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Becoming a Real Woman

by Tiffany Earl

My great grandmother had it.  Her daughter, my grandmother learned it.  Her daughter, my mother, saw traces of it but didn’t rely on it, and her daughter, me, doesn’t even know the value of it because it appears to be obsolete.

Women in general often have a sense of being unfulfilled.  The feminist movement has taken its toll.  Even my compatriots who don’t call themselves feminists pride themselves on the fact that the burden of the family is shared equally in the home.   Two incomes come in, both mother and father rotate diaper changing, dish duty, and laundry washing.  And yet, the woman is still unfulfilled.

Rousseau persuaded women “freely to be different from men and to take on the burden of entering a positive contract with the family, as opposed to a negative, individual, self-protective contract with the state."

Tocqueville picked up this theme, described the absolute differentiation of husbands’ and wives’ functions and ways of life in the American family, and attributed the success of American democracy to its women, who "freely choose their lot.”

Allan Bloom goes on to say, “Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order.  But as they have succeeded, men have also been liberated from their old constraints.”  He continues, “And women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume a responsibility for them.”  Here’s the truth, “The promise of modernity is not really fulfilled for women.”

Where is the answer?  I think there are two of them: One is technology, the other, ideology.

Technology
Technology has inadvertently caused a change in motherhood and homemaking.  It used to be a necessity to set aside one day a week for washing, one day for mending, one day for baking, and one day for cleaning—besides the daily rigors of gardening, housework, cooking, and preserving food.

It was a necessity to the function of the home that mother and multiple children reside, work, and play therein.  Because of technology we no longer have to spend as much time on food, clothing, and shelter.  We have much more leisure time. Since the 1930’s, something has been gained (time), but something has been lost (mom feeling and knowing that she is needed in the home).  Furthermore, that “missing something” is tied to “systems”.  With the loss of systems in the home, the new homemaker, four generations later, feels lost.

We must create and find new systems that bring fulfillment.

There are myriads of books on organization and home management for women, all because we have lost our organization, our management, and our vision of what motherhood is.  Where are our gardens?  Where are our seasons?  Where are our preserves?

That’s an interesting word, “preserves.” Do we preserve anything anymore, or just live and pass like the daily newspaper—important for a few moments and then forgotten forever.

Is there a way to find fulfillment, to rediscover our lost sense o fthe rightness of things, to reinstate the old systems, using today’s technology?  All of the old systems are tied to self-reliance, the reliance that says we are a community, we are responsible for our own, our education, our homes, our food, our animals, our land, etc.

Are we unhappy partially because something deep inside of us knows that the cycles of history do repeat themselves, that challenges will come again, and we realize we don’t know how to make bread?  Are we unhappy because in losing some of our systems we have lost some of our liberties?

One fundamental aspect of our American governmental form is our focus on commerce.  Jefferson recommended widespread private ownership with an agrarian bent and we adopted it in his time up through the early 1900s.  Then we shifted to Hamilton’s industrial commerciaism, with central ownership in a few hands and a nation of employees.  In the 1960s we heard of a new program, a focus on pleasure which we have been adopting more and more.  Is it the shift to the industrious to the pleasurable that has caused the uneasiness of women, even in the “home-makers”?

We don’t know how to grow food and store enough to see us through to the next growing season.  We don’t know how to care for our animals, provide our own milk, butter, cheese, and eggs. We don’t know how to knit, sew, or mend.  And most of my colleagues would laugh if they read this!

No wonder we have a sense of anxiety.  Like Roosevelt said, “We believe in the equality of right, not in the identity of functions.”  Is it part of our function to know these things?

Over and over in the literature I read—Potok, Hugo, Stratton-Porter, Wilder, Virgil, Plutarch, Herodotus, Thucydides, Toynbee, Durant, and others—the women of all ages and times have known how to cultivate and store food, how to produce clothing, how to exist in hard times, how to truly care for their families. My generation knows no such thing.

The industrialization and urbanization of America has all but banished these abilities in women.  I find myself looking more and more to those who came before me for knowledge of these systems.  I want to purge out my slothfulness, my laziness, my ease of living and wake up to the reality that there is work to be done, and I better be doing it!  I wonder if the problem of modern women, and men for that matter, is just that we don’t sweat enough.  Maybe really small things make all the difference, and we’ve lost sight and knowledge of a few really simple, small things.

Ideology
Another difference that makes or breaks a happy woman in the home is ideology--the power of ideas.  When Roosevelt went looking for the source of declining fertility, he found the ideas of Malthus, Mill and Nietszche.  Malthus taught the dangers of overpopulation, Mill the need for government to become utilitarian (do what is best for the most people, not for the individual), and Nietszche started making the focus on pleasure credible (it had always been popular).  Amazingly, Gibbon records similar forces creating the fall of Rome, and Edith Hamilton mentions the same for Greece.  History repeats itself, as Santayana warned, and may be doomed to do so unless we get past ideology.

We haven’t yet.  Unhappy and unfulfilled womanhood can be traced to the power of “wrong ideas”.  Ideas, which are spread through words, are more powerful than the sword.

My realization is that I am coming upon a new idea which I think will make home life more fulfilling to me.  I want to embrace motherhood, with all its duties intact, even that of finding the simple systems that all generations of women through time have known.  I should learn the systems inherent in the georgic, or agrarian, tradition and in the entrepreneurial focus of widespread private ownership.

Well, it’s laundry day and my lunch break is over. Time to be “farmerlike.” I used to hate this, but now . . . it seems like this is who I really am.

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