a big job.  The truth is that someone has to be the face of domestic life in America – because that life is real, and it is increasingly flooding into our reality.  As fewer people can afford even fast food and bad daycare, as more people are unemployed, as more and more people need to tend their own needs and expand their self-sufficiency, domestic life is reminding us that despite our lack of respect or even interest, it is a primary human activity, one we cannot negate simply by declining to value it or the people who do the work.

Those Russian women being interviewed have educations too.  They have jobs or even careers too.  They also have gardens and kitchens and children – and the very fact that they aren’t interested in Obama’s legal career or her speeches on self-esteem suggests something – in a society where domestic life literally saved lives – where the gardens kept people fed during the SU’s collapse, domestic life is more interesting than jobs. Jobs go away sometimes. Education is great, but you can think about poetry while you cook or dig. 

It is us who haven’t come to terms with reality – tomatoes can change the world.  It does matter how you parent children, and doing so is not trivial work.  Pretending that domestic labor doesn’t exist doesn’t make you happy or your life easier.  And that maybe, just maybe, there are better choices for both women and men than damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

 Sharon

• America , women
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