women need advanced degrees in homemaking

[August]

Well, meals are slightly different, as that implies at least a little preparation, though of course toddlers, like all humans, have varying tastes.

But snacks? I don't get it.

You don't get bored eating fruit three times a day? Fair enough, but I do, and lots of others as well, apparently.

[Ariel]

Homemaking requires a certain amount of visual-spatial skills. Mine happen to be mediocre, while my husband's are non-existent. It's not obvious to us how to neatly organize things, nor do we naturally have any idea of how to get things clean. People like us need to be taught things that seem obvious to other people. For example, my family seems to need a course on How Not to Set Your Kitchen On Fire (hint: don't put plastic in the oven or on a hotplate, and don't clean your gas stove with paper towel WHILE THE BURNER IS ON), followed by a course on How Not to Get Paint on White Carpet.

This! This! A Thousand Times This! I've never had my own problems with organization/cleaning explained so well before.

[guidedbybobafett]

I graduated from college and I've never cooked a meal in my life and my house is FILTHY!!!

Oh wait no, just kidding, that stuffs not hard. I feel like if you need to tell yourself that in order to give your life meaning then go for it? Granted I don't have any kids, but neither do the Botkinettes and they won't shutup about how difficult it is to cook dinner and sweep.

[linnea27]

I am really confused by her assumption that women who work = women who don't know how to cook or care for children. Does she seriously believe that women who work don't ALSO do their own laundry?

I have a degree. I work. I have two kids. My family eats healthy, whole-food meals that are usually cooked by me (from scratch) because I enjoy cooking and do most of the cooking in our house. My family has clean clothes. The bathrooms are, well, clean enough. The kids get played with and read to and disciplined when needed. I got out my sewing kit and made some repairs to my clothing tonight. I am genuinely confused as to how she thinks my home must function. Does she think that my house is piled high with laundry and stocked with ramen noodles? Does she think I have a live in maid and cook? Why would I be unable to process a load of laundry because I work?

[YPestis]

My mom is a scientist who gets complimented on her cooking, has sown and knitted clothing for me as a child, and is an uber-clean freak. Yeah, and there was no need for any advanced degrees in homemaking. She didn't stress homemaking skills to me growing up, instead encouraging me in academics. Education is much harder to just "pick up", is what she told me. Housekeeping, OTOH, can be picked up as needed, so there's no hurry to teach me how to sew my own apron unless I wanted to.

In the past, I can see homemaking as a skilled trade requiring extensive training. Things like soap-making, gardening, canning, dress-making, cooking from scratch, making one's own stock, etc....those were skills required for homemakers because they could not be substituted at a local store. These days, the skills it takes to run a home requires far less training. Grocery shopping, cooking (even from scratch), buying clothes....how much time does it take to learn all of that?

Obviously, one can still learn to garden, can and sew, but those are personal hobbies, not necessities in order for the family to stay fed and clothed. That's why the whole 12 years of homemaking training is unnecessary. I know that fundies are trying to equate homemaking with attending college or becoming a lawyer, but all it does is make their stance that much more ludicrous and desperate sounding.

Why not accept that being a homemaker is not as physically tasking as in the past? One can argue that raising children is still just as challenging but to make it sound like "real" homemakers work as hard as Ma Ingalls is a bit ridiculous.....

[Peas n carrots]

Has this blogger never heard of Google? I just got done googling "how to make your own hardwood floor cleaner" and came up with a zillion hits. Homemaking - at your tips with Google!

[docmom]

Has this blogger never heard of Google? I just got done googling "how to make your own hardwood floor cleaner" and came up with a zillion hits. Homemaking - at your tips with Google!

The best homemaking advice I ever got from Google was the name of my cleaning lady :lol: Hey, if that makes a fundie woman feel special (advanced degree holding mother must contract out the cleaning) then fine. I have plenty of job satisfaction helping people overcome illness and I can spare a little for them.

