Eco-parenting and women's work?

[wastingaway]

Some interesting points came up on this thread, about whether eco-parenting and green living in general tended to create more work for women?

It was also suggested that in fact modern conveniences act to disguise the inequality in relationships.

As I sit contemplating the bucket of shitty nappies that I will be putting in the washing machine, I am wondering about this a lot.

What do you think?

(OT - just realised, QoFE - did we have an email conversation before?)

Definitely agree MillyR about rejecting consumerism being part of the package - and the definition of women as consumers.

TBH I think the community living bit has lots of other advantages, but its not a magic answer (speaking as someone who left partly because I actually wanted some time for relaxing and a social life).

But I am very unconvinced that eco living = anti feminism or worse deal for women.

Looking at the two groups of friends that I have - one lot from university; city based, 'proper' jobs, not at all eco, the others round here, much more green, more out of the system - I am always bemused when I go up to London & see my lefty uni educated friends tied into a whole package which effectively depends on the woman taking responsibility for the home and childcare. They don't all sign up to it - but they are definitely swimming against the tide.
I guess the difference is summed up by the fact that my male London friend says he is very much the odd one out at the school gates. Here on any given day at least 30% of those picking up will be men - largely because there are hardly any full time proper jobs anyway . . .

I suppose it's making sure that the green choices are the easiest choices too.

I did mostly blw, so no need to make purees - time consuming, or buy jars - eco guilt.

I'm a SAHM atm btw. (ooh, acronym OD)
I think if we both worked outside the home it would be easier to decide if I was doing too much.

Remembering not to buy things is pretty hard.
Our gendered role in capitalist society is as a consumer.

I do have to remind myself, that actually, what I do is home making.

"Our gendered role in capitalist society is as a consumer."

I think that is absolutely the central point, wastingaway. Too often 'eco-parenting' becomes about consuming some other, supposedly green product - just another way of selling us things (have a look at the adverts in Green Parent mag . . . Rejecting our role as (female) consumers and (male) producers is a good place to start, I think.

I think that's the think, Wasting. I am not the main care-giver to our children or the home maker because I am a woman, but because DH and I together decided that I would be the best person for the jobs. And now I am a home educator too. I see myself as having 3 very important jobs, and so does DH; and when he's at home, he takes on half of the work required by those jobs.

Our family is a team, and jobs are 'assigned' according to who wants to do them and who is more efficient at them.

It also seems to me that a lot of this 'eco-community' stuff depends fairly heavily on lots of other people living modern non-organic lives. There isn't enough space for everyone to have a smallholding, and road (and rail) networks have to be maintained, as does the sewage system (there are too many people for everyone just to crap in their back gardens without completely trashing the water supply).
And, unless you're really mental dedicated, you need the NHS to be functioning for those awkward little moments when someone gets peritonitis or tetanus or any other ailment that aromatherapy and the power of prayer won;t heal.

Hmm.

There is a question here about the distinction between work and leisure.

Is part of 'eco living' or voluntary simplicity about erasing that distinction, as far as desired or possible, so that, for example, tending the allotment, hanging up the washing, supporting the children in learning, putting the scraps in the worm bin, baking bread, making soap, sewing quilts, knitting socks, etc, don't seem so dreadful, but possibly even relaxing or invigorating? Perhaps this could be viewed as liberating women from patriarchal professionalization, sexualization, etc. Perhaps. It could certainly liberate men, so many of whom are shut out of homemaking etc.

Do you think men are shut out of homemaking?
By the stereotyping?

I think on the whole, men shut themselves out of homemaking.

It's not as if women aren't constantly inviting them in. ("Please put the fucking rubbish out, I've asked you three times now" "could you kindly take your plate with you when you leave the table" etc.)

Poor menz, desperate to do the laundry and not being allowed to by the control freaky women whose standards are just tooooooo high...

Though slouching, yes, some of those things are wonderful, but laundry is not.

Ooh, I must be a freak, because I do love laundry. I look forward to hanging it on the line and taking it down every day. Seriously. Then folding it up. It's my quiet time. Meditative. I don't mind the sorting, etc, and throwing it in the machine is not hard. I do not like folding laundry from the tumble dryer though, it usually just sits there in a basket for days, taunting me.

What I mean by 'homemaking' when I refer to men, is not the assorted everyday hopefully shared mundane tasks but the bigger picture stuff. I mean men are not being well supported by society in general to be homemakers, SAHDs, etc.

Homemaking is not considered a serious ambition/career/occupation for most men. Woman's work may be trivialized and undervalued when it is done by women, but it is much more so when done by men. Unless it is in a professionalized manner, for example a male chef has status, whereas a SAHD who cooks does not. Does that make sense?

Anyway, the kind of 'homemaking' I mean is really more of the 'Radical Homemakers' (Shannon Hayes) variety, which involves a great deal of dropping out, saying no to consumerism, etc. Which has something to do with gender, but not everything.

I'm tired, perhaps this isn't quite clear.

SGB, I was thinking of eco-community living being done as well as each person also having a job. Some of my neighbours do work for the NHS, but they also try and do other aspects of their lives communally within a smaller group.

At the end of the Self-sufficiency bible (which lots of green people refer to), the writer points out that self-sufficiency doesn't really work; it is simply too much work for one family. His solution is that a group of households work together - each taking on various roles.

