To be properly green, you will tie women to the house

[Flo]

As a child I lived the very green life in the 50s and 60s. We had no dustbin collection as we lived in the middle of nowhere on a farm with not a community tip within 100 miles. Consequently we had to deal with all our own rubbish. The only thing that we could not reuse or recycle was the tin can.

We were also tenant farmers with descent from bankrupt in the 1930s on one side of family so not that well off landowners. Poverty doesn’t lead to waste if you have been down that road it seems.

Mother was tied to the large farm house by the sheer volume of work – all meals from scratch, bottling, preserving, searching the hedgerows for produce, composting, washing in the copper boiler and mangling the washing before hanging out, managing coal fires, patching and darning, knitting when we were small, cutting down and reusing old clothes …. Now this was an intelligent and educated woman following in the footsteps of two intelligent and educated grandmothers. What use a university education to women who were going to be housebound after marriage because you didn’t work when you had children in them days. And yes I was involved in out of school time with the hunter / gatherer activities round the hedge rows, yes I can knit and darn and sew for a house if I must.

But no you can’t live properly green in the sense of zero waste, reduce, reuse, recycle if one person out of the family is not at home full time. In my opinion. OK so we are unlikely to go back to the old washing copper and mangle or coal fires (think pollution) though "the rich" can afford to run agas and ranges which can be coal fired and wood burners (ok if you can get the wood). But certainly the range we had burnt a lot of waste that we still can't recycle. So no landfill but plenty of coal powered smoke.

[Annpan]

I think that firstly it is not always the woman who chooses to stay at home. Secondly what is so bad about being at home... it is a different lifestyle for sure but it is in no way less rewarding than going out to work.

There are many new ways of working from home that are now available too, so you could still earn money from home.

I am tired of justifying my choice to raise my own child rather that go back to work... and when I tell people that I plan to Home educate, they think I am some kind of sadist - I can't think of anything more wonderful.

[johnhcrf]

Home living for women and growing families is a valuable contribution to society. Equally as valid as working women. WhenI hear of criticism of the fair sex, The M word springs to mind.

[red]

yes - I echo what Ann has said here..

firstly it has nothing to do with gender. yes this lifestyle ties you to the home .. Livestock and poultry do that to a large extent. and then the growing and preserving. - but you could find this if you are male female, in a relationship or single .
And yes I often say it takes much longer to cook a meal.. as it starts with going out and picking the veg.. washing it.. podding/prepping etc etc.

thing is.. this is real life. an fine by me.

as it happens, in my life and arrangement with my OH, I work part time from home, home educate my child and my OH works full time (partly from home) - so a lot of it falls to me to keep an eye on the place, animals etc. as I am here, but we are equal in the work around here.. the digging planting chopping of wood, recycling. we both cook, we both preserve.

and we like being at home and enjoying this life. I consider myself lucky that we can arrange our lives in such a way, not tied which makes it sound like a prison...!

[ina]

I wouldn't see it as being tied to the home, either - I would see it as having my place of work at home - great - no need to commute! In a way I have that now, too, although I am employed: it's just that my place of work is across the yard.

[MKG]

Unbelievable - I'm truly shocked. How did women get conflated with "in the house" in a modern discussion? Yes, that's the way it was. Yes, it was hard. Yes, it was unjust. So was Magna Carta, and just about as relevant to modern living.

I've just watched Ina out on lambing watch, and I don't envy her. It's not something I'd choose to do because I'm male. It's not something I SHOULD do because I'm male.

Being green doesn't "tie" anyone to the house - least of all women. What it does is reassert the importance of the home in a green lifestyle. It's not a prison sentence - it's a personal choice.

[glenniedragon]

I gave up work when I had my first child, but I don't consider myself tied to the house but I can sorta see where you're coming from-ish. The problem is whoever stays at home to do the family raising bit isn't recognised/valued by society and the government as a whole be they male or female. The value of the homemaker has slowly been whittled away until you feel you have to explain why and how you came to that decision and justify it. Raising kids is the guarentee for all of society- they will be the Drs, Dentists, Lawyers, Farmers even Prime Ministers of the future its in everybodies business that its a job done properly. I became more green as a result of being at home with the kids, I may not be financially contributing but I do 95% of the childcare, grow my own veg, tend our chooks and extract our honey...as well as turing my hand to carpentry, DIY and metalwork as required!
So the crux of all that is if The value of the homemaker was reflected in financial support from govt, and the esteem of society then more would do it and may result in a greener society locally based, ties to a location rather than the immediate home.

thats my two'penarth anyway

Deb

[hamster]

I think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that being green or living more sustainably equates to going 'back in time', but I'm not sure it's necessarily that simple. A lot of what we describe as feminism is really only a by-product of industrialisation and capitalism. So it seems terribly shocking that women weren't allowed to vote or own property while men were (and it is!), but it's also worth remembering that until comparatively recently before that, most men didn't own property, it was all in the hands of a few landowners, and most men couldn't vote either. In pre-industrial agrarian societies, people generally lived in multi-generational family groups anyway, but both parents would largely be occupied in mostly unpaid work around the house and on the land to ensure the survival of their family. Sure, some things naturally got dumped onto women who would often be pregnant or breastfeeding and better suited to doing things inside the home rather than going out vigorously hoeing fields or whatever, but the paradigm of the male parent going out to work while the female parent stayed at home bringing up the babies and preserving fruit has really only been true for an extremely small segment of the population for an extremely brief period of time. It's largely a middle class phenomenon (all peasants had to work, if you were rich men didn't work much either) and has only become so prominent since the Industrial Revolution and the huge rise of the middle classes.