[FJismyheadship]

Snacks? I buy blueberries and hummus and guacamole. I usually google new foods before giving them. Buy some whole wheat crackers and spread peanut butter on them

[Conuly]

You don't get bored eating fruit three times a day? Fair enough, but I do, and lots of others as well, apparently.

1. Fruit is not a food, but a category of food. No, I don't think I would get bored eating from a variety of foods that includes apples, bananas, tangerines and oranges, pineapple, grapes, cherry tomatoes, mini bell peppers, avocado, blueberries, raspberries, cherries, melons of various sorts, mango, cucumber, raisins, peaches, pears, plums, snap peas.... And if I did, I would add some celery and baby carrots to my list. Heck, even if I just stayed in the apple family I could have a different variety every day of the week, and they all taste different!

2. I don't give kids three different snacks a day as a rule. Two snacks if they're very small. More than that and they don't eat it, nor their meals. (If they're growing, that's different, but even then, if they're growing, they need more fruits and vegetables, not less!) If I were feeding them three snacks a day, all the more reason for those snacks to be healthy. Healthy primarily means fruits and vegetables. Crackers and cookies and other things that come in boxes aren't healthy, and nobody really needs three eggs a day.

3. Food isn't supposed to be exciting, it's supposed to be food. If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you probably aren't very hungry. Obviously I wouldn't force a kid to eat foods they actively dislike, but if they genuinely can't find one thing from the produce section that they want to eat, well, then they can probably stand to wait until dinner time.

[louisa05]

Cooking is truly a skill. If you don't believe me, come to my in-laws' Thanksgiving next year.

That doesn't mean you need to study it for 12 years or learn it in any formal setting. But many people truly can't cook and google and a library of cookbooks does not help them. Believe me, my sister-in-law has three shelves of gourmet cookbooks and most of her food is still tasteless on a good day and disgusting on a bad day.

[ems]

"Hard" (or complex or challenging, which I believe raising a family can be, although no personal experience yet) /= needing an advanced degree. Some things are best mastered through classroom learning, while others are mastered mostly through experience and with the support of others.

Cooking amd cleaning, these are things I learned by doing, because I need to eat and to live in a reasonable clean home. And when I need help with something, there's my friend google. It's not rocket science, and God does not require a woman to be Martha Stewart.

[ems]

I really hate the way she talks about girls dreaming of a career vs. wanting to be moms as if it is an either-or. Way to tell all the working moms including my own that they are not really moms.

[JesusFightClub]

No-one could create an advanced degree in home ec without a strong theory component, and what would that theory be? Things like "wipe down the sides after you cook, and don't have raw meat touching stuff" are so self-evident that you couldn't make a whole degree out of them.

For example, I have a (fairly pointless) postgrad qualification in teaching. For teaching, it's not enough to show up in front of a class and start lecturing them about whatever catches your fancy, so you do actually have to learn both the practical (how to plan lessons and how to manage classroom discipline) and the theory behind why you are teaching in the first place. (Strangely enough I was excellent at the theory and hopeless at the practice, which is why I don't teach nowadays.) However, the thing is you need them both - without the theory behind you you don't understand your learners or really know why it is you're doing what you do. For home ec it would have to be similar.

[Peas n carrots]

No-one could create an advanced degree in home ec without a strong theory component, and what would that theory be? Things like "wipe down the sides after you cook, and don't have raw meat touching stuff" are so self-evident that you couldn't make a whole degree out of them.

For example, I have a (fairly pointless) postgrad qualification in teaching. For teaching, it's not enough to show up in front of a class and start lecturing them about whatever catches your fancy, so you do actually have to learn both the practical (how to plan lessons and how to manage classroom discipline) and the theory behind why you are teaching in the first place. (Strangely enough I was excellent at the theory and hopeless at the practice, which is why I don't teach nowadays.) However, the thing is you need them both - without the theory behind you you don't understand your learners or really know why it is you're doing what you do. For home ec it would have to be similar.

When I was a kid I used to like to look at my great grandfather's university yearbooks from 1910-1914. Each student had their photo, with their name and degree under it. Many of the women were listed as being "Household Science" majors, which I assumed was like a finishing school type degree. Back in those days to attend university you usually came from wealthy families, and I gathered that this degree course taught women about managing a household staff, event planning, etiquette and probably a little bit of cooking a sewing. However, I'm guessing this was more of a MRS course and the social side of university life was perhaps more important to them than their education.

However, there were a number - nowhere near as many as the HHS or Lit majors - who were science/math majors. And even in 1910 the university had some sports options for women, such as basketball and tennis. It seems that even back in the Edwardian era women of the upper class weren't quite as limited as fundies would like to believe.

[louisa05]

No-one could create an advanced degree in home ec without a strong theory component, and what would that theory be? Things like "wipe down the sides after you cook, and don't have raw meat touching stuff" are so self-evident that you couldn't make a whole degree out of them.

For example, I have a (fairly pointless) postgrad qualification in teaching. For teaching, it's not enough to show up in front of a class and start lecturing them about whatever catches your fancy, so you do actually have to learn both the practical (how to plan lessons and how to manage classroom discipline) and the theory behind why you are teaching in the first place. (Strangely enough I was excellent at the theory and hopeless at the practice, which is why I don't teach nowadays.) However, the thing is you need them both - without the theory behind you you don't understand your learners or really know why it is you're doing what you do. For home ec it would have to be similar.

The current name for it is "family consumer science" and includes nutrition, personal finance, child development, family relations, etc...there is actually plenty of "theory". The major often is tandem with education and grads teach what used to be called "home ec" in school. At the schools I taught at FCS teachers taught traditional things like cooking and sewing but also taught child development and family relations courses, including valuable things like how to recognize abusive relationships--a surprisingly frequent issue in teen dating.

[lilah]

Ahh, I love it when straw-women letter-writers conveniently describe the myths the author is trying to create. Because all highly-educated women with degrees who become stay-at-home moms are so incapable of educating themselves about household management that they don't know how to use google/research and read a book on the subject/ask a real-life person. They write in to ask some random religious blogger what they should do, because they have stumbled upon her blog and divined that she is the source of the ultimate wisdom they are seeking. Right.

Agreed. The toddler snack issue is a pretty easy one but other two are not. I think that I'd really struggle if I believed that I had to submit to my husband and I was struggling with him making financial decisions that were risky. But then maybe it's because I don't believe in wifely submission and do believe in having my opinions heard and respected in marriage.

I think it's unfair is it that they are doing the Titus 2 thing and asking a so-called older woman/self proclaimed home making expert and she just shames them because she's knows more about home making.

[treehugger]

Agreed. The toddler snack issue is a pretty easy one but other two are not. I think that I'd really struggle if I believed that I had to submit to my husband and I was struggling with him making financial decisions that were risky. But then maybe it's because I don't believe in wifely submission and do believe in having my opinions heard and respected in marriage.

I think it's unfair is it that they are doing the Titus 2 thing and asking a so-called older woman/self proclaimed home making expert and she just shames them because she's knows more about home making.

What makes it even worse is this "self proclaimed home making expert" is 24. She would be just out of college - and yet, somehow, she is giving advice to career woman? :shifty-kitty:

[2xx1xy1JD]

Just read the actual blog post.

Obviously, I found the tone obnoxious since I don't believe in submission, don't think that grown women need to be under their father's "protection" and don't think that household management is just for girls.

Patriarchal crap aside, though, I can see some reason to say that effective household management takes some education and skill.

Imagine that there was an job posting for one or two people to run a residential facility for children. The job description includes:

- managing the budget for the facility

- writing and implementing policies and procedures

- develop a mission statement, articulate core values and develop a strategy for implementing them throughout the programming

- ensuring that health and safety standards are maintained

- planning and preparing all meals, meeting nutritional standards

- doing daily programming

- teaching basic life skills

- implementing effective behavior management techniques for children, using positive parenting strategies and keeping current with the latest research on various methods

- ensure that children meet developmental milestones. Identify any concerns and arrange for assessment and services if needed.

