Defending Home
March 12, 2013
THE Home Renaissance Foundation is an interesting think tank in London that promotes domesticity with a cool, modernist style. Here is the organization’s latest video, part of its “Homemakers Project.” It’s a wonderful thing to see Western academics actually speaking up for housewives as they do here.
There are many worthwhile links on the organization’s website. However, the foundation’s call for the “professionalization” of homemaking is misguided. Only by valuing efficiency above all else can homemaking be considered a profession. Efficiency is not the highest goal of the domestic sphere. Homemaking, like the priesthood, is a vocation, not a profession. Domesticity deserves to be taken seriously and that seems to be the foundation’s main emphasis, but calling for professionalization of homemaking is wrong.
—- Comments —-
Grateful Reader writes:
Thank you for guiding us to this group. The principles of the Home Renaissance Foundation are well grounded in human nature. Their founders recognize that people are strongly affected by the environment in which they live and that the healthiest children come from a home with a mother who pays enough attention to them to know their needs and care for their needs. This requires careful attention and cultivated intuition. Intuition cannot be learned from a textbook; a good, living example can help, but only practice will develop that intuition.
This is from the HRF’s article about their symposium, “Housework and Well-Being:”
“Dr. Paola Binetti spoke in her capacity as a psychiatrist – examining the deep relationship between both physical and mental wellbeing (be it real or perceived) and the environment we inhabit, namely the home. She likened the home to different medical treatments and claimed that it can be preventative, predictive, healing and rehabilitating.
“However, in order to be a space of reciprocal care and healing, [the home needs a person looking after it who is] able to de-code the language of personal needs and human emotions. Whereas technical skills are crucial to be able to cater to the universal needs of man, it is only through the skill of reading each person’s needs that individuals can find a space of fraternity within the home. In this sense, the people who devote themselves to this form of work are the guardians of human wellbeing.”
Thus, an important part of housework is caring for the persons in the house; cooking and cleaning are not enough. Cooking and cleaning for loved ones in ways that help them go about their duties, paired with listening to them, helping them through difficulty, sharing their joys, and guiding them toward a good path creates a healthy household. To a traditional culture this would be obvious, but our modern society needs PhD’s and psychiatrists as experts to explain how and why this works.
Now I can bring this study to my liberal aquaintances who ask, “But what are you doing for YOU?” and tell them, “I am doing what the experts tell me to do: guarding the well-being of my family.”
Clark Coleman writes:
I will support anything that lends its support to the traditional home. I do think it is sad that homemaking is defended in terms of the marketplace and the business office. The emphasis is always on how the homemaker is really the “manager of a little business” and so on. The implication is that we have accepted the primacy of the office workplace, and everything must be compared to it.
The video also has the statement (in French) that society does not “value” that for which it does not pay money. I think this is nonsense, and it is a big part of the motivation of the whole feminist movement. I do work at my church for which I am not paid, but I know that it is valued by others. Is it valued “by society?” Who cares? My work is valued by those who are close to me and who are aware of my work. The same is true of my paid work. Only a few people in this world value my paid work, and the same is true for most workers. The entire “society” cannot value my paid work, because almost none of them are aware of it.
Laura writes:
I agree that we don’t need affirmation from the whole world to find value in what we do. But, there is a real issue with the work of homemaking being devalued by society and thus in turn by most of the people a homemaker may encounter. When a woman with young children runs into friends and all they are interested in is her life of paid employment, when her mother urges her to leave her family and return to the workforce, when her husband comments that she has been doing “nothing” all day because she was not at job, then what she does appears to have little value to others.
Mr. Coleman responds:
I agree that society does not value homemaking enough. My point was that the lack of monetary compensation for homemakers is not evidence of this fact. Homemakers were never compensated monetarily, but two centuries ago, two millennia ago, etc., no homemaker concluded that this was proof that her contribution was not considered valuable. Ever since money was invented, men have worked for money and bartered for money more than women have. But motherhood was always valued. What changed in recent times? It wasn’t a change in who gets paid and who doesn’t. Yet, this particular angle keeps coming up: Homemakers should be paid, the fact that they are not paid means they are not valued enough, etc. The lack of pay is ancient, the lack of respect for stay at home mothers is recent.
Laura writes:
Agreed.
By the way, it seems that when the Home Renaissance Foundation advocates the “professionalization” of homemaking, it is referring to professional standards, not pay.
Mr. Coleman writes:
What does “professional standards” mean with respect to homemaking? It sounds like the imitation of the workplace, which gets back to my original point. We need to accept the fact that homemaking is a legitimate activity and domain of life that does not have to mimic any other domain of life. Mimicry concedes that one domain is superior and the other is trying to catch up to it.
Allan Carlson discussed this in From Cottage to Workstation when he covered the “home economics movement” of the Post-World War I era. Homemaking had to become “efficient” and “scientific” and so on in order to remain attractive. The forces of industry were moving to mass production, economies of scale, and so on; standards of living were being raised, and the secular world of the marketplace was all very impressive and exciting at the time. So everyone else had to imitate that and seek respect on the same terms as are found in the economic marketplace.
The churches were greatly affected in this era as well. Books began to be written about how Jesus was the first great “manager” of people, etc. Everything outside the economic sphere was re-cast in business terms. Lawrence Auster once mentioned reading a book about the history of Christianity in America that had an off-hand remark that struck him. The author said that before World War I, America followed the lead of the church, while afterwards, the church followed the lead of American culture. I asked him several times for the reference, but he said it was a book in his local library and he would have to find it again, and he has not had time since then to do so.
World War I was the great turning point in the decline of Western Civilization, but most conservatives are fixated on its step-child, “the Sixties.” Volumes could be written about the social changes that occurred in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and of course, many of the seeds of those changes were planted much earlier than World War I (e.g. 19th century feminism, Romanticism, secularization of universities, the birth of psychology as a religion rivaling Christianity, etc.) One such change was the devaluation of motherhood, and one of the signs is that homemaking/motherhood now must justify itself in business and economic and professional terms. We need to reject such justifications wholesale and reclaim the intrinsic merit that homemaking has possessed since long before there was such a thing as major industrialism or the mass marketplace.
