I’ve been spending more time reading complementary blogs lately . . . I love reading about other women’s adventures and misadventures as they navigate their lives at home.
Most of the time I find it encouraging, inspiring, invigorating – breaking me into fits of laughter and tears in turns.
But I have to say, some of what I read worries me. Ok. Worries isn’t even the right word. More like . . .
Freaks me right out.
My girlfriends and old colleagues who question my decision to be at home full time do so largely because of their feminist values. They hear housewife and think barefoot and pregnant and under the thumb of some man.
I like to think that I can be a housewife, homemaker, homesteader and be a feminist. In fact, when I look back at the women who did this before it was a big deal or a “lifestyle” I suspect more than a few of them probably had a thing or two in common with modern feminists.
I’ve spent plenty of my time at home barefoot, prego and in the kitchen. And I’ve spent every moment of it a feminist.
I’d like to dream that my writing helps dispel the myth that choosing a more traditional role as a woman means choosing subservience. I have not walked back into shackles. (Even if some days I feel chained to my washing machine.)
And then I read blogs by women who promote the values of serving their husbands. And I don’t mean – working for your family, taking care, being a mum and wife. I get that. I understand that. I try to live that.
What I don’t get, is the tone of less than that I hear in some of these blogs. The notion that these women, their entire lives, exist to serve their husbands.
Is that what we’re doing this for??
Husband and wives should be partners. Different but equal. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that long ago that women were mere chattel. In many places in the world, they still are.
We owe it to those women who are daily bought and sold, traded, beaten, abused and thrown away to exercise our freedom and embrace our proper place as equals to the men in our lives.
We cannot move backwards.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Does it make you as uncomfortable as it makes me? Does it even matter to you? Is it a case of to each her own? Does it have wider implications for women in general? Homemakers in particular?
