DIY, Homesteading, Radical Housewifery/Homemaking

Though I haven't read the book yet, the lifestyle described in Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming domesticity from a consumer culture by Shannon Hayes is kind of seductive. I've flirted with these ideas a bit. Screw the rat race and 70 hour work weeks (all in the attempt to make partner, or get an elusive tenure-track position or not get fired). Instead focus on a slower pace of life, gardening, baking bread, living close to nature, voluntary simplicity, reskilling etc.*

Mother Nature has shown her hand. Faced with climate change, dwindling resources, and species extinctions, most Americans understand the fundamental steps necessary to solve our global crises-drive less, consume less, increase self-reliance, buy locally, eat locally, rebuild our local communities.

In essence, the great work we face requires rekindling the home fires.

Radical Homemakers is about men and women across the U.S. who focus on home and hearth as a political and ecological act, and who have centered their lives around family and community for personal fulfillment and cultural change. It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has benefited from feminism, where domination and oppression are cast aside and where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity, or relentless servitude.

Radical Homemakers nationwide speak about empowerment, transformation, happiness, and casting aside the pressures of a consumer culture to live in a world where money loses its power to relationships, independent thought, and creativity. If you ever considered quitting a job to plant tomatoes, read to a child, pursue creative work, can green beans and heal the planet, this is your book.

I know and admire several people who I would class as radical homemakers/homesteaders/DIYers. Some off-the-grid, some minimally on it. Some with children, some without. Some with lots of land, some with tiny patches in the city. They pretty well all combine this with some sort of income generating work. I respect what they are doing. It's hard work!

Indeed Not One More Winter in the Tipi, Honey (found with commentary over at Historiann) discusses gendered labour off-the-grid.

Too often, modern homesteading asks women to return to the toil so many of their grandmothers left behind. No matter how progressive the homesteading couple, the unfamiliarity and the physical demands of DIY living make it easy to fall into traditional gender roles — to retreat to the stereotypically masculine and feminine skills most of us still learn first and best. The result is that in many modern homesteads, despite highly evolved intentions, men build the houses, and women, like their pioneer-era counterparts, cook over the wood stove. Or scrub the floors. Or care for the babies.

This old-fashioned division of labor means that women are often the first to encounter the worst realities of homesteading. While their partners are outside, impressing the neighborhood with their construction skills, women are inside, confronting the cultural invisibility of domestic work and the social isolation of rural life.

Of course, this is a generalization. I'm sure many relationships are more egalitarian, but so many fall back into these gender roles. Though I think some work traditionally gendered female is beginning to be seen as admirable and even cool - cooking, baking, knitting and gardening were definitely not 'cool' when I was young. Young women tried to get AWAY (to be liberated) from doing those valuable yet unpaid (and therefore not contributing to GDP, and therefore having no official value) tasks. I'm not sure yet that toilet-cleaning has made it into the newly-cool category, but maybe it is just a matter of time.

I guess my question is: Is it really that radical for a woman to stay home and do what women have been doing for generations? Actually, it might be.

Which brings me to the feminist activist Radical Housewife blog (named with tongue-in-cheek), and a whole other way to be a woman who does not currently work for wages. One can still have a voice and be political and be a primary caregiver to children or a household. The danger is in supposing that simply "staying home" or dropping out of the paid work force will somehow automatically fix the world. Of turning completely inward and forgetting to be political. (Or confuse property rights with real human liberties.) Forgetting to fight for social justice and rights for others. Forgetting to be active in our communities. Becoming blinded by our own halos.

*I know, I know, it sounds so bourgeois and indeed it may require a degree of privilege (I suppose being minimally middle-class or at least upper-working-class) but I suppose there are worse things that one could DO with that privilege. (This reminds me of a similar discussion going on over here - Is minimalism just for the rich?)

Of Plastic Bags and Things

As described in this article, Rwanda is one of several places in the world that has banned plastic bags. Kigali, the capital of Rwanda is a beautiful and clean African city (I was highly impressed when I visited last year). This is due in part to the plastic bag ban. Rwanda is not alone; apparently 25% of the world either restricts or bans the bags. And people still manage to carry things!

Since it was implemented two years ago, Toronto's 5 cent bag fee has significantly reduced the use of disposable petroleum-based bags. When it first came into effect, there was a chorus of whining hyperbole from those who thought they somehow had a right to free garbage bags or who thought they were being subjected to Soviet-style repression, etc. etc. But most Torontonians got on with their lives, getting into the habit of bringing reusable bags with them.

As Wayne Roberts points out, the city's bag "tax" is just the beginning of what is truly required. Charging a "nominal payment for the convenience offered by plastic throwaways" was enough to start a conversation, to gently encourage people to use less plastic. I used to get funny looks when I said "I don't need a bag"; now I am always asked if I need one. I would say it has been a successful first step: relatively painless, and relatively effective.

Now our illustrious gravy-destroying mayor plans to go to the trouble of actually getting rid of the bag fee (a "Nightmare" according to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business). Toronto might never be as clean and beautiful as Kigali.

How useful am I?

As an academic, I question my usefulness. Society will always need carpenters (or plumbers or tailors or nurses or farmers). Their benefit is pretty clear and obvious. Will it always need historians? How important is my obscure research that might only be read by a handful of other obscure historians? Am I a producer or a parasite?

I think it is a normal to want to be a productive member of society. To know that the work into which you put your life force actually benefits humanity in some small way. Even to be able to ask these questions demonstrates a great deal of privilege.

