A note on the naming of this blog:
i chose the name “cultivating domesticity” as a play on “the cult of domesticity,” an ideology coined in the nineteenth century that said a woman’s place was in the home. also known as “the cult of true womanhood” this ideology laid out the cardinal values all [white middle/upperclass] women must display: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. the woman’s biological imperative was to create a tranquil domestic sphere for her husband – as women were ill-equipped to do the things men do in the outside world. these ideas pervaded all forms of popular culture at the time, and were buttressed by a lot of pseudo-scientific evidence of female inferiority: we have smaller bodies and smaller brains, more delicate constitutions, and things like menstruation and masturbation make us insane.
i learned all about the cult of domesticity studying at smith college, where generations of (mostly white) women before me had come to buck the system and break out of the domestic sphere, proving their ability to challenge male domination in all aspects of the outside world. which is incredible, and necessary – because we’re obviously not over the belief that women are inferior and incapable of doing certain things men do (physical labor, politics, being decisive, etc), so while i take issue with the white privileged backbone of the feminist movement, i do think the sentiment is necessary and the fight is still relevant.
what i don’t like is the implicit devaluing of domestic work. in a sort of animal farm–ish move, feminism takes on the assumption that traditionally-male work is more valuable and desirable than roles traditionally done by women (and people of color). so i walked away from my feminist education thinking that i ought to get an impressive job and higher degrees to show the world that i can beat men at their own game. and while i do think i can beat men at their own game, i also think that cooking and washing and mending clothes and raising families are some of the most important and critical roles in a society. Unlike some of the best-paid jobs in this country, if someone isn’t making food and babies nobody’s going anywhere.
and i don't think these realms are mutually exclusive, in fact i think the realms are constructed to be separate (and unequal) in order to maintain a system of domination and destructive policy.
so what i’m saying with this blog is that i value those necessary roles as much as i do the flashy positions in male-dominated spheres, and i think it does us good as a movement, as a people, to pay tribute to and cultivate the art of caring for our family, friends and homes, and to bring that energy into our work in our communities and the world.
worried you're going to be home biting your fingernails tonight? what better form of stress relief than grabbing some crayons and doing a crafty project while watching the counts come in. thanks to elizabeth perry for creating and sharing this downloadable color-your-own electoral college map. there are 538 votes total. a majority of 270 is needed to win. happy voting.
a strange piece of mail arrived at the domestic abode the other day. it was addressed to someone i don't know at my address, which is common enough - we get a lot of junk mail for people who no longer live here. but this letter was hand written and had the words "please forward or blog" written on the envelope. hmm. please forward is a pretty standard request for mail, but the blogging part threw me for a loop. i wasn't planning to open the letter, since i think opening other peoples' mail is some sort of federal offense, but since it asked to be blogged about... and i happen to have a blog... i guess it's my duty.
and i'm so glad i did. it's one of the most bizarre pieces of mail i've ever received. and i have worked at organizations where i've opened a lot of odd mail.
the sender is a mr. holden charles hollom, who apparently gained international attention in the late '80s by chasing down a purse-snatcher and pinning him against a wall...with his cab. marty says he remembers this being in the news - a cabbie who took it upon himself to defend a japanese tourist whose purse was stolen by running down the assailant and using his cab to pin the man's body to the side of a building until authorities arrived.
it seems as though he gained further infamy when the confessed robber won a lawsuit against him for use of excessive force in the amount of $25,000. it doesn't seem as though either of the two men actually handled any of the money; the purse-snatcher was serving a ten-year term in prison and the money went to cover his publicly-funded medical bills, and people all over the bay area and apparently around the world saw charles hollom as a good samaritan and raised the money so he didn't have to cover it. which gets us to the part about why he's writing a letter to marie at my address. he included in the envelope the original letter marie had written to him in 1992 (yes, that's 16 years ago) saying she was sorry for the way he was being treated and she saw him as a "hero" (her quotations, not mine). included with marie's original letter is another letter he wrote up on a typewriter and seems to have sent to all the people who once showed him support. i've scanned it in, but the text is interesting enough to actually be reproduced in its legible entirety here:
September 23rd, 2008
Hello out there to all my friends on shore,
My name is Chuck Hollom; my Driver’s License says that my name is Charles Oscar Hollom.I was named after Grandpa Hollom but have always been called Chuck.
Perhaps more people than any other way know me as a San Francisco Luxor Cab Driver than any other reference; warily and who can blame them after the storm of commentary after I took exception to a vilent mugger’s attach upon a young lady visiting from Japan in 1989 as she strolled up Market Street with two tour companions around Ten O’clock in the evening of May Second.They were only going for a bite to eat at Zim’s at Van Ness.
I chases him and, with permission of my passenger, pursued and pinned the mugger against the wall of the San Francisco School Administration building with my taxi; put it in Park without turning the engine off so the vehicle would not sag back down a little; and waited for all sorts of people to arrive; which they certainly did; then and since; for years and years with what some might call a great strain on me as well as those close to me….
I can’t call what happened to me after that night unbelievable because so many people along the way believed the misconstruances and half-truths and simple lies to which they were exposed.I can’t blame the people who lost faith in whatever they took me to be.I couldn’t track all the prevaricating spin-doctors or iconoclasts who took it upon themselves to make a mockery of my existence; but I have taken an interest in the reasons for their smilingly brutal activities…
I’m in Minneapolis, being near my failing 88-year old Mom as long as she recognizes me, and helping my only sibling, my younger sister Linea, who has been Cerebral Palsied since she was two and I was five, with her charge of Mom’s care in a care facility.
Currently, I live on a soldier’s pension of $935.00 per month and have a $250.00 per month fun live-work space in conjunction with a $300.00 per month office.
