Doing feminism can feel like doing the dusting. The sexism piles up, coating surfaces, hovering in the air. You run a cloth around, but the relief is only temporary. There will always be more of it soon. Or it’s like doing the dishes, or cooking dinner, or keeping up with laundry — all those tasks that need to be done again and again and again in the daily round of staying afloat.
Helpfully, feminism has a word for this kind of unpaid, unending work: it’s called reproductive labour, in contrast with the productive labour that generates goods or services in exchange for wages, and if you didn’t know that, you’ve demonstrated exactly what I mean about feminism being like dusting. Most movements have an institutional memory, a sense of where they’ve come from to underpin where they’re going. Feminism has the willed obliteration of its history.
A recent column in the New Statesman, for example, bemoaned the timidity of contemporary feminists. The author wanted to talk about the ills of BDSM and plastic surgery, but, she wrote, that urge put her in “strange territory” — because it aligned her with arguments made by bad old “dogmatic and exclusionary” second wavers. The cultural horror of allying with older women wasn’t because of sexism: it was the older women’s fault. Yes, the author conceded, they may have had some good points, but they weren’t very nice, so she couldn’t be expected to read them. “I can understand why a young person would observe that landscape and wonder why they would want to be a part of it, which makes me all the angrier,” she wrote. Feminism cannot have a history, because it will always be sullied and devalued by the women who make it.
It seems exasperatingly obvious that you cannot build on the past while repudiating it (and if nothing else, being angry at older women for failing to present themselves more ingratiatingly is a strange way to critique feminine aesthetics.) But then I read Danielle Dreilinger’s new book The Secret History of Home Economics and realised I’m guilty of the same ignorance. Did home economics even have a history? Surely it just sort of happened, like the dusting seemed to “just sort of happen” when I lived with my mum.
For me, at school in the nineties, home ec classes stood for everything I didn’t want to be. This was training for a life I had no intention of leading. The thought of running a household bored me — worse, it demeaned me. Domesticity was unimportant stuff for unimportant people, and if it had been pointed out that the “unimportant people” in this formulation were implicitly female, I would only have replied that I did not see myself as female. I saw myself as human. “Humans” didn’t do housework: women did.
My grandmother found my determined slatternliness shocking. When she was at school, she told me, girls were taught to sew and bake so they would be ready to keep a house, and this of course was precisely why I despised the whole subject: if I took home ec seriously, I’d be acceding to my part in the great drudge. What I didn’t know (but do now, thanks to Dreilinger) is that my grandmother and I were both wrong. Home economics never was intended to reduce women to domesticity; it was intended to elevate them.
Dreilinger’s account is US-centric, and begins with Catharine Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe) and her programme of education for girls, which she summed up in the 1841 book A Treatise on Domestic Economy. While Beecher never challenged the idea that the home was women’s proper sphere, she argued forcefully for its importance: “It wasn’t just about how to care for a house. It was about the power of women to glue together a fragile society.”
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe