Why Liberation Can’t Be Packaged as Hustle or Homemaking

As a kid, when non-Evangelical adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was always confused. Why ask when the correct answer was clearly “homemaker”?

Certain aspects of the job were appealing. I could exert control over the domestic sphere—things like meal planning, child rearing, decor, and my personal favorite, home organization. There’d be no pointless meetings and good job security.

Fresh out of college, I was lucky to marry a great guy, who (after I put him through grad school) earned enough to support our fledgling family. But while I was ecstatic to become a mother, being home with a baby all day was not, let’s say, as stimulating as I’d imagined.

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Not only was I socially isolated and bored out of my mind, I felt confused: wasn’t this supposed to be God’s plan for families? And if so, why was it driving me up the wall?

What I didn’t realize was that the story I’d absorbed (a woman’s highest calling is full-time motherhood) was a recent invention. Pre-Industrial Revolution, most families lived and worked all in one place. Farms and shops were worked by the whole family. Elementary-aged kids learned their parents’ trades, how to run the home, and how to care for younger siblings.

Only once adults were leaving home to work in factories and large offices during the Industrial Revolution did we start to see the gender norm of upper-class women not working outside the home. (Low-income women have always taken on extra work for money.)

The Industrial Revolution’s emphasis on efficiency and productivity elevated certain types of work over others: work that made products which could be sold was deemed more important than maintenance or care work. Under neoliberal capitalism, work is valued primarily in terms of money—not in family or community necessity.

As a woman, I was presented with two choices: make money via Lean In-girlboss capitalism or opt into full-time motherhood.

But neither solution really satisfied my own ambitions, nor the needs of my family/ community. Lefty girlbosses (Sheryl Sandberg chief among them) conveniently ignored their reliance on other women (usually women of color, always low-income) to take care of the domestic and care work they were too busy/important to do. Not to mention that communities (and especially public schools) rely heavily on the unpaid labor of mothers.

Meanwhile, the Religious Right’s take on full-time motherhood/tradwifery has myriad issues. They, at once, elevate the value of unpaid domestic work (yay!) while also strictly reassuring us that men are biologically incapable of performing it (boo!)

It’s a thoroughly hypocritical argument: this work is sooooo important that men just have to do something more stimulating/prestigious/well-paid.

Masculinity is equated with earning enough money to support a family, while femininity equals “being taken care of” financially while being a 24/7 domestic servant with no breaks or benefits. Men in such arrangements get to enjoy the benefits of capitalism and the gift economy without ever labeling it as such (or needing to reciprocate.)

It’s a system ripe for abuse. Even among full-time mom friends in “good” marriages I’ve heard of women being told they didn’t get a vote in major family decisions because they “don’t earn any money.”

Perhaps it makes sense, then, that marriage and birth rates have been falling for decades. We’re feeling the squeeze of capitalism and rising inequality, with less community to call upon for help.

As more and more work gets shifted from the community to the couple (think of the decline of free-range kids since the 90s), couples are burned out and exhausted. That makes the prospect of additional children less and less appealing.

If the Right is actually serious about boosting marriage and fertility rates (instead of merely controlling women), they’d do well to help the 36% of American adults who’d like to have kids but don’t think they can afford to. According to survey respondents, this could look like:

* subsidized childcare (a friend in Spain pays €100 per month per kid!)

* cheaper higher education/help with student loans

* more affordable housing

* universal healthcare

* legalized abortion (this one may seem counterintuitive, but knowing abortion is an option if a pregnancy becomes dangerous = more women willing to get pregnant)

(Note: Trump’s $5000 ‘baby bonus’ did not make the list.)

We feminists must recognize that the discourse around women and careers has, for far too long, been dominated by wealthy white women. By listening to intersectional feminists, we can escape the tradwife/girl boss binary and start reimagining a system that actually works for everyone.

Books like Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism and Angela Garbes’ Essential Labor challenge us to expand our definition of “feminist” issues to include things like food security and domestic workers’ rights.

These authors understand that capitalism and feminism make strange bedfellows; they inspire us to focus less on individual ambitions and more on building up the community.

As I’ve worked to build up my writing/storytelling career while remaining the primary caregiver for my kids, I’ve come to realize how essential community is. I’m lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where my kids can roam pretty freely; one where neighbors can be called on to help out. We also benefit from living in a city which invests in its public schools and aftercare programs. Without these support networks, you wouldn’t be reading this Substack right now.

Neoliberal capitalism, in conjunction with the Religious Right, have long sold us the idea that the individual and nuclear family are the only units of society that matter, that systemic problems can only be outwitted by working even harder.

But more and more of us are waking up to realize that not only is the system rigged, but that we can find ways to circumvent it. We can build our own gift economies, we can value community and care, even when capitalism doesn’t. We can vote for visionaries who will build us the system we actually need.

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

Programming Note: the regular Substack will be off for the next two weeks as I retool for the launch of Manly Man of God (the serialized version of my novel) coming October 1st.

BONUS MATERIALS:

* Jameela Jamil has some thoughts on billionaires

* some Seattle-based humor

* and, finally, Every Women’s Conference Everywhere

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