I don't think the answer is to go back in time; we need to restructure so that we keep many of our modern services like a transport network, modern healthcare and so on. But we can still reorganise other aspects of our lives so that we build up better support networks (again, this comes back to what Greer says in the Whole Woman).

You only have to look at all the moaning on here when there was snow and the schools shut to see that many families have no friends or neighbours that they can turn to for childcare. Not knowing your neighbours is just replicating work for 5 sets of parents and creating lonely children. One of the major issues in feminism is women being reliant on their male partners. Maybe we should be relying more on each other.

Change to social structures at a national level, at the community level, and in our energy use and wider consumption need to go hand in hand. There are plenty of studies showing that it is when local people are given control of resources, their use becomes sustainable - in fact a woman was recently given a major international award for her research on this topic.

SGB, having read your post again, I just think you're being patronising. My politics are green and I no time for aromatherapy or the power of prayer. You are simply trying to ignore the very real changes that people are making in order to pretend it is some wishy-washy loads of nonsense.

Milly, you touch on something I've been thinking for a while.

We go on about SAHMs being dependent on men, yet those men are dependent on the capitalist system etc. We do need to support each other.

The credit crunch made me realize that I am perhaps better placed to survive a serious financial disaster because I have skills unrelated to commerce, and a network of friends who run the gamut from mostly self-sufficient (think bunkers) to living in commune to a greater or lesser extent.

What I mean to say is, I don't feel less independent than DH, or a woman in more gainful paid employment (I am part-time WAHM).

MillyR: SNide rather than patronizing, actually. I am sure there are some people doing good useful things, but most of the ones I have ever met who are into all this back-to-the-land-communal stuff are smug middle-class twats with a trust fund to fall back on when they find that bartering tarot readings for hand-knitted willy warmers doesn't actually make their communal living all that economically viable.

ANd the thing about 'homemaking' being a career is complete crap. OK meals have to be prepared and clothes cleaned - there is a certain amount of repetitive, generally tedious shitwork that has to be done to sustain a human being. This is not a vocation or a 'career', it;s just stuff that needs to be done. So you either do it yourself or get someone else to do it for you. Men have always tended to romanticize 'homemaking' as a way of getting women to do it for them.

I think part of it is about the much misused word 'empowerment.' The more you can do for yourself, or swap skills with a neighbour to do, the less dependent on wider systems you are. We will always need a wider system; I'm not going to treat a serious medical condition myself. But the more skills you have to be able to mend the leak in your own back wall, make your own door or make some clothes for your own child the more empowered you are to not need to make huge amounts of money to have everything done for you by a commercial company.

And it isn't a huge change; many of our grandparents are still alive and remember when people did things for themselves rather than having them done by a child on the other side of the world.

OMG. SGB, the people I know doing the communal/eco stuff are as far away from smug middle class as you can get. I know what you mean, I really do, but you're talking about the trendy, half-ass version of a movement that is very hardcore, untrendy and dedicated. The people I know are mainly from working class or just plain back woods poor social backgrounds.

And I really don't care whether 'homemaking' is a 'career.' But just wondering whether, if you 'get someone else to do it for you,' they indeed have a career? I mean, even as a 'shitworker.'

Milly - re 'empowerment.' Yes, exactly what I've been thinking.

SGB, yes I agree with you, and I often rant on about people (not actuallymothers in my experience) sewing endless wool corsages and making complicated cupcakes. Like anything, doing things for yourself can be made into a weird fetish that becomes consumeristic and about buying pointless specialist crafting and cooking goods and Cath Kidston tins.

Argh, the complicated cupcakes. I may start a whole thread about complicated cupcakes, because I am certain I am not being unreasonable about them.

TOTALLY re the consumeristic fetish...the ironic WI revival etc...

I try not to get worked up about the cupcakes, and in the interests of fairness on a feminist thread I must mention their male counterpart - the complicated sausage making machine.

But I definitely avoid mentioning things I am doing for myself to some people because it is not my identity and I think some people are trying to make such stuff into some moral identity. I suspect it is connected to people having kids late, so having to show off their productive skills in some other fashion.

LOL at the idea either of us have a trust fund - DP spent nearly 15 years living rough and has no parents at all. A lot of people living similar lifestyles to us have been appallingly let down by their families and by society and so end up looking for alternatives ways to take some control of their lives.

There's not much woolly about the way we live, apart from the bloody sheep I suppose, its hard practical work a lot of the time.

I don't really find domestic stuff too taxing tbh, though I suppose as someone said higher up, part of being green is lowering standards and not even trying to live in a show home [hollow laugh].

What I do find hard is things like the coppicing and chopping of wood to last the winter. But thats the choice I've made and I'd rather do that than for one of us to have to earn more money to pay a winter gas bill.

SGB, I think you are meeting the wrong people. Re. the not enough space - smallholdings are considerably more productive in terms of output per acre than industrial farming (which is managed to produce the highest monetary profit with minimal labour input).

I also don't think you'll find anyone wanting to get rid of all industry (chainsaws are pretty handy things - and even if you don't want them its kind of hard making a bowsaw blade in your back garden) or indeed all conventional medicine.

I have to say (and generally other than this thread I agree with loads of your posts) that you sound rather like the Daily Mail. (Doncha just know, all these people that want to bring down capitalism, they've all got trust funds and are called Miranda - well no, they haven't, and they aren't - but its a good way to ignore their real arguments.)