- ensure that children form proper attachments to caregivers

- coordinating with other service providers, including health care professionals, teachers, etc. This includes choosing the best service providers, liaising with them, monitoring the progress of each child, doing any follow-up work at home, and attending meetings

- identify any problems or special needs, and arrange for any extra services needed and do any necessary modifications

- providing appropriate infant stimulation and early childhood education

- providing tutoring and homework assistance for older children

- promote literacy

- manage all IT services and computer literacy

- providing guidance and counseling to the children

- set up a management structure that utilizes a cooperative model, being sure to role model respectful non-hierarchal communication and conflict-resolution techniques for the children

- provide safe transportation

To do that job well, you'd certainly need plenty of advanced skills - whether or not the children were your own.

[freedomjesusfootball]

I somehow managed to go to medical school, get married, teach myself to knit, crochet, and sew, bake,

cook, and manage a budget. I am also currently the primary wage-earner while my husband starts his home business. Am I some kind of fucking genius woman? Not at all. I am pretty good at googling stuff though.

[JesusFightClub]

The current name for it is "family consumer science" and includes nutrition, personal finance, child development, family relations, etc...there is actually plenty of "theory". The major often is tandem with education and grads teach what used to be called "home ec" in school. At the schools I taught at FCS teachers taught traditional things like cooking and sewing but also taught child development and family relations courses, including valuable things like how to recognize abusive relationships--a surprisingly frequent issue in teen dating.

That sounds very interesting - cheers! I'm away to google it :)

I still don't know - is all of that precisely theory? Personal finance is practice, surely, and nutrition likewise. Child development and family relations have a clear theoretical component, but it puts the shivers down my spine a bit as I have flashbacks to reading the Feminine Mystique. This, for example, I found a bit creepy:

http://familyconsumersciences.com/2013/ ... k-dynasty/

[2xx1xy1JD]

Fields like social work and education have a strong theoretical component. From my POV, I have professional involvement in family issues all day, and then I come home. I also see my sister's family - she and my BIL work professionally with planning therapy and programs for people with special needs, and my BIL took a year off to care for the kids including my nephew with high-functioning autism. He was doing what he does professionally, but with his own son.

And yes, you can incorporate progressive - and even socialist - political theory into child rearing and household management. Once upon a time, I worked at a Labor Zionist summer camp (which was suppose to follow the kibbutz model), and I also sent Girl 2 to a progressive co-op daycare as a baby. I learned that you can:

- actively fight against sexism, gender stereotyping and rigid gender roles (when singing Old McDonald, sing "and on HER farm...", insist on participation from both parents in 2-parent families, hire male staff as caregivers, create a queer-positive space, etc.)

- recognize the value of traditional "women's work" by recognizing it as labor, insisting on fair labor practices

- have a tremendous influence over toys, songs, books, media exposure, etc.

- create your own model social unit. If collective property is important, demonstrate sharing of resources and creating of common funds (at the camp, we even had a candy collective - all junk food sent by parents got pooled and shared by the whole cabin). If equal division of labor is important, create a rotating chore schedule. If being charitable is important, insist that 10% of allowance be donated, sing songs about giving and make putting coins in the donation can and canned food in the food bank bin part of the daily routine.

- if non-violent conflict resolution is important, sibling rivalry provides LOTS of learning opportunities!

[louisa05]

That sounds very interesting - cheers! I'm away to google it :)

I still don't know - is all of that precisely theory? Personal finance is practice, surely, and nutrition likewise. Child development and family relations have a clear theoretical component, but it puts the shivers down my spine a bit as I have flashbacks to reading the Feminine Mystique. This, for example, I found a bit creepy:

http://familyconsumersciences.com/2013/ ... k-dynasty/

They were going to make me teach a foods class once, so I was given the textbooks for a couple of weeks. The nutrition section was extensive and a lot was about how the human body and digestion works--not merely how to plan a nutritious meal but all the scientific reasons behind what makes a nutritious meal. It also included sections on special dietary needs and the scientific/medical reasons for them.