My life has been saved three times by San Francisco GeneralHospitaland three times by the Veteran’s Administration MedicalCenter in Minneapolis.I’m beginning to wonder if I’m a cat.I have acquired an old Royal alpha 110 typewriter at a garage sale for $5.00.Since the Bum Rap King will be a Corker; I’ve decided to seek help; loans or patronage with the assurance that it will all come back to you.(It’s been awhile wince I’ve typed, but that will all come back to me), God bless you and keep you.
Chuck
P.S. Don’t hurt yourself
P.P.S Please Blog intact.
Wow.
so in addition to that letter he has photocopied a check, presumably from the japanese tourist, in the amount of $3500.00, and the memo line reads "a salute to our common humanity, arigato!" and chuck's note photocopied below the check says: Hello again, Thank you all so much for helping me long ago. I have the hope that you might find a way in your technological power to help me in what has come to be a long, difficult journey. I would like to have my Sept. 23rd letter (enclosed) seen by as many people as possible.America's "Legal" types have so "branded" me a "Cowboy." But perhaps without offense, you could consider me in metaphor to be a Samurai on a path with a broken sword. Respectfully, Chuck Hollom and finally, there's a copy of a certificate of merit and appreciation for charles hollom from the va medical center radiation oncology center, on the bottom of which he writes "42 Treatments. These folks are the best and the brightest!"
and there you have it. i've now used my technological power to have his letter seen by as many people as possible.
oh, the things you can do on the internet. since i'm pretty much resolved to not leaving the house today, let me share with you what i just learned about from u-handblog: wordles. amazing. you can enter the web address for your blog (or anything, really) and create an abstract word collage of the words most used in the site: the more frequent the word, the larger it appears. basically what i learned from my blog's wordle is that i wrote more about canning than everything else put together. i'll have to check back on wordles after my blog's been around a while longer. you also have the option to paste in a bunch of text and create a wordle out of that. i took my thesis [about native hawaiian resistence to geothermal energy development] and pasted that in, just to test how it would work with 128 pages of text. it didn't even blink - and produced this: it's really fun, and a great way to avoid doing other things. you can also mess with the colors and font and word direction, if you've got something big to procrastinate about. try it out. also, if you want to save the image (the website doesn't really allow you to do that) lisa lam of u-handblog kindly gives you links on how to take a screenshot with both macs and pcs. if you do make your own wordle, please comment about it and share.
the business next door that used to be an auto repair shop closed down a couple months ago and in the past few weeks a work crew has been there demolishing parts of the building. aside from the friendly wake-up sounds of demolition, i have a new concern about the building. a few days ago they wrapped all entrances, including windows and roof vents, in plastic and friday the yellow signs you see pictured here showed up declaring it a "lead hazard zone." hmm. that's a little unnerving considering marty and i have been complaining about all the dust that's been blowing into our house through the open windows for the past week, and that the morning coffee has been tasting more metallic than usual.so i phoned alameda county's Lead Poisoning Prevention Program on friday and explained all this to the woman on the phone. she didn't share my concern, saying that if they had wrapped the building in plastic and posted signs that essentially they were abiding by regulations. her only real concern was if there were children under age 6 in the house. i told her there weren't, but i was still concerned for my own health, and while i had to concede that she was probably right that i have completed my neurological development (unfortunately), i still don't think lead is good for health. and while there aren't any children living in the house now i may just want to have some sometime and should this concern me for say, my ability to reproduce? she said no, she didn't think so and suggested if i was worried about it i should wipe down all the surfaces that have dust on them with a wet rag. the more i pressed her with questions the more she retreated into her known repertoire of lead poisoning services - so for instance she told me if i got the landlord to request it we could have a free inspection of the house to point out potential lead hazards in the paint and soil. well now that you mention it, maybe i should be concerned about that too - but that was not what i called about. so i've done a little online research about lead poisoning for adults and discovered that it can indeed affect basically all your bodily systems and that symptoms are hard to detect but might include tiredness, irritability, loss of appetite and some other gastrointestinal issues. while i can readily admit to the first two, i certainly haven't lost my appetite so i decided not to pursue that avenue of lead detection. they also suggest eating a balanced diet high in iron, vitamin c, and calcium reduces lead absorption. this information is all coming from a very informative pamphlet put out by oregon's lead poisoning prevention program. they also give you a number to call for lead hazard inspections. it's too bad i don't live in oregon. because what i really want is for some unbiased inspector to come out and tell me if i'm indeed living in a lead hazard zone and what to do about it, but if i can't get that i guess i'll wipe down my furniture and eat more leafy greens.
I've now been unemployed for almost three months. I've been spending my time between travel at home nesting: cooking, rearranging furniture and crafting. And applying for jobs, of course. The truth is that although I came up in the feminist tradition of rejecting all things domestic (thanks betty friedan, gloria steinem) I actually love that shit. Knitting, crocheting, sewing, cooking, baking, frying especially - you name it - with the exception of vacuuming. Hate that. So yesterday I was talking with my good friend, Laura, about my secret domestic tendencies and how what I really want is to find some rich person who will pay me to explore my crafting and cooking ideas. Barring that, scheming Laura suggested I start a blog. I said that I've thought about it because I love reading cooking/crafting blogs, but basically, "isn't that a little geeky?" To which Laura replied, "Well, Kasha, you might be a little geeky yourself." So there it is, I'm owning my love for domesticity and coming out as a my geeky crafting self. If I'm not working, I might as well be chronicling my domestic endeavors. Hope you enjoy.
Cultivating Domesticity is a play on the 19th century ideology coined "The Cult of Domesticity." This is my reclamation of the domestic arts, an effort in repositioning the “domestic” as central to our acts of self determination and revolution.
