This was a wonderful conversation between two thoughtful women who are concerned with living meaningful lives, and making real contributions to the common social good.
I think that we undervalue women’s household work because of all the “labor-saving” devices, and products,that have made many of the routine tasks traditionally done by wom…
This was a wonderful conversation between two thoughtful women who are concerned with living meaningful lives, and making real contributions to the common social good.
I think that we undervalue women’s household work because of all the “labor-saving” devices, and products,that have made many of the routine tasks traditionally done by women easier, and simpler. I had the fortune (whether good or bad you decide) to have grown up in an environment that was more nineteenth than twentieth century. We had a wood burning stove for which we (mostly me) had to find dead trees to chop down. That stove was a lot of work to operate and maintain, but my mother did most of the work on it. Feeding a family of five is no easy task.
And yet she also milked cows, made butter, sewed shirts, and other articles of clothing, and even wove wool. That was the world of a farmer’s wife, and we wouldn’t have survived without it. Since the male members of the family herded animals, planted and reaped the crops by hand , chopped wood, built and maintained the fences, and slaughtered animals, we wouldn’t have eaten if we hadn’t produced anything.
I say this because we have apparently abandoned the concept of complementarity that such a life requires. Everyone in the household had to contribute their work to support the family, and everyone’s work was valued. The world is in many ways a better place today than it was in my youth half a century and more ago, but we have lost the family as a productive entity in which each played a part in keeping things going, and the result of our shared work was a secure household, and a humane way of life.
Feminism, by devaluing the family, has effectively ruined the lives of uncountable men, women, and children who ought to be engaged in a cooperative relationship spanning generations. I am immensely grateful to both of you for shining a light on a matter of crucial importance for all.
Exactly right, and I would add, removed additional tasks from mothers by collectively raising children in what I find uncomfortably similar to orphanages. This belief was strengthened after I did a Norwegian show criticizing feminisms push for daycares. I received countless emails from norwegian women describing their anguish about being trapped in a system that forced them to give up their children to the Monday-Friday 9-5 daycare regime. Their letters were all laced with regret over going against their intuition and not speaking up.
It is no accident that feminism is strongest in the most developed nations and in the most affluent classes of those nations. For most of human history and still most of the billions today life is a might too hard to indulge in such "luxury beliefs".
This was a wonderful conversation between two thoughtful women who are concerned with living meaningful lives, and making real contributions to the common social good.
I think that we undervalue women’s household work because of all the “labor-saving” devices, and products,that have made many of the routine tasks traditionally done by women easier, and simpler. I had the fortune (whether good or bad you decide) to have grown up in an environment that was more nineteenth than twentieth century. We had a wood burning stove for which we (mostly me) had to find dead trees to chop down. That stove was a lot of work to operate and maintain, but my mother did most of the work on it. Feeding a family of five is no easy task.
And yet she also milked cows, made butter, sewed shirts, and other articles of clothing, and even wove wool. That was the world of a farmer’s wife, and we wouldn’t have survived without it. Since the male members of the family herded animals, planted and reaped the crops by hand , chopped wood, built and maintained the fences, and slaughtered animals, we wouldn’t have eaten if we hadn’t produced anything.
I say this because we have apparently abandoned the concept of complementarity that such a life requires. Everyone in the household had to contribute their work to support the family, and everyone’s work was valued. The world is in many ways a better place today than it was in my youth half a century and more ago, but we have lost the family as a productive entity in which each played a part in keeping things going, and the result of our shared work was a secure household, and a humane way of life.
Feminism, by devaluing the family, has effectively ruined the lives of uncountable men, women, and children who ought to be engaged in a cooperative relationship spanning generations. I am immensely grateful to both of you for shining a light on a matter of crucial importance for all.
Exactly right, and I would add, removed additional tasks from mothers by collectively raising children in what I find uncomfortably similar to orphanages. This belief was strengthened after I did a Norwegian show criticizing feminisms push for daycares. I received countless emails from norwegian women describing their anguish about being trapped in a system that forced them to give up their children to the Monday-Friday 9-5 daycare regime. Their letters were all laced with regret over going against their intuition and not speaking up.
It is no accident that feminism is strongest in the most developed nations and in the most affluent classes of those nations. For most of human history and still most of the billions today life is a might too hard to indulge in such "luxury beliefs".