Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity
Emily Matchar
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Sweden had paternity-leave policies in place for years but found that few men were taking advantage of the benefit. While women felt comfortable taking time off to be with baby, men worried that they would look less dedicated to their careers if they did the same. So the Swedish government implemented a “use it or lose it” policy, mandating that the country’s thirteen-month parental leave cannot only be used by one parent – the other parent must use at least two months of the leave, or both lose those months entirely. Today 85% of Swedish fathers take paternity leave. The policy has helped redefine notions of masculinity and femininity in the already-egalitarian country.”
“If women cut back on their ambitions en masse, institutional change will never happen and the glass ceiling will lower. We need to be there to demand equal pay, mandatory maternity leave, more human hours. Leaving the “dirty work” of working to the men is a way of muffling our own voices.”
“when affluent, educated parents decide to homeschool, public schools lose out on involved PTA parents and capable school-improvement advocates. Or when parents spend all their money and energy searching for the best organic baby products, there’s little energy left to lobby for consumer product regulations that might benefit everyone.”
“[Judith Warner:] Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.”
“The problem is that the media rarely discusses the real reasons behind why women leave their jobs. We hear a lot about the desire to be closer to the children, the love of crafting and gardening, and making food from scratch. But reasons like lack of maternity leave, lack of affordable day care, lack of job training, and unhappiness with the 24/7 work culture-well, those aren't getting very much airtime.”
“A privileging of individual rights over group goods can lead to serious problems, as we’ve seen with the antivaccination movement.”
“[Leslie Bennett] You have a teenager who desperately wants to separate...If you don't have a career, these New Domesticity types are likely to find themselves standing in the kitchen with all these domestic skills and no outlet for them, no way to earn a living.... [A]t that point your kids are not thanking you for having made the hand-pureed baby food and for giving them homemade cookies. They don't feel you've done them a big favor; they say, "Why didn't she ever grow up and take responsibility for her own life?”
“[Joan C. Williams] Food has always been a class code, and since Alice Waters, the way to give an upper-middle class act is with food that is fresh and local...The class code of the upper-middle class literally links morality and political virtue with certain forms of high-intensity food-preparation activities.”
“When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult.”
“Many men no longer want to be identified just by their jobs," said Bengt Westerberg, the country's former deputy prime minister.”
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Book Keywords:
working-parents, masculinity, feminism, stay-at-home-mothers, food, workplace-attitudes, work, equal-rights, having-it-all, social-withdrawal, working-women, egalitarianism, social-contagion, hyperindividualism, upper-middle-class, female-employment, perfectionism, downshifting, independence, sweden, workplace, mothers, feminist, diy, class, working, motherhood, class-and-virtue, parenting, libertarianism, employment, morality, working-parent, homemakers, neurosis, maternity, inequality, new-domesticity, status-symbol, homesteading, paranoia, childcare, paternity-leave
