[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Reviving the Household Economy

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (August 06 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Part Two: The Decline and Fall of Home Economics


Raspberry jam, the ostensible subject of last week's Archdruid Report
post, is only one of hundreds of goods and services that until recently
were produced almost entirely in the household economy, outside the
reach of the market. Nowadays, by contrast, nearly all those goods and
services are either produced commercially or are not available at all.
This represents an economic transformation on a massive scale, and yet
it's one that has seen remarkably little discussion by economists.

It also represents a social transformation of equally massive scope.
Visit the library of an American public university that has not yet
taken up the currently fashionable habit of purging its collection of
"outdated" materials, wander through the stacks until you find the
dingiest and most neglected shelves in the building, and odds are that
you'll be looking at the mummified remains of a field of study, a
profession, and a university department as dead as the dinosaurs, and a
good deal less popular nowadays: home economics.

Not all that many decades ago, an impressive network of home economists
working for universities, county extension services, and private
industry provided an extensive support system for the household economy.
Backing that network, and the by no means negligible expenditures that
supported it, was an almost universal consensus that recognized the
social and economic importance of the household economy. The experience
of two world wars, in which government-promoted home economics measures
had played a major role in softening the impact of food rationing and
enabling the United States to feed armies and allies alike, gave support
to that consensus.

At the same time, the household economy had long faced steady pressure
from the expansionistic habits of the market economy. Beginning around
the end of the 19th century, and accelerating over the decades that
followed, the market seeped into the domestic sphere with a steady
stream of "convenience" products and "labor-saving" devices. Many of
these were neither convenient nor labor-saving, but the massive
marketing programs that backed them up made them highly fashionable,
especially in the newly prosperous middle classes that emerged as the
20th century wore on and America entered on its age of empire.

These two major social forces - the broad consensus surrounding the
domestic economy and the expanding pressure of a metastatic market
economy - finally collided head on in the decades following the Second
World War. A third force, however, played what may well have been the
decisive role in the collision. Bringing up that third force at all may
be problematic, for it's remained a hot-button issue in American culture
right down to the present, and very few people seem to be able to
discuss it dispassionately just now. Still, what happened to the
household economy is impossible to understand without taking it into
account. That force, of course, is the role played by the economics of
gender in launching and shaping the second wave of American feminism in
the 1960s and 1970s.

Many currents of social change flowed together to launch the women's
movement of the 1960s, but one factor that has not always been given its
due is the impact of the abrupt changeover from the war economy of the
1940s to the consumer economy that followed it. As the troops came home,
government and industry alike did everything in their very considerable
power to get Rosie the Riveter off the factory floor and turn her into
Suzy Homemaker as fast as possible, in order to free up jobs for
millions of demobilized soldiers. At the same time, the quest for
markets to fuel the consumer economy's expansion and employ those same
millions threw the market assault on the household economy into overdrive.

Postwar propaganda - "advertising" is too mild a word for the saturation
campaigns that flooded the popular media in the late 1940s and early
1950s - presented middle class families with a glittering image of
affluence in which convenient, up-to-date consumer products provided by
the market would replace the dowdy routine of the domestic economy with
a life of elegance and leisure. The reality behind the facade turned out
to be much less palatable. Denied both the place in the market economy
they had occupied during the war years, and the role in the household
economy their mothers had held before that, millions of middle class
women across America found themselves expected to lead a purely
decorative and essentially purposeless existence.

As a motor for rebellion, deprivation of meaning is even more potent
than deprivation of food, and so an explosion was inevitable. Many of
the forms that explosion took were altogether admirable. A great many
injustices were set to rights, or at least challenged, and social roles
that had become hopelessly restrictive for women and men alike came in
for a much needed reassessment. Still, as the feminism of the Sixties
and Seventies percolated outward into popular culture, it suffered in
some measure the common fate of progressive social movements in the
modern West: instead of challenging the system of male privilege, and
the presuppositions that underlay it, a great many women who considered
themselves feminists simply set out to seize their share of the
positions of privilege within the existing system.

In the process, no small number of them embraced the manners, mores, and
attitudes of those they hoped to supplant. Compare a Playboy from the
1960s with a Cosmopolitan from the 1980s, for example, and it's
impossible to miss the parallels, all the way from the shared obsession
with sexual conquest, conspicuous consumption, and personal appearance,
to the mutually interchangeable cover girls meant to allure potential
readers. The astonishing thing is that the "Playboy man" and the "Cosmo
girl", those airbrushed icons of consumer culture, were both considered
to be liberated, and liberating, in their day.

