A Book Review - Sort Of

So, I finally ordered the book Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes, after reading about it for a while online and waiting for it to become available at my library.  It didn't, so I had to order it.  I'm about halfway through it now, so consider this a "sort of" book review.

You know how it is--there are people who "review" things, either on Amazon or elsewhere online, and reading their review it becomes quickly apparent that they read about 25 pages of the book and then gave up in disgust.  You can tell when, for instance, they whine that the book doesn't address something that it in fact spends a whole chapter (late in the book) on.  We distance ourselves from trolls like that; you shouldn't write a review of something, especially not a scathing one, that you didn't finish.

However the ideas from this book have been boiling around in my head, so I thought I'd write a semi-review, and then add to it later if it seems necessary.

The first half of the book is the theory of domesticity, if you will; the Why of what Hayes calls Radical Homemaking.  The Why goes like this:

1. Each household should strive to be as free as possible.  Part of being free is the freedom to dispose of your own time and energy in ways that you think are good.  To that extent, having to purchase things from corporations or having to work for different corporations to earn money to purchase things makes you less free.

2. One way (I might even dare say Hayes contends the only way) to become more free is to engage in Radical Homemaking, which might be summed up as: The household tries to meet as many of its own needs as possible without purchasing goods and services.

All of which is well and good.  The things I don't go along with are Hayes's insistence that corporations are necessarily evil.

(In case you are wondering, a corporation can't be evil because a corporation is not alive and has no soul.  It is just a tool.  It would be like calling a shovel evil because someone used it to hit their brother.  People can be evil, but not corporations.)

Hayes is also, rather surprisingly considering how pessimistic she is about corporations (made up of people, remember), very optimistic about the goodness of people.

If you can get over the idea that everyone would be good, healthy, kind, and wise if only we shared things equitably and had a cash-free economy, you can dig into what I think is the valuable part of the book--the idea that the labor a stay-at-home parent (or person) does is not trivial and valuless.  This is not, of course, a new idea, although Hayes might be uniquely sucessful at packaging the idea for a liberal, crunchy, trendy culture.  (For the record I don't think Hayes is particularly trendy, but I think her treatment of the "stay-at-home women have value" will be more palatable for a mainline culture than, say, The Monstrous Regiment of Women.)*

This is something I've been trying to formulate for a long time, and Hayes pretty well hits it when she makes the point that domestic work never goes away.  What, in fact, happens when privileged women decide not to do domestic work is that the work gets pushed onto someone else.

A simple way to look at this is scrubbing toilets.  We all have to use toilets.  There's no way around it.  And toilets have to be cleaned, or we'll get cholera and die.  I happen to clean my own toilets, but let's pretend like I decide I have to go back to work.  That doesn't mean that now, magically, the toilets no longer need cleaning (even if I have a soul above such things).  Either I have to clean the toilets after I get off work, the Husband has to clean the toilets, or we have to hire someone to clean our toilets.

We would try to pay the person who scrubbed our toilets fairly, but as an industry house cleaners don't make a ton of money.  We certainly couldn't afford to give our toilet scrubber benefits, the way the government thinks we should.  Odds are that the scrubber would be middle aged, female, and (speaking in national statistics, here) nonwhite.

Added to this dubious ethical stew is the above idea--that I have a soul above toilet cleaning, and so I don't need to do it.  This idea, because toilets still need to be cleaned, implies that some people do not have a soul above toilet cleaning.  It reinforces classism, because if soulishness gives me a pass on cleaning up messes I make, obviously the people who are cleaning toilets must not be quite as... je ne sai quoi as me, right?  Not as smart, or sensitive, or wide-souled.

Dangerous territory, that.

For the record, I don't think employing a cleaning lady is unethical, if you can pay her fairly ("fairly" will vary from area to area, but it should be on the books and in accordance with the law, for starters) and if you have thought through the implications.  Likewise buying vs. making your own bread, or employing a babysitter, or having a dual-income household.  You just need to be sure you are not blindly believing the message of the culture.

Are you sure that the things you are doing are important enough for you to give away that much of your income--to lose that much of your household freedom?  What do you believe in?  Does the second income really help you achieve those goals (religious education for your children, healthy food, cozy home, financial security) or does it, insidiously, chip away at it?

Even if you don't want to become a Radical Homemaker (I'm a fail so far today, because I bought produce from an evil corporation instead of waiting until tomorrow and the farmer's market--though I'm still going to the market and I did make yogurt), it pays to think about domestic labor as valuable.  It helps you take a pride in what you do, if you're a stay-at-home mom, and it also makes you think before spending blindly or foolishly (even on something "green" or "natural").  When you consider how many hours of labor went to earn the money for the purchase... is it worth it?


Cheers,

Breanna
*Note: do I need to say that I'd like to see that documentary, but in a watching-a-car-wreck sort of way?  People saying the right things in drastically wrong ways has that effect on me.