Radical Homemaker - Book 13

The full title of this book is Radical Homemaker; Reclaiming Domesticity in a Consumer Culture. It is written by Shannon Hays who has a Ph.D. in Sustainable Agriculture from Cornell. Even while Hays was ambitiously pursuing higher education in order to fulfill the feminist call to economic independence in the corporate world, she was also growing up and living on a farm where neighbors helped each other out, grew their own food and were much more self-reliant than most of society; a society which has shed all the skills and know-how of being self-sustaining and has opted to buy more and more goods and services to make up for that loss of know how.

Hays uses Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique as a starting point. She lauds the feminist movement for freeing women from oppressive stereotypes but she rejects the model upon which they based their strategy. Hays traces the history of domesticity back to pre-historic times and then back up to the present era. The problem with feminism is that it requires women to exit the home in order to gain economic independence. The only thing is everyone still needs a home! Originally both men and women were workers at home. Men built the home, chopped firewood, butchered animals, tooled leather, etc. Women cooked, spun and knitted wool, sewed clothes, preserved food. And plenty of the jobs overlapped. The division of labor that left women in the home and forced men to go out to a workplace happened with the industrial revolution. This eventually led into a consumer economy where supposed economic health for a family came to mean two income earners to afford a house with a big mortgage, multiple cars, buying instead of growing and making food, buying clothes instead of making one's own, putting children in child care and schools instead of having them at home to learn and help.

Radical Homemakers have rejected the idea that consumerism should be the basis for our lives. Hays compares working for corporations with little to no job security, the expectation of working long hours, the long commutes, as a type of slavery, where the employee can't leave the job because they can't afford to; they are trapped there because of debt and the need for health insurance. The job actually generates more debt because of all the incidental expenses this lifestyle entails: child care, transportation, car insurance and repairs, convenience foods and health care (and a lot of health issues so rampant today like depression, diabetes, etc actually stem from the stressful corporate consumer lifestyle!).

Radical Homemakers have opted to drop out of this type of culture and reclaim the home. They have chosen to base their life decisions on four tenents, what builds up these four things: family, community, social justice and the environment. Hays says that households should once again become producers not consumers. Every home should be comprised of not just living people but all kinds of living things, gardens, yeast, fermentation, livestock, etc.

All of the twenty people/couples Hays studied choose to live alternatively, either in small houses they have refurbished themselves, or in trailers or with extended family. They grow much of their own food via gardening and raising chickens or livestock. They barter often with neighbors and others in their communities. They are clever about living happily with very limited incomes. They enjoy doing the things at home that allow them freedom from the materialistic and promote deeper family and community ties. They are very conscientious about ecological factors and social justice issues.

Hays identifies seven subtle characteristics or skills that these Radical Homemakers have cultivated that allow them to live these alternative lifestyles. They are: 1) nurturing relationships, 2) working with a life-serving economy, 3)cultivating an ability to self-teach, 4)setting realistic expectations and limits, 5)redefining pleasure in their lives, 6)rediscovering the taste of real food, 7)adopting a fearless attitude in withstanding contrary cultural expectations.

Hays uses the term 'extractive economy' often in this book. This is our current economy which requires all our needs to be met through consumerism. She juxtaposes this against a 'life-serving' economy where actual money plays a secondary role and meeting basic needs happens through skilled labor and creativity that directly meets the need. Hays quotes the likes of Wendell Berry and Thomas Berry throughout the book. She has really researched all the issues that the Radical Homemaker lifestyle raises and she systematically addresses them and argues that the Radical Homemaker has chosen the better way. For instance, instead of paying so much for health care insurance, Radical Homemakers prefer to put their money towards eating real food, growing medicinal herbs and seeking alternative medicine instead of playing into current, overpriced and often questionable health care practices. They've jumped off the hamster wheel lifestyle of living for one's paycheck, which means they live much less stressful lives which are intrinsically more satisfying because they focus on relationships and creativity. Stress, we know, is a great harm to health and so they have rid themselves of a major aggravator of major health issues.

The book is chock full of instances where the different people who identify as Radical Homemakers grapple with various situations such as paying for housing, pregnancies, dealing with schools or homeschooling, family illnesses, etc. There is a lot of practical information to be gained by reading their stories and hearing their voices as they describe the reasoning behind their life choices.

I found this book to be thought-provoking and very interesting. This is a kind of feminism I can get behind. One where men and women are equal and both engaged in living not lives of materialism and status, but centered in family and deeper pursuits. Toward the end of the book, Hays says that Radical Homemaking needs to be a bigger movement in order to change our society's negative and destructive trajectory that destroy family and personal satisfaction. However, I simply don't think it is practical to expect everyone to get off the grid, so to speak. I do think that a significant minority could. And I do think it is a growing trend. At least I have witnessed it in the Crunchy Con, real food, homeschooling circles I travel in.

The very end of the book has slightly more in depth biographies of all the people/couples Hays interviewed for her study. This part was a bit redundant, as I felt I had come to know these people in the earlier section of the book. And in fact some of the write up in the biography section is word for word what was in the prior chapters of the book. So that last section felt odd and unnecessary.

I read this book on my Kindle.

I definitely recommend this book. I'll be mulling over the ideas presented for a long while to come. By the way, Hays has a website: radicalhomemakers.com

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