The Art of Homemaking
It's more than stirring and stitching
Once upon a time, there was a young girl whose mother worked outside the home and transferred most of the housecleaning chores and the care of a younger sibling to the girl. She was not allowed to leave the house because her mother feared she would find trouble. After returning home from school each day, the little girl was required to vacuum and dust the living room and dining room while keeping watch over her sister. Upon the mother’s return, the young girl was expected to set the table for dinner and help with meal prep. After the evening meal, the girl was required to wash, dry, put away the dishes, and wipe the table, chairs, stove, and refrigerator. As the young girl grew up, she developed a great resentment of domestic chores. At age fourteen, she found a paying job and declared she would never be “just a housewife.” She had big plans for her future as a young woman entering adulthood in the 1980s.
My version of the Cinderella fairytale did not feature an evil stepmother and mean stepsisters, nor did it end with rescue by a prince. Many years later, my mother explained that she was concerned about me getting into trouble after school and hanging out with the wrong crowd, and she wanted to teach me about responsibility. My young mind interpreted this mandatory servitude as a way of measuring my value in the family. In moments of teenage anger, I yelled that I was not her maid and babysitter. With no cousins and few friends, I didn’t know if this was normal. Did other girls have to do these daily chores?
The desire to escape my family delayed my big plans, and then, pregnancy changed everything that I thought I wanted. Motherhood had a back-to-the-land effect on me; I dreamed about living in the country, having animals, and growing food. A nesting instinct took over, and my new priority was to be a good mother. I prided myself on making all of my son’s baby food, reading to him daily, taking him to parks to play, and the library for weekly story hour. I unconsciously returned to the domestic chores I rebelled against a decade earlier. I never abandoned those tasks again, and in the years to follow, I grew to resent the unequal division of labor that many women experience. I had to work outside of the home to help pay our bills, but worked evenings so I could parent my son during the day. My husband referred to his evening care of his son as babysitting, and that started the decades-long, occasionally angry discussions where I argued that I was doing far more household tasks than he was and that I carried a running household to-do list in my mind 24/7. Why didn’t he know when we were out of milk? He responded before realizing his mistake: Because I didn’t tell him! It finally occurred to me that I was managing three lives while managing the day-to-day aspects of a home while working full-time.
No wonder I was exhausted.
I didn’t intend to write about women as homemakers and housekeepers, but while searching online for something else, I discovered that November 3rd is National Homemakers Day. I generally poo-poo these national-whatever days as they are often associated with consumerism. The official website for National Homemaker Day is one page that recommends we “celebrate the people who keep our households running” and offers a few ideas for honoring the homemaker.
The irony of my youthful resistance to domesticity is that I am now, at age 65, an advocate and dedicated practitioner of homemaking. My version of homemaking still includes the more mundane chores of house cleaning, bill paying, and paperwork management. However, I now believe my weekly cooking and baking, seasonal gardening, seed saving, food preservation, herbal remedy making, and, most importantly, a growing awareness of how my home economy, rooted in sustainable living practices, can potentially impact the wellness of the earth - our bigger home. Homemaking has become my lifestyle. Of course, I no longer cater to an employer’s schedule and expectations and don’t have to care for children or elders so that I can maintain a homemaking lifestyle.
While thinking about homemaking, I searched through my books, remembering I had one about the history of home economics in America, another on the art and science of keeping house, numerous Wendell Berry books about food production and the importance of local economies, and permaculture principles and lifestyles. I have my mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook, given to her as a wedding present in 1958, full of written and graphic 1950s expectations and stereotypes (definitely worthy of a newsletter). I also had the unique experience of helping women in a federally-funded Displaced Homemaker training program define their experiences and skills for their resumes. I am intrigued by the many political, economic, and sociological issues that revolve around the work and expectations of homemaking and have brainstormed ideas for future newsletters. What do you think?
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I found that consciously choosing the path of the homemaker, especially since I left college in my junior year to do it, was decidedly going against the mainstream current. Four years later I left an upwardly mobile corporate career to start a family, moved from a big city to a ramshackle rural farmhouse that needed lots of work. I had so much pressure to return to the career world, put our first child in daycare, etc. Anything but be a homemaker. I loved my chosen work. It required all the managerial skills of a CEO, all the devotion of a renunciate, all the creativity of a master artist, and so much more. I loved the uniqueness of each day, all the challenges and triumphs. Eventually, family and friends stopped pressuring me to "contribute something useful," "make my mark on the world," and stop "wasting my intelligence." I stand by the my choices. I identify as a homemaker, rather than a housewife. I literally made a home daily, but never married a house. I think your article is inspiring some journaling for me. Thank you!
Sue, this is a beautiful essay on homemaking and housework. I appreciate how you came to expand the idea of domesticity to mean gardening and plant medicine and so forth. I am in hearty agreement. I too have been angry at the unfair division of labor between the sexes, but I guess I put that out to the universe because my partner now does his half the labor and probably more. He cooks one night, I cook the next. He does his laundry, I do mine. I know that this is not the case in many homes--and that many women have to choose to be unmarried in order to not feel bitter about housework expectations--so I feel very grateful. I really loved this piece. Thank you.