Work/Life/Home

I am listening to Joan Williams speak on Your Call Radio about the disjointedness between the way our economy and workforce function, the needs of families, of women and men. It's a great show. So interesting that I wanted to add my own .02 about how people and their work is valued in our country.

Women were at one time trapped in the home with no means of independent support. Her homemaking was only compensated by the protection and support of a husband. If a woman was suddenly a widow or divorced she was caught in a system that would not let her work at all outside of the home, and if she did, it was for a paltry paycheck. (The irony that a single mother's paycheck would be the lowest when it's generally her who supports the kids!). With the advent of second-wave feminism,  women went back to work in record numbers, leaving their families so that they could help support them financially. They still made less than men, but were able to contribute in some way. Meanwhile, the kitchen arts died out almost completely after all the short cuts and bad advice of the mid-20th century. There was a new term, "latch key kids," that described the children of working mothers who let themselves in after school in the afternoons. Thirty years later U.S. women have to work. Most of us have no choice. The cost of living in many places is high and health insurance costs are unreal. Too many people get sick and die simply because they can't get care. Because we have no idea how to cook real food, and because women come in tired after work at 6pm every day, undernourished, overeating people get fatter and sicker. Our public school system is depleted and sick enough to drown in a bucket, turning out more and more kids who can't compete in the workplace, and so the circle completes itself.

Jobs are few and far between if your line of work isn't in computers. Women are actually more likely than men to be in the workforce. I know two men who spent their children's baby years as part-time working, stay-at-home dads, simply because their wives were much better employed than they were at the time. I'm just guessing that a lot of these gainfully employed mothers make less than their male counterparts, that many large employers go for female employees because they know that they can pay them less than if they were male.

Meanwhile, men sit at home, waiting to hear from someone at some company somewhere to give them a job offer. This is especially true for manual workers who do not own their own businesses. Unless, of course, they want to move to China or India and take a major pay cut (not to mention that in certain lines of work they'd be in sweatshops with kids). This is also a huge issue, both emotionally and socially.

I'm certainly not criticizing mothers who went back to work in the 70s. It was a huge gain for women at a time when they were second class citizens. My complaint is with a system that took advantage of lots of cheap female labor that desperately needed that paycheck to support their families, with money and health insurance.

Then there are the Michael Pollans of the world whose writings, however insightful, also have a huge blind spot right at the point where women, their work and family have a critical disjuncture. Specifically this: how is a woman who works all day and still often does most of the domestic tasks around the home, to cook whole foods from scratch so that their families can eat every day? It simply does not work. Also, I have never met a man who is either interested or comfortable enough in the kitchen to take up that particular gauntlet (and I mean the full-on-homemaker dad who does laundry, is a member of the PTA THEN lines up his monthly sauerkraut crocks and gets his bone broth in order every week). Maybe they're out there. If you know one, please tell me, because I'm certain that he's a myth. So what is to be done?

Our labor system - the value given to people and what they do - simply must change. Anyone who takes up the domestic tasks of raising a family has to be compensated in some way. People in the workforce need to make a living wage. Someone in our government needs to grow a spine and finally take on the insurance companies.

Now I have to put my stew in the refrigerator for later and get myself to work...I won't be home until after 9 tonight, but everything's fine because the food is done and half of the laundry is folded. :)