Guess what? I've never supported myself. Ever. I've been a grad student/part-timer, a mother, and a mother/part-timer, but never a fully self-supporting entity.
I've never lived on my own either. I went from my father's house (well technically my mother's) to my husband's, although he did a few laps as my boyfriend before we formalized things.
I do not consider myself a homemaker, due to the fact that that word conjures images of picking stuff up *off* the floor as opposed to throwing it down *on* the floor. Which is what I actually do. (I leave stuff on counters too. Before throwing it away for me, my husband will occasionally pick up the latest empty frozen dinner box, torn-off film cover, semi-used paper towel, and fun-size candy wrappers and solemnly tell me, "This is trash. Trash goes in the garbage can. Right over here. See?" He will helpfully place the trash in the can so I can see how it's done. I will sincerely thank him for his time and effort, then not change.)
So anyhow, I do not consider myself a homemaker. What I consider myself...
Is a flat-out, balls-to-the-wall (okay, ovaries-to-the-stomach-lining) dependent.
That is a highly ambivalent thing to be in this country at this time.
It has not, however, damaged my core, nor dampened my feminism.
It has given me a different perspective.
The feminist movement has attacked the problem of women's low status by attacking their dependency. On the face of it, this is perfectly logical. Men go out and work, which earns them money, which gives them power. Let's have the ladies do the same!
As a practical strategy, this is unassailable. Where it shades into a theoretical underpinning, however, we run into trouble. "I work/earn, therefore I am" is a shaky philosophy. It suggests that personal value and social standing depend on paychecks.
First of all, that's odious.
Second of all, it leads to the really absurd situation where one woman hands off her baby to another woman who will do the same job as the mom would have, only for money. Does this make sense? Seriously, why would you pay someone--often a huge amount of money--to do a job that you could do yourself? I know there are reasons, but I'm going for the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt here. I want you to pull back, change your angle, and see the bizarreness of child care. And its kicker: the hired caregiver will in turn hand *her* baby off to *another* woman, and on and on and on until "it's turtles all the way down," as the lady in the urban legend said. Each woman handing their own child to another so they can take care of someone else's.
All because everyone has this big flapping horror of being a dependent.
Now with the way things are in this country these days, that's actually pretty understandable. Eudora Welty once said "A sheltered life is a daring life." She was right.
But any way of living as a woman is daring, whether we want it to be or not. Men's choices empower them; ours trap us.
So let's ask the obvious question: what happens when men become dependents?
Because sometimes they do.
As inconceivable as this is in the United States, countries with strong social contracts/safety nets/etcetera do...or at least, before the Awful 80s, did...make it possible for individuals to live without working *or* being partnered to someone who's working.
I know, I know. Take a minute. Breathe.
We have an artifact of this exotic world which, although not terribly listenable, is readily available: the song "Wham!Rap 86." It encourages men, specifically, to go on dole if they're anything less than thrilled with their jobs: "Do you enjoy what you do? If not, just stop!"
There is a definite loss of status with this choice, as evidenced in the defensive line, "I am a man/job or no job, you can't tell me that I'm not." But that defense is also an offense. Look at the presumptuousness of it: the singer simply declares his truth and dares anyone to disagree. This is the red-blooded, masculine approach. He backs it up with Classical philosophy: "I take pleasure in leisure/I believe in joy." (That would be Epicureanism.)
So we see that when men throw off the shackles of glibertarian Calvinist productivity, life turns into an "On the Road" style celebration of itself. Yes--surprise-surprise, we discover that the choice is liberating.
Frankly, I think welfare was invented for men. Women can go attach themselves to a partner, becoming his cherished companion or his slave or both, depending; men, of course, deserve better, and arrange for themselves to receive checks from the state.
American men have really missed the boat on this. Guys!! Come on!! Of course, in order for the whole thing to be fair, women would have to be able to get checks too, which is where things break down. What? Pay a woman just for existing? On her own? For herself? So she can spend the whole day farting around with her toddler that she probably went and had without even decently binding herself into wedlock? We can't have THAT.
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Even if I could have had one of those magic paychecks, though, my choices would have been the same. My love for my partner guided me; I led myself by my feelings. (Something that my mother did only once, and lived to regret it.) Which is exactly why I've ended up living this quietly oppositional life. It's not the what. It's the how.
I guess that's what I want to make room for. The different, sometimes wildly different, ways that people approach their lives; the often strange and beautiful kingdoms inside them, the internal logic that drives many to live what for lack of a better word would have to be called surrendering, submissive (whether to fate or to some secret unfolding in the self), passive, INWARD, I-saw-it-all-in-my-cup-of-tea (Proust) lives.
Feminism tries, bravely, to fight the dominance paradigm of our cockroach-and-rhesus-macaque society, but inevitably ends up taking on its colors--"We can be CEOs too!" That's valuable and necessary but limited. I prefer the strain of feminist thought, and it does exist, that says, with Delirium, "There are other paths outside this garden."
I want to go someplace beyond even equality--where human value is so unquestioned that we don't need it. And where value is measured not by assertiveness, which does not even come naturally to a significant chunk of humanity, but by...I don't know. By whether you've seen your life in a cup of tea.
Whether you've seen the butterflies on their migration. And your delicately-beating eyelids have become the memory of their wings.
The quality of your feeling.
Can we measure that? For a change?
