Joyfully At Home: Chapter One - Part Two

Mr. Spawn is three days post-surgery and I am flabbergasted at how well he's been doing.   He tires out a bit more easily than he did before the surgery - but he's eating well, playing like a happy toddler and getting into trouble.

The fact his surgery went so well has taken a huge weight off my chest.  Spawn's a robust little trooper- but last February he had a cold that set him back for weeks.   Since then, he's weathered several colds without any major lags - but I was worried that this surgery would set him back again.   My concerns have turned out to be imaginary - and I'm thrilled.

On a similar note, I find writing about Jasmine (Baucham) Holmes' book "Joyfully At Home" to be far easier than any of the other books written by stay-at-home daughters.  Mrs. Holmes' writing is of an entirely different caliber of quality than the poor standards set by the Botkin Sisters or the Maxwells so reading it feels like a breath of fresh air.   Also unlike the women of the Botkin, Maxwell, or Mally families, Jasmine Baucham finds a man whom she marries and is raising a family with.  The other authors' books were written with all the energy and vigor of young women who believe that they will be in marriages that will be the envy of all their friends any day now - but as readers who are five to fifteen years in the future we know that that assumption is faulty.

Let's continue discussing Ms. Baucham's understanding of the evils of feminism when she was 19, shall we?

I know, this is not a popular notion. As a young, American woman, I have been told time and again how thankful I ought to be for feminism: it is giving me the right to vote and own property; it is giving me protection from an abusive marriage; it is giving me options beyond the scope of the Suzy Homemaker mold that women before the rise of feminism have been forced into! Women before the dawn of feminism had it bad. Right, guys? (pg. 25)

The people who created the materials for Vision Forum's homeschooling wing have a lot of  resulting ignorance to answer for; that paragraph is such a muddled mess of historical steps for women that untangling it is daunting.

Let me start with this statement: feminism is not offering protection from an abusive marriage.   No one can do that because abuse happens at a person-to-person level.  No, what feminism offers is the ability to leave an abusive marriage without losing all assets and all access to children born in the marriage.  In countries that are based on English Common Law, an unmarried woman had the ability to own property and custody of children born out of wedlock.  Once a woman married, her entire legal existence was subsumed by her husband.  Her husband owned outright all of the property either person brought to the marriage, any assets gained by the couple during their marriage and had complete legal and physical custody of their children.  Divorce was strictly confined and divorced women had little or no expectation of equitable distribution of assets or access to their children.   The most clear example I can think of was in the book "Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres" by Ruth Brandon.  Eliza Bishop was the married sister of Mary Wollstonecraft when Eliza suffered a bout of what we would now call postpartum depression.  Since Eliza was an adult, she could legally leave the home of her husband - but if she took her infant daughter with her she would be guilty of a felony.   Eliza left - and most likely never saw her infant daughter again before the baby died at 11 months old.  Eliza left - and spent the rest of her days working as a companion, a governess or a schoolteacher to try and earn enough to live on.  She had no financial support or settlement from her estranged husband - and no reason to expect one.

Getting a divorce today still requires bravery since legal proceedings and starting a new life are challenging - but at least women have a chance of eventually gaining financial independence after a divorce.

In terms of Suzy Homemaker, she's a myth perpetuated to idealize the decorative, protected wife and mother of upper-class Victorian times.  She re-appeared for a few decades in the 1950's and 1960's for white middle and upper-class women during the exceptionally rare economic times that allowed families to be supported by a male breadwinner of limited education.  I hate to be the bearer of bad news - but that level of economic prosperity regardless of education for white males is never returning.  People who idolize that time period ignore the fact that the prosperity of the 1950's was built on a massive infusion of government cash to veterans through public housing, VA mortgages and the GI Bills support of education plus the oft ignored fact that the other countries that had manufacturing skills had been bombed into ruins.  Oh, and the generally ignored fact that this largess toward white males came at the expense of women and men of color who had also sacrificed for their families and countries during the 1930's and 1940's. 

I think a more realistic historical idea for married women is as half of the economic engine of a household.  Women have always either earned wages directly or done unpaid work in the home that frees other members to produce materials or earn wages.  CP/QF bloggers glorify the stay-at-home mother as lovingly doing things at home - but they generally ignore how much work she completes.  The cost of child-care for an infant or preschool child is often equal to or more than the amount that most women can earn plus we would need to factor in the cost of a cook and a maid to do basic cleaning.   Plus, women nowadays have far more time and energy available to interact with their young children than they ever have in the past.  I suspect young children spent far more time under the general supervision of their mother or older sibling while the older members of the family worked on food production, food preservation and the never-ending process of creating cloth from fibers or skins.

For unmarried women or women whose children are older than 4, the historical model was far more tilted towards working.  Women worked on their farm, in the homes of wealthier people, or in industrial settings.

Really, the dependent adult woman model that underpins both the SAHD movement and the CP/QF married woman ideal is far more of a historical abnormality than the "feminist" model of recognizing that women work throughout their lives in and out of the home.

I feel like I've read and wrote about this quote before:

[...] although, before the dawn of our modern egalitarian leanings, women and men occupied completely different roles in society, we have the legacies of women like Abigail Adams, Sarah Edwards, and Anne Bradstreet, and others to show us that this position was not one of mental or spiritual inferiority, but one of order. (pg. 26)

Is there a Vision Forum brochure somewhere that writes about the glorious anti-feminist views of Abigail Adams, Sarah Edwards and Anne Bradstreet?   I feel like I've run into this sentence - or one strangely similar - in the Botkin Sister writings somewhere. 

Regardless of where they got this drivel from, it's still wrong. 

Abigail Adams wrote her husband frequently to tell him push the rights of women to vote.  To point out the obvious, her candid and fervent requests to her husband didn't lead to women voting during her lifetime - or the lifetimes of her immediate descendents. 

As for Sarah Edwards, I can't find more than a few surviving letters she wrote to her children.  The stories of her life that are embellished and shared among conservative Christian women are second-hand accounts of how nice she was to visitors to her home and how much her husband worried about her when he was dying.  All of this is nice - but it's a far cry from understanding how Sarah Edwards felt about her life personally and privately.  Her daughter Esther Edwards Burr left a far more honest set of journals prior to her death at age 26 and she struggled mightily with the stresses of being a wife and mother.  Cynic that I am, I often think that Sarah Edwards' main selling points to the CP/QF crowd is her convenient silence on troubling ideas combined with the fact that her descendents are both numerous and include some famous people. 

Anne Bradstreet works for CP/QF families as long as they pick the poems she wrote carefully.  If they stick to "To My Dear and Loving Husband", she is completely unobjectionable.  If they include "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" where she implies that her husband might remarry someone who abuses her children after she dies or "In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Elizabeth of Happy Memory" where she explains that women can be excellent warrior rulers, she becomes much more objectionable.

In the next section of the first chapter, Ms. Baucham begins explaining the rationale of being a stay-at-home daughter which will lead to our next post.