Bell hooks’ notion of homeplace, domestic environments created to combat racial oppression, has been a major influence on my thinking about the domestic sphere. In “Homeplace (a site of resistance),” hooks writes:
“Since sexism delegates to females the task of creating and sustaining a home environment, it has been primarily the responsibility of black women to construct domestic households as spaces of care and nurturance in the face of the brutal harsh reality of racist oppression, of sexist domination. Historically, African-American people believed that the construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension. Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.”
This is a refreshing counterpart to, for instance, The Feminine Mystique, which galvanized and in many ways typified second-wave feminism. Betty Friedan casts the home as a site of drudgery, boredom, alienation, and wasted potential. She quotes an article from McCall’s to this effect: “The chronic fatigue of many housewives is brought on by the repetition of their jobs, the monotony of the setting, the isolation and the lack of stimulation.”
But of course many types of paid work—and many popular hobbies—are repetitive, monotonous, and isolating. Writing, for instance, consists of the painstaking, mechanical fleshing out of half-formed ideas; it is (for me at least) a fairly tedious, unpleasant process punctuated by occasional flashes of satisfaction as I feel myself to be expressing a significant idea well. Gardening, bicycling, running, backpacking, and other popular hobbies require intense, prolonged physical exertion and offer little reward aside from aesthetic appreciation (of the well-tended flowerbed, the majestic vista, etc.) and a sense of accomplishment. Yet writing is seen as a high and noble pursuit, and many of my friends insist that running is a perfectly enjoyable hobby.
I don’t see anything inherent to domestic tasks that makes them more dull and repetitive than, say, flipping burgers, working as a checkout clerk in a supermarket, selling movie tickets, mining for coal, or grading freshman composition papers. In her Home Comforts, a massive practical reference guide to homemaking, Cheryl Mendelson writes: “Having kept house, practiced law, taught, and done many other kinds of work, low-and high-paid, I can assure you that it is actually lawyers who are most familiar with the experience of unintelligent drudgery.”
Sure, scrubbing toilets is unpleasant and children are notoriously disinclined to thank their mothers for their hard work, but homemaking is self-directed, expert labor that provides many outlets for creativity. Unlike much paid work, its products are tangible, clearly necessary, and directly beneficial to the homemaker. It certainly doesn’t provide the intellectual stimulation or social engagement that are also crucial components of a satisfying life, but neither do most jobs. So why is homemaking seen as so uniquely deadening? The only answer I can come up with is that homemaking is women’s work, and we instinctively devalue and disdain anything a woman touches.
Earlier, in Feminist Theory, hooks wrote of Friedan: “Friedan’s famous phrase, ‘the problem that has no name,’... actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life.”
But poor women, African American women, and other women who had always pursued paid employment, who had never been bored, drunk housewives, did not believe that working outside the home would be sufficient to counteract sexism. They were all too familiar with the harassment and exploitation that took place in the workplace—and the capacity of homemaking, of building a homespace, to counteract this violence.