On the one hand, academia is often criticized for being an ivory tower, from being divorced from "real life". On the other, academics are among the most engaged people I know. Rarely are they unconcerned with politics, society or human relationships.

In the hierarchy of academia, often the applied sciences and business are considered to be most useful - 80% of Canada's research funding is allocated to science and health. And in 2009, the Conservative government decided to increasingly allocate the social sciences and humanities research funding to business-related degrees. Already (as often decried during the most recent crash) so many of the best young minds are wasted in the financial sector moving money and creating paper wealth instead of solving society's problems. Even if I don't solve any major problems myself, maybe I will be partially responsible for teaching the generation that might do so.

Hello blog, I have missed you

I think I feel like blogging again. My last post was about a year and a half ago. What have I been doing in that time? I have been working on my PhD in history. I found I was too busy, and had too little energy for writing. Also my eyes hurt.

I just passed my comprehensive exams. To give you a sense of the scope, this involved reading 200 books over the last year, and then being examined on them with 3 written and 1 oral exam. It was a grueling process that involved regular 60-70 hour weeks. The last day I took off was Christmas (and I felt guilty about it). I can liken it to training for a marathon. Then it was over. Now I feel very strange. I'm absolutely exhausted, and feel a bit at loose ends. I've heard about the post-comps slump. I think that so much of my time and energy and self has been wrapped up in this process, that now I don't quite know what to do with myself.

I have to start preparing a research plan. But I feel a bit lost. I've never done anything of this scope before.

What are my plans for this blog? I figure I can use this blog to help me think through some of the issues, concerns, fears and thrills involved in researching my thesis. It will probably also still contain arts, culture and political commentary, and my usual musings on various topics. Probably commentary on academia as well. Many things in my life have changed since I began this blog back in 2005. (2005! I can hardly believe it's been so long!) My perspective has changed. I've become less sure about some things, more sure about others. The more I've learned the more I've become convinced of my own ignorance. It's been an encouraging, and yet humbling 6 years (6 years!) I feel old and young, wise and foolish. I hope some of you join me on the next stage in my journey.

This must be a joke... please tell me this is a joke

Nature's laws of shopping: Men hunt, women gather

University of Michigan psychologist Daniel Kruger has found that how we shop has an awful lot to do with how we once found our food. Men hunt. Women gather. Conjugal chaos ensues.
[...]
As a scientist, he refused to do the sensible thing – shrug his shoulders. He wanted to know the reason. He combed over studies of aboriginal tribes and did a battery of tests on student volunteers. The results will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology.

Kruger found that our habits haven't changed. Our environment and our goals have.

In prehistory, women gathered or foraged for food. This kept them close to home, performing a daily, intensive and social activity. A good memory, a keen eye and a lot of patience when choosing help make a good gatherer.

Men hunted for meat. This was an intermittent, asocial activity that earned them prestige only through the biggest catches. Short bursts of energy were followed by long periods of sitting around waiting for women to bring in the harvest.

There are so many things wrong with this article, I don't even know where to begin.

Ending Africa's Hunger... by funding Monsanto?

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.
[...]
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates's greatest legacy.

But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution.

The Gates Foundation is focusing on technology, spending about a third of the $1.3 billion on promoting and developing seed biotechnologies, one of the largest recipients of which is everybody's favourite corporation, Monsanto.

However, all is not lost...

Despite institutional neglect, ecological farming systems have been sprouting up across the African continent for decades--systems based on farmers' knowledge, which not only raise yields but reduce costs, are diverse and use less water and fewer chemicals. Fifteen years ago, researchers and farmers in Kenya began developing a method for beating striga, a parasitic weed that causes significant crop loss for African farmers. The system they developed, the "push-pull system," also builds soil fertility, provides animal fodder and resists another major African pest, the stemborer. Under the system, predators are "pushed" away from corn because it is planted alongside insect-repellent crops, while they are "pulled" toward crops like Napier grass, which exudes a gum that traps and kills pests and is also an important fodder crop for livestock. Push-pull has spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools. It's a farming system that's much more robust, cheaper, less environmentally harmful, locally developed, locally owned and one among dozens of promising agroecological alternatives on the ground in Africa today.

Read the whole article from The Nation

Previously blogged about here

Mass Murder of Women

Bob Herbert: Women at Risk

"I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me," wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week's shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.

We've seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

Or, can you imagine if the gunman was Arab, Muslim or black. The news would be filled with analyses of black violence or Muslim misogyny or whatever. Just look at how some people try to make Mark Lepine into a secret Muslim, so that the violent impulses can be blamed on his Algerian-ness instead of his male-ness. Why is it when a white man commits a similar act, neither whiteness nor maleness are examined?

According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”

I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus.

Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. “What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

I don't for a minute believe that all men hate women or that all men are violent or whatever the right wing wants you to think feminists believe, but that there is an undercurrent in our culture which accepts too much violence in general and too much violence against women in particular.

We need to take a good honest look at our society and take responsibility for these sick people we raise. We need to promote healthier ways to deal with anger and other strong emotions. We desperately need a healthier masculinity. We also need to abandon our antisocial and ultra-competitive society that rewards domination.

Blame CUPE

Are you tired of blaming fate, the vagaries of nature, or God for your misfortunes? Try blaming CUPE. It's fun and easy.

Here's an example, provided by the Toronto Sun.


CUPE killed summer. That's right. Summer is dead, and CUPE perpetrated the murder.

Try it yourself. Car won't start? Blame CUPE. Weather too cold? Blame CUPE. Miss the bus? Stub your toe? Spill your coffee? You know who to blame.