High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [26]
If the working-class women of my mother’s generation had been born in any other time, they would have led other lives—not necessarily better or worse, but definitely other. A decade earlier, they might have built airplanes and let the devil and Hitler take the daily dusting. Ten years later, they could have had Ph.D.s in aeronautics. Women, unless they were quite wealthy, have always worked: in the house and out of the house, on the farm, in factories, sometimes caring for other people’s kids, often leaving their own with the family herd under grandma’s practiced eye. I’ve read that early in this century, when desperate families flooded into cities seeking work, leaving their rural support systems behind, female factory workers had to bundle their toddlers up on boards and hang them on hooks on the walls. At break time they’d unswaddle the kids and feed them. I like to mention this to anyone who suggests that modern day care is degrading the species.
Sometimes, when I’m trapped and have to listen to such stuff, I hear men of an evangelical bent explain that all our problems would end if women would just tend to housework and children as they have for two thousand years. Problem is, we are tending those things, but few of us have the option of doing it without also holding down a job that pays real money. Homemaking is moot if you’re homeless. What the televangelists are invoking as the natural order is actually an artifice of a postwar economy, a kind of household that was practicable for just about twenty years. Not two thousand. Picture a medieval Donna Reed, if you will. Doesn’t wash.
Whatever anyone might like to pretend, the fact is we’re living in a country that can’t—or in any event, doesn’t—guarantee support for a spouse who does housework. And you don’t get Toll House cookies without the toll. Behind the nostalgic call for women to return to tidying up the cottage is the supposition that some burly fellow will always be there to keep the wolf from the door. This fairy tale has lost its powers of persuasion. Half of all marriages undertaken since 1960 didn’t last for the anticipated eternity. It’s been a great disenchantment for all in the magic kingdom, no doubt, but the statistics on what follows are a shock that gets your feet back on the ground: after divorce, a man’s expendable income is overwhelmingly likely to increase, while a woman’s plummets, along with her children’s standard of living. The reason for this is clear enough. Hours logged on Kinder and kitchen don’t add up to tenure and a retirement plan.
Given that we have to make our own way in this big old world, it seems rude to try to make women (or men) feel guilty about neglecting the household operation. Cleanliness is next to godliness only if you’re God’s Wife. Guiding and nourishing a flock of the very young—your own or someone else’s—is a career, there’s no doubt about it. But housework is mostly about dirt. Other people’s. The world’s most renewable resource.
It seems incredible that some twenty years’ worth of magazines could glorify the routine maintenance of marginally grateful sock-dropping families. I’m embarrassed about my own selfish participation in that experiment. For years I was determined to make it up to my mother. She has a job, now that we’ve all flown far from the nest, and I craved to ease her burden. Whenever she’d come to visit I would subtly try to demonstrate that housework could be the next best thing to nothing at all. “Let’s all just pick up our plates,” I’d say cheerfully at the end of a meal, “and put them straight in the dishwasher.” I felt shaky and heretical, as if I were suggesting to a priest that we spread Cheez Whiz on the wafers to make them more tasty. But I did it anyway. Right before Mom’s very eyes I threw a pair of green socks in with the sheets.
Guess what? She already knew. She’s no fool. Dad even cooks breakfast now.
I’m starting to see what my friend Jane, the scientific illustrator of vacuum cleaners, learned at age twelve: that in every profession, housewifery included, the