Some Of Us Never Left the Kitchen

Even though she's a little loony, I do read Penelope Trunk's blog. Occasionally she has a post so revolting I can't finish it, but that's only happened twice so far. She gave two links today that I found interesting:

The Retro Wife -- This article from New York Magazine discusses how young moms these days are choosing to stay home, and loving it. The mom in the article is a self-avowed flaming liberal, but she adores her husband, lives totally for her two pre-school children, and advocates that women have careers they can walk away from.

Disclaimer: When online articles are forever long, I don't usually read them to the end. I read the first page, unless they get too verbose and repeat themselves. Then I stop. Just sayin'.

Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig? -- This was fascinating. I disagree with a lot of the article (duh), but still found it so interesting. The writer seems to assume that being a back-to-nature, slow food, chicken-raising woman means you must be a progressive liberal who fled an urban life. Not so! I cannot count the number of conservative, Christian friends I have who are also lock-stock-and-barrel into this movement. They're environmentally sensitive without buying into climate change. They were homeschooling for decades before the progressives decided the public schools weren't meeting their kids' needs. They were canning tomatoes twenty years ago. But I digress. Like the other article, this one states boldly something that would make a dead feminist churn in her grave: women can find a fulfilling, satisfying life at home, doing domestic things. Shocking!

Ha. Those of you reading Edith Schaeffer's The Hidden Art of Homemaking (published in 1971) know that this is yawn-inducing old news to conservative Christian types. Still, we're very happy that other women are discovering it. Schaeffer takes what these article writers hint at, to a deeper level. She doesn't just call it fulfilling; she calls it ART. And it doesn't just make you feel satisfied; it's of spiritual value, eternal value.

There you go.

Regardless of how you arrive at it, the destination is fine -- the home is a comfortable place to be, and when a woman is in charge of her home, she's in charge of her world. And isn't that what the feminists were wanting in the first place?

Heehee. Did you just hear me say that? "A woman is in charge of her world."  If any of you believe that any of us puny humans can ever truly be in charge of our worlds, please let me know how you did it. I'd like to know! Perhaps what happened with feminism (The first article says it's fizzled.) is that it simply discovered the truth:  whether in the home, in academia, in the office, in the military, or in the street, women cannot be in charge of their lives anymore than men can. Life happens. What matters is how you behave when you realize at last that you're not in charge.

But read the articles, or at least part of them. Especially if you only watch Fox news -- stretch yourself a little. Not because you'll radically change your views, but because it's really useful for living in this world to know how and why other people hold their views. It reminds us all that we are all humans, and of incredible value.