Fortunately, they decided not to make me teach that. Which was good as I am certified to teach English, Language Arts, and Social Sciences. But I would never denigrate it as a subject area. I worked with some very intelligent and accomplished teachers who were in that field.

As for the Duck Dynasty lesson...ugh. But that should not be used to denigrate the field as the internet can provide you with BS lessons based on movies and television shows for every school subject area under the sun. It is part of the (potentially damaging IMO) notion in education that you have to relate every lesson to something the kids are interested in. My problem with that is that always appealing to the narrow interests of teenagers usually means that you are not challenging them to grow or think outside of themselves. That may be influenced by my admins proposing we eliminate literature like The House on Mango Street and Raisin in the Sun because our kids were all white and it didn't relate to their own lives. Trouble is that if education is merely looking in the mirror, you are not being educated.

[knitwit]

One of the things that bugs the shit out me when it comes to posts like these is that none of these people seem to realize that education teaches you (or should teach you; I've heard stories from academic librarians which show that that isn't always the case ;) ) something that is invaluable: research skills. College students have to learn how to look up something they don't know or need support for when it comes to papers and assignments...gee, could that possibly be applied to everyday life? But then I'm sure research leads to independent thinking and we can't have that.

I had to laugh at her comment, "Let her study the culinary arts so she can grill a fine steak and bake a mean loaf of bread for her family." Two months ago, I decided I'd like to learn to make rolls/bread, mainly because there are only two people in my house and the alternatives seem to be 1) buy rolls, eat half of them, the rest go moldy, 2) buy a smaller quantity of rolls every other day or 3) learn to make my own that can be frozen, then thawed and baked as needed. I looked up a number of recipes online, made a batch following the general advice I was seeing in the recipes and bam, some really good rolls. I'm sure my crumb could be airier, but they were still delicious. See, blogger? No SAHD education required; just the knowledge that the information I need is out there in some format, whether that be books, online, videos, etc., and the ability to find it.

[Full enough quiver]

Those of us that are reasonably intelligent and possess critical thinking skills could probably figure out how to manage a home without years of training. Fundies raise their children to be deliberately uneducated, without critical thinking skills, so it's no surprise that it takes them years to learn what it might take a normal person a few months of trial and error (and you tube videos) to figure out.

[YPestis]

When I think of advanced skills, I think of those requiring years of studying and training, like being a lawyer or a surgeon. Yes, it does take some skill to manage a household, to raise children, to cook and clean. However, those skills are LIFE skills that can be picked up as I live my life.

Yes, if I wanted to do gourmet cooking at a five star restaurant, then that would require years of training. However, if I wanted to cook for my family, I can probably teach myself as I cook for my family every day. It's laughable to compare learning how to do a home cooked meal with learning to perform a liver transplant, or comparing my daily cooking to what a professional chef does. One is actually so good he gets paid for it! I will never get paid for my cooking LOL.

Maybe I'm finding this "advanced homemaking" thing irritating because I constantly hear how SAHM is a nurse and cook and blah blah and they would make six figures if you added all those jobs together. It's kind of offensive to SAHM when we try to put on such false pretensions, I think. The problem is that what most people do at home is not professional grade work. I'm not a professional chef because I can cook at home. My mom is not a professional nurse, even though she bandies me up. My husband is not the same as a professional teacher just because he helps with homework. We would never earn our keep as teachers nurses or chefs because those skills requires years of training to acquire. However, we can learn aspects of those jobs in order to run a household.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm putting down homemaking or SAHM. I dislike how society tries to play up the difficulties of day to day living. Cooking, cleaning and childcare care can be chores. They can be monotonous and tiring. But then, work can as well. How about we appreciate the contribution to life that each spouse brings? The prattling about advanced homemaking degrees seems to just sugarcoat the reality that homemaking is underappreciated and tedious to most people and that when we force people to take up homemaking, it creates unhappy people. The more they play up homemaking, the less likely I'm to believe it will bring universal happiness to women.