Our basement remodeling project starts in earnest today. The crew is at the house now, doing the demolition, and I'm here at my ad hoc office at the local coffee shop. I'm thinking about gender roles and how those play out in our house. I'm thinking of it because P., our contractor, was describing the different kinds of work they'll be doing and the different materials they'll use and as soon as I heard the words "two by six" my eyes started to glaze over. "I'll get Jon," I wanted to say, but alas! Jon is at work, so there I stood, nodding with feigned understanding while nervously backing toward the steps -- the emergency exit, as it were.
Not for the first time I realize that the work and responsibilities in our house have split along traditional gender fault lines: I do the housework, Jon brings home the paycheck. I cook, Jon grills. (Though he does make weekend breakfasts, and is justifiably proud of his slow-cook bacon technique.) Jon supervises and/or performs the large-scale house alterations while I pick out fabrics and furniture and color schemes.
That last paragraph makes me sound so...so...Donna Reed. But I don't feel that way at all, and the way my marriage works is not like that. But, really, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is it not, in fact, a duck?
There's been a lot of noise lately (well, for the last few decades but it seems louder of late) about women and roles and career choices and family choices, and whether one can, in fact, be a feminist and still choose to be a stay-at-home mom and whether that could even be said to be a choice, or whether we who "choose" that are just kidding ourselves and that we're actually just conforming to the same old expectations of a woman's place and we're even setting the feminist movement back, and that we are a bad influence on our children because they'll see what we're doing and think that it is well and good and that a woman's only place is at home with the vacuum and the dirty diapers.
But I don't believe that. First of all because the yardstick for feminism seems to change every decade or so (I remember heated discussions back in the 80's about whether it was acceptable to wear makeup if you were a feminist), and second of all because labels mean vastly different things to different people, and women aren't a homogeneous group who all mean the same thing when the word "feminism" comes out of their lipsticked (or not) mouths. And I can't live my life and forge my self-image by what one woman (or a thousand) writes in her op-ed piece, or in her book -- no matter her academic credentials.
So: I'm a feminist. And a stay-at-home mom.
And a narcoleptic when it comes to discussions involving interior framing or the way our new boiler works.
So there!
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