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.
