Is domesticity anti-feminist?

In an effort to get our eating out and Starbucks bills under control, The Man and I are participating on a no spend challenge this month. I’ve also been experimenting with traditional foods, especially soaking grains. We even created a meal plan for the week, and I have no knead bread rising as I type. Add to that that the Boychick has actually let me pick up the knitting needles again (good thing, too, for The Man left his previous wool hat on the bus in the middle of a blizzard), and that I’m in the middle of a month long break from classes, and it’s all combined to make me feel a little… domestic.

Did you hear that whisper? The slightly horrified tone? Domestic is a dirty word, no doubt about it.

But why? Where did that repugnance come from? Well, Betty Friedan, but other than that. Why the revilement of the place we spend most of our lives? I am surely not immune to it, for the realization that I had made all three of our meals (a rare event in our household only for me: The Man, the main cook here, does it most weekends) plus our dessert and had already started on tomorrow’s dinner made me feel decidedly odd. I had an urge to throw down the spatula and run away to an all-women university. I felt I was betraying my mother (a physician from the generation where the female med students still had to share the nurse’s locker room), my grandmother (who really did wear army boots), and all my feminist forebears.

But I also felt betrayed. I was raised on meals from a can, a box, or a fast food “restaurant”, and didn’t even know what real food was, much less how important it is. I was taught that cleaning was for the maids (all women, interestingly), for it was beneath an educated, enlightened woman, and so it took me (and my partner, whose full-time on the night shift mother gave up sleep to clean and care for him) years to learn how to avoid squalor, and we still haven’t fully controlled the clutter. Homes must be kept, if we are to live somewhere. Children must be reared, if we are to have them. Why must these tasks be reviled?

Oh, but I am so not suggesting women meekly head home and don their aprons like good little housewives. That truly would be a betrayal, and I would rightly be roundly shot down by my fellow feminists. I maintain that there must be, and is, a position neither women oppressing nor home neglecting.

The problem as I see it is that domesticity is reviled because it was women’s work, and the way proposed to raise women’s status up was to leave the domestic sphere and join the men. Which is great, as far as it goes. But it means no one’s home. And those who are (either literally by being stay at home parents, or figuratively by excelling at domestic tasks such as cooking or knitting) are belittled — the men by the gender traditionalists, the women by feminist traditionalists.

The solution then, as I see it, is neither to raise women out of the domestic sphere nor to lower them back in to it, but to raise the status of the sphere itself. Only when domesticity and home-keeping are valued by all will men as a whole take up their share, and only then that women will be free to enter or leave it as they please, and be respected either way. Only then will our domestic ancestresses receive the honor and acclaim they deserve for keeping the home fires burning, and our ancestors the shame of not participating fully.

One could accuse me merely of wanting status for falling in to a role my mothers worked so hard to run away from, and maybe that’s part of it. But I can’t see what we would lose by celebrating domesticity a little, and I see so much we could gain, from gender equality to really great bread. That seems worth the effort, doesn’t it?