Are Homemakers What America Really Needs?
Motherhood: “the toughest job in the world"?
This week, Featured Author Rachel Lu reviews Dia Boyle’s new book, The Thoughtful Home, and asks: what does it really mean to consider homemaking a “job”?
Are Homemakers What America Really Needs?
Rachel Lu
The Thoughtful Home raises a deeper and more profound question. If homemaking, at its heart, is most centrally concerned with loving and humanizing people, what are the consequences of entrusting that task to a particular class of “professionals”? Isn’t there some risk that non-homemakers will be infantilized, permitted to be slobbish or callous, while homemakers are overworked and underappreciated? If “seeing people for who they are” is the work of homemakers, who sees them?
It’s easy to toss off putative solutions, but in reality, I think the problem is quite hard. Precisely because we are accustomed to outsourcing so much work to professionals, it feels natural to treat Mom as just another person whose job it is to take care of us. It’s very comfortable to take her for granted. But unlike teachers, social workers, and therapists, who get to clock out at the end of the day and go home, Mom doesn’t get to compartmentalize that way.
This Week in Sex-Realist Feminism: Men Saying No to Porn, Egg Freezing's False Promises, and Parking for Mothers
This week: Julie Bindel on the men who say no to porn, Samantha Stephenson on the false promises of the egg freezing industry, and Patrick T. Brown with a proposal to make life easier for expectant and new mothers. Plus: PR firms and drag, the sex dolls are coming, the gender wage gap for college grads—and more!
From the Archives:
As part of our Feminism Against Progress symposium, Meghan Murphy takes on the destruction caused by third-wave feminism.
Feminism’s Mistake
Meghan Murphy
“As a young woman, my rejection of “human nature” and attempt to embrace this modern version of “feminism” manifested itself in the belief that women could approach sex just like men. I thought I could disconnect from my emotions and attachments, that I could be an empowered slut—a player.”