The household economy, or what was left of it, was one of the casualties
of the process that made these dubious figures popular. The feminist
movement might have posed hard questions about the relative social value
assigned to the household and market economies, and indeed some of the
subtler minds within the movement made forays in this direction, but
their ideas found few listeners. Instead, many feminists - and
ultimately a great many American women - simply accepted the relative
values their culture assigned to the two economies, and aspired to the
one that they were taught to consider more valuable. The ensuing shift
in attitudes cut the ground out from under the consensus that once made
home economics relevant; by the 1980s most universities had closed their
home economics departments, and county extension agencies and private
firms followed suit.

Still, the old social roles assigned to women carried so much emotional
force in the collective imagination for so long that they had to go
somewhere. To a remarkable extent, they came to be applied to the
institution that supplanted the economic roles once held by women: the
market itself. Look at the rhetoric applied to the market over the last
few decades and you'll find every cliché applied to women in 1950s men's
magazines present and accounted for.

The market, in effect, has become American society's coquettish and
curvaceous sex kitten, its June Cleaver mom complete with patriotic
flags and apple pie, its nubile innocent waiting to be rescued from the
lustful grasp of government regulations and tax collectors. Placed on a
rhetorical pedestal as absurdly florid as anything Coventry Patmore ever
said about Victorian womanhood, and abused and exploited as ruthlessly
as Victorian women so often were, the market is America's pinup girl,
the focus of overheated notions every bit as detached from real life as
the fantasies that filled the pages of Playboy or Cosmo in their prime.

Any attempt to rebuild the household economy in the wake of peak oil
will inevitably have to contend with these issues. It's not at all
uncommon today, for example, to find couples for whom the cost of
professional childcare, an extra car and commuting expenses, and the
other costs of a two-salary lifestyle add up to more money than the
second salary brings in. In many cases these families would come out
substantially ahead if one of the adults were to stay home and provide
the same services within the household economy, but in the present
social climate, this option is very nearly unthinkable for many people.

As a longtime househusband, I can speak to this from a certain degree of
experience. During slightly more than half of 24 years of married life,
it made a great deal more economic sense for my spouse, a bookkeeper, to
work in the market economy, while I tended the garden, cooked the meals,
did most of the cleaning, and worked my way through the long learning
curve of a career as a writer in my off hours. I came in for a fair
amount of criticism for making this choice, though I have to say it was
a great deal less savage than the treatment meted out, mostly by other
women, to women I knew who made the same choice. Despite the pressure,
though, it was unquestionably the right choice for us; it enabled us to
maintain a very comfortable lifestyle on a modest income.

That choice is likely to be at least as valuable an option for a great
many more people as the market economy contracts in the wake of peak
oil. The abandonment of the household economy, after all, was only
viable in the first place because of the temporary conjunction of
American imperial expansion with the rapidly expanding fossil fuel
production of the postwar years. As America's empire frays and global
energy production falters, the costs of the energy-intensive economic
structure we have built over the last sixty years will fairly rapidly
begin to outweigh its benefits. In that context a renewal of the
household economy offers one valuable set of tools for taking up the
slack and providing needed goods and services, and those dusty books in
the home economics section of your local college library may turn out to
be valuable once again.

Such a renewal, though, will require a reassessment of social roles and
values as ambitious as anything the pioneering feminists of the 1960s
envisaged. Measures of value evolved within the market, and shaped to a
large degree by market-centered ideologies, fall flat when applied to
nonmarket economies in which custom, reciprocity, and collective benefit
govern exchanges, rather than the quest for individual profit. Money
itself, that abstract fiction that has very nearly smothered the real
economy of goods and services it originally evolved to support, may be a
good deal less relevant as alternative forms of value become ascendant.
The form that will be taken by those alternatives in the ecotechnic
world of the future is probably impossible to guess at this point, but
an openness to options and a willingness to look beyond the market are
likely to be valuable steps just now - and a renewed household economy
may just turn out to be the seed from which the economics of the future
can take root and grow.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/08/reviving-household-economy.html#links


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