Incidentally, I'm not trying to pretend that life was just like some rural idyll before they built all those nasty factories: but I don't think it was a bed of roses for most men either, the overwhelming majority of people of both genders were engaged in repetitive physical labour in pursuit of keeping their family fed, sheltered and clothed, had minimal education and minimal political participation. So while it's true that the women's lib movement of the latter part of the 20th century was largely possible because of technology making domestic work easier, the dichotomy of public sphere work= masculine/private sphere work = feminine had only really emerged as a consequence of technology as well. Most 14th century men didn't work in offices. Ditto the value that was placed on these types of work by society: in the 17th century, running a household well was a very respected occupation and even wealthy women would have baked and made pastry for dinner parties and this was seen as a great accomplishment, and it was only, say, in the late 18th and 19th centuries that it became fashionable to take no part in running the household at all (it was terribly middle class to know what you were having for supper).


It really depends on what we understand by a green way of life as to what types of work we think people will be involved in and how many people will be engaged in the formal economy rather than working for self-sufficiency (or at least community self-sufficiency) in the future. In what might be called the best-case scenario, where the technology fairy solves all our problems and we carry on our unbridled economic growth, but powering everything with wind and solar energy and simultaneously reducing carbon emissions, then very little need change, we can all cycle to work or drive in hydrogen cars, run the dishwasher and washing machine off the wind turbine and the issue of who brings up the children will be largely disassociated from green-ness and will be the decision of each family, as it is now. I work a 40 hour week (mostly from home), and we currently cook from scratch every night, using mostly local, organic ingredients, we wash up by hand, we make our own bread, jam and cakes, I knit, mend clothes and sometimes make them and am aiming to grow a good amount of food this year, and the only reason I couldn't carry on doing all this and working would be if we had children (or livestock, I suppose), and in that case the question of whether I carried on working would be up for discussion anyway. Otherwise, increased opportunity to telecommute or have more flexible working hours might allow people the freedom to live a green life and have a paying job: you could have time off during the day in winter to feed the pigs or make repairs to your house or whatever and make it up by working during the dark evenings.

(On a purely personal note, I also find making bread, growing tomatoes and knitting far more empowering and fulfilling than sitting at a desk being the stooge of big business for an annoyingly large percentage of my week, but I accept that not everyone would make the same choice. And it's nice to have the choice.)

Of course, we probably all accept this is extremely unlikely, but assuming some kind of middle ground between the technology fairy scenario and the total-social-collapse-leading-to-a-return-to-agrarian-self-sufficiency scenario there might indeed be pressure for one parent to remain at home while one works outside the home, but even then, it's not a given that this is the mother. If often is, but when I was in Africa I worked for a women's organisation and one interesting thing I learnt was that many families will now actually invest more in the education of their daughters than their sonse (contrary to what has been done historically and what one might expect) because men are more able to find work as labourers or drivers, for which little education is needed, or are more use around the family farm, while women can earn a lot more doing office type jobs where upper body strength confers little advantage.

A society with less cheap, abundant oil (or, less likely, a strong commitment not to burn it! Hah!) will doubtless demand a lot more physical labour from all of us except the super-rich, but that involves a whole myriad of changes in cultural and social norms, values and expectations, and if we don't start managing the transition better on a community or political level we'll ALL be in for a nasty shock anyway, but I don't think it necessarily follows that just because we maybe reverse the situation where women work full-time as well as men, we'll also have to give up our right to vote or to have a bank account in our own name, in the same way that even though we might lose a lot of our snazzy modern medical equipment, we can't unlearn our knowledge of germs and diseases.

So we might 'tie women to the house', but we might equally tie men to the house, or we might tie women to the house and men to the land, or we might decide that being 'tied to the house' is a peculiarly post-industrial, capitalistic way of looking at it and it is, on balance, no worse than working as a data entry clerk (the only job I've ever had that was more mind-numbing than au pairing!). It's not moving backward, it's just a different way of moving forward.

[Cassiepod]

I thin a lot is down to choice and opportunity, if you've chosen to stay at home then it's not so restrictive and being obliged to stay at home.

That's also why this is an 'ish forum in recnition that without a great deal of dedication we can't arrive at a truly green a selfsufficient lifestyle if anyone in the household goes out to work and introduces a daily commuteetc etc.

[hamster]

My word, I do apologise for the pretentious load of waffle I've just written! I would delete it, but it took me all of my lunch hour to write and I can't quite bear to yet...

[red]

don't appologise Hamster - I enjoyed reading it. Particularly the connection between children and livestock (just kidding!)

all valid points I think.

I agree that we must not confuse going back in time with going green. Back in Victorian times, people threw chemicals around the garden with mad abandon.

[snapdragon]

My word, I do apologise for the pretentious load of waffle I've just written! I would delete it, but it took me all of my lunch hour to write and I can't quite bear to yet...

not at all Hamster - twas all very enlightening - the social progression revolving around the land and the factories is something that has affected the geography /demography of this and other lands to a great degree.

[Annpan]

My word, I do apologise for the pretentious load of waffle I've just written! I would delete it, but it took me all of my lunch hour to write and I can't quite bear to yet...

That was a really interesting post hamster... don't delete it.

[ina]

Can I second (or third/fourth/whatever) that?

[eccentric_emma]

and i fifth it.