« Pie Making | Main | Making Life Beautiful »
Beourgeois Family Values vs. the Market
In the nineteenth century, Lasch observed, it was often feminists who had led the “forces of organized virtue� to stamp out drunkenness and debauchery, gradually subduing the older “patterns of male conviviality� and domesticating males to “bourgeois hearth and home.� An important element in this campaign to “feminize society� by substituting “domestic enjoyments for the rough and brutal camaraderie of males� was the “glorification of the child and of maternal influence on the child’s development.� This conflict between the feminine and masculine spheres was often reflected in women’s efforts to combat the “competitive, work-oriented values of their husbands�; “Men valued achievement; women, happiness and well-being.�
Treating domestic life as an emotional refuge from the world of work rested on a separation of private and public life that developed with the bourgeois nuclear family. Lasch described this as a family where “glorification of privacy in turn reflected the devaluation of work,� which was viewed simply as a means to an end – as a “way of achieving satisfactions or consolations outside work.� The Victorian home, as Gertrude Himmelfarb puts it, became “a haven not only from the pressures of the marketplace but from the temptations of sin and corruption.� The attitude that market activity within the public arena is not the ultimate good reflected what Brigitte and Peter Berger have identified as a fundamental bourgeois belief that the “‘little’ things in life, the ordinary and seemingly unimportant details of everyday events, matter as much as the ‘great’ things.�
It is the critical significance of these simple, commonplace events comprising our daily routines that Jane Austen celebrates in her writings of delicate precision and Leo Tolstoy portrays in his monumental novels. In War and Peace, Tolstoy captures in Natasha the essence of the woman who finds satisfaction in attending to the particularities of her family’s daily activities by preserving routines and discharging the obligations they impose. Indeed, it was at the figure of Natasha that Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 fired the first salvo of feminism’s current war against the housewife, when she ridiculed the “supreme self-abasement� of Natasha’s “passionate and tyrannical devotion to her family.�
Women who cherish as an ideal Tolstoy’s portrayal of the domestic bliss that Natasha finally achieved – perceiving that bliss as self-fulfilling, not abasing – stand athwart the course of feminism’s advance. Society can choose to honor this ideal, to grant significance to the ordinary details of everyday life, and to respect, rather than disdain, a woman’s devotion to her family’s daily routine. If it does, then this woman can easily derive more satisfaction from baking a loaf of bread with her child than from writing the legal briefs that feminism would celebrate as the only genuine achievements. Such as woman might well describe the purpose of her daily life in the way Mark Helprin described the paintings of Edward Schmidt: this artist’s purpose, said Helprin, is not “to reinvent the universe, but rather, like Raphael, and Caravaggio, and Sargent, and a thousand others before, to attend to it.�
Contemporary feminism would have women devote themselves to reinventing the universe – as Hilary Rodham Clinton urges them to “remold society.� But devotion to grandiose schemes within the public arena necessarily requires relinquishing to others the cultivation of one’s own garden. The essence of the traditional woman is her preference for attending to the welfare of her own small universe, hoping to create therein a simple canvas of quotidian beauty. If T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufock thinks his life diminished because it is measured out with coffee spoons, the traditional woman cherishes the daily ceremonies in which she arranges these spoons. Henry James speaks for her when he begins The Portrait of a Lady by observing that “there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.�
. . . .In the struggle between masculine work-oriented values and feminine domestic values, the feminine lost. The “Angel in the House� – that Victorian-era wife who, as Robert Wright puts it, “could tame the animal in a man and rescue his spirit from the deadening world of work� – was evicted. Heeding Virginia Woolf’s admonition to “kill� the angel in the house, those who now call themselves feminists have assured these angels that, far from deadening, the world of market work is vastly superior to the “almost pathetic ordinariness� of their lives. This ideal of “The Angel in the House� had been created as the foundation for withdrawing women (who were seen as morally superior) “from the exhaustion, the contamination, the vulgarity of mill-work and professional work.� But it has succumbed to the feminist ideal of sexual equivalence.
-excerpted from Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism by F. Carolyn Graglia, Spence Publishing Company: Dallas, Copyright 1998
Posted by lilypress at November 16, 2005 9:25 PM
