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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:26am on 2008-03-08

"No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children." -- Barbara Ehrenreich

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There are 4 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] lysystratae.livejournal.com at 05:07pm on 2008-03-08
even suburban America had cleaning, cooking, money management, etc, etc... so the question becomes, how would anyone KNOW if it's a bad thing or not, when no one's ever DONE it?
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posted by [identity profile] kolraashgadol.livejournal.com at 01:18am on 2008-03-09
I think you're missing the point, which is that the ideal has been to isolate women in suburban communities where they were alone the majority of the day with children, and that children were largely her sole responsibility, without - for most women, at lest those in the middle classes and aspiring- anyone helping.
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posted by [identity profile] lysystratae.livejournal.com at 05:56am on 2008-03-09
but that's not what she said; what she said was the only thing those women were doing was raising children, when all these other women were doing other things as well to keep busy. Raising kids isn't the only thing they were doing, ever.
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posted by [identity profile] blueeowyn.livejournal.com at 04:11pm on 2008-03-10
However, the ones who did farming, gathering, etc. ALSO probably did the cooking & cleaning and in some cases may have done the money management (and quite a few of the suburban women aren't doing the money management). Heck, it seems that in many cases women who have full-time jobs still are in charge of cooking, laundry, and a lot of the cleaning.

Another potential problem is the one-woman-one-child that she mentioned, if a person (either gender) is a stay-at-home parent with one child, that child may become too much of the center of the universe for the parent's OR the child's mental/emotional health.

All that said, it is oversimplifying things a bit and leaves out a lot of factors.
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