Extreme Housewives

Homeward Bound, Emily Matchar

Simon and Schuster, 2013, 250 pages

You’re a female college graduate. Smart, creative, efficient, organized. You’ve had a great job, loved it, and then you’ve fallen in love. Gotten married. Had a baby or two. And in a matter of just a few years, your priorities lurch off your well-planned course onto one you didn’t expect. No longer do you have a passion for staying late at the office and fine-tuning reports. You spend lunch meetings texting the babysitter under the table. You wonder more and more about the safety of jarred baby food and long for time to puree your own in the kitchen.  

This is just one of many stories that send working women across the nation packing up their office desks and setting up shop as homemakers. These are the lives Emily Matchar explores in Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity. Matchar takes a look at the arenas in which women are recently returning to the home and the reasons for the growing trend. With a healthy mix of history lessons, anecdotal evidence, and diplomatic opinion, Matchar’s book reads smoothly enough for poolside lounging, but is hearty enough that you’ll find yourself hmm-ing thoughtfully throughout.

So why are women today - in the post-feminist world - finding the tasks of homemaking appealing again? If your social media feeds are anything like mine, your friends are baking their own bread, growing their own veggies, canning jam, making soap, sewing clothes, raising chickens, and using cloth diapers. Is a young woman’s future today redefined as we experience a swing from our parents' generation, that saw the dawning of vaccines and microwave meals and two-earner families, to the extreme opposite, in which any help from "the man" is seen as risky and all of life is funneled through a DIY filter?

Matchar finds a few key motivators. A backlash of feminism found women feeling trapped in the much-longed-for role of a wage-earner. Instead of feeling triumphant as top-tier managers, women discovered they no longer knew the things their grandmas did – how to make soup from scratch or knit a scarf – and they were no longer satisfied being ignorant about the domestic arts. Couple this with a recession that hit nearly every sector of the economy, and women had fewer and fewer reasons to desire work outside the home. They headed home in droves and changed the face of homemaking. “The symbolism around homemade items began to shift,” Matchar says. “If a jar of home-canned tomatoes was once a sign of poverty, it now became a sign of an enlightened attitude toward food and the environment. If an apron was once a symbol of oppression, it was now a kitschy-cool reminder of the joys of cooking.”

Moms were particularly inspired to leave the workforce, especially considering that “the United States is the only country in the developed world without guaranteed paid maternity leave.” The unfriendliness of the American workplace toward the American mom left disappointed women across the nation. “Feminism raised women’s expectations for career satisfaction, but the larger culture didn’t rise up to meet these expectations,” says Matchar in a chapter called The Emergence of the Hipster Homemaker. 

While so-called “DIY Parenting” is one expression of the New Domesticity – homeschooling, co-sleeping, natural childbirth, homemade baby food, extended breast-feeding, eschewing vaccines – a DIY lifestyle not just for moms. Childless women also find the return to homemaker status satisfying. Earning a living from internet-based businesses like Etsy, setting up an off-grid homesteading lifestyle, or just taking a little more time to live self-sufficiently appeal to women with any number of reasons to reject the American Dream. Distrust for the FDA, the CDC, and the corporate sector make carving out your own living seem much safer than relying on American culture and industry. Matchar sums up the DIY life: “This new style of home-focused, sustainability-minded living seems to offer an answer to the opt-out question for creative, educated women… New Domesticity moms imbue their days with meaning and purpose in doing not only what’s right for their family but what the believe is right for the entire world.”

My response to all this is necessarily couched in my own experience: a college-educated woman who graduated in the 2000’s, a wife and mom who cut back to part-time after the birth of my son, a fridge homesteader who grows veggies in the backyard and buys local whole (but not raw) milk for my little boy to drink. Before looking objectively at the trend, I stamp down the temptation to dismiss domesticity simply because I haven’t drenched myself in it. Mommy Guilt is real. Homemaker Guilt is equally real. Though most women in my age category have at least dipped their toes in homemade domestic life, the idea that all-in is the ideal way to live can leave guilty women hiding storebought cereal high in the cabinet when friends come to visit. So I’ll tease out my reactions and try to leave emotions behind.

Firstly, some red flags go up when I read quotes from career women turned homesteaders like “When you start producing your own food, even the simplest plot of potatoes, your life regains some of the authenticity we’ve all forgotten about.” Homegrown potatoes fried in butter make an awesome breakfast, but if your life’s authenticity depends on harvesting vegetables, you’ve missed something crucial. Matchar points out the overlap between Mormons, lesbian couples, Christian wives, and end-of-the-spectrum political liberals, all of whom find themselves drawn by the pull of new domestic life. Christian wives might not expect to find solidarity from such a diverse group of peers. I fear that many, though, put the homemade life on the pedestal that should be reserved for a Christ-made life. When value and meaning are found in shelves lined with home-canned jam and handmade soap, the domestic goddess has overstepped her bounds. Like any obsession, domestic living can become life-consuming.

Secondly, and I take this point from Matchar’s concluding chapter, the New Domesticity is most often connected to the upper-middle-class who have the luxury to quit their jobs and sustain their own homegrown lifestyles. Women in lower-class settings “don’t have time to breast-feed for three weeks, let alone three years.” Wives who canned tomatoes as “just another chore for women whose fingers were already worked down to the bone” won’t see the do-it-yourself foodie-ism with the same romantic nostalgia as wives who left a successful boardroom career to live off a quarter-acre garden. It’s important to acknowledge this if we self-righteously refuse to buy a jar of Smucker’s.

Finally, I think cultural feminism, which argues that “some gender inequality is actually just ‘gender difference’ and that we should honor women’s (and men’s) natural, inherent natures,” actually aligns properly with the Christian ethos of feminine skills. A biblical worldview would never suggest that women should be banned from business or confined to a round-the-clock job of knitting, baking, and gardening. But it’s clear that women and men are created differently and the New Domesticity appropriately recognizes that. Women climbing the career ladder or delaying child-bearing because they love their jobs aren’t necessarily making a wrong choice. But if and when they find themselves fed up with the American workplace or without enough hours in the day to balance mothering and working, there should be no shame in reorganizing life to resemble the traditional housewife. On the other hand, there should also be no shame in a lifestyle that includes dinner at Wendy’s every once in a while. No woman need feel guilted into extreme domestic life. With kindness and fairness, Emily Matchar pries open the doors on the lives of today’s young women and gives a neutral assessment of the twenty-first century housewife’s successes as well as the potential dangers of diving in too deep. Grab a glass of homemade iced tea and take a fresh look at New Domesticity this summer with Homeward Bound.