Things to Read While I Write: Realities of Poverty Edition [Casaubon's Book]
Reaching the hellacious end-of-book period where I do nothing but merge endlessly with my computer. Thus, low on new content. So you can read this stuff instead.
First, check out "Little House in the Ghetto" which will be going on my blogroll just as soon as I figure out how to change my blogroll.
Waking up from this entrancement and becoming aware that options exist has given me opportunity and motivation in my own life. As hobo poet Vachel Lindsay remarked, "I am further from slavery than most men." This has been an unexpected gift from downshifting (dropping out) from mainstream consumer culture and exploring what can variously be called simple living, "green", diy, urban homesteading, welfare and poverty, community, or even paradise. As Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted, we must expect the unexpected, or we'll never find it.
The wealth we hold may not be obvious. Indeed, it takes an eye for beauty to see the wealth that abounds in my neighborhood. Our wealth lies not in consensus reality dollars, but in our collective security and abundance. We have each other, and we will always have each other. As governments fall short on cash and their enforcers (police, zoning, etc.) disappear, our freedom increases. We use this freedom to create realities that make sense in light of the world we inhabit. We invite homeless people to squat the houses that are falling down from neglect. We scatter seeds of plants that nourish ourselves and the community of life in vacant lots and alley ways. We rediscover handy skills in the dumpster of history. We raise animals and build structures that do not fit into zoning's view of safety, but that do fit into a paradigm of making sense. We raise our children with the knowledge that another life is possible, and provide them the tools they need to make a living in the economy of community. "
The New York Times has a good piece, I think, on the way for-profit educational programs are profitting from the recession - without necessarily returning anything of great value. I worry about all the people who think that going back to school is the solution to their problems - most of them are going to take on considerable debt in the assumption that by the time they are done, things will be better and there will be a job for them.
They tell people, 'If you don't have a college degree, you won't be able to get a job,' " said Amanda Wallace, who worked in the financial aid and admissions offices at the Knoxville, Tenn., branch of ITT Technical Institute, a chain of schools that charge roughly ,000 for two-year associate degrees in computers and electronics. "They tell them, 'You'll be making beaucoup dollars afterward, and you'll get all your financial aid covered.' "
Ms. Wallace left her job at ITT in 2008 after five years because she was uncomfortable with what she considered deceptive recruiting, which she said masked the likelihood that graduates would earn too little to repay their loans.
As a financial aid officer, Ms. Wallace was supposed to counsel students. But candid talk about job prospects and debt obligations risked the wrath of management, she said.
"If you said anything that went against what the recruiter said, they would threaten to fire you," Ms. Wallace said. "The representatives would have already conned them into doing it, and you had to just keep your mouth shut."
A spokeswoman for the school's owner, ITT Educational Services, Lauren Littlefield, said the company had no comment.
More debt, for most people, is not going to be the solution to their problems. Moreover, most community colleges will offer similar programs for vastly less money than the private for-profit institutions. In most cases, entry into these kinds of programs is a bad idea, and I hope all my readers will discourage folks from making that kind of desperate bid.
Meanwhile, as the stripped down, pathetic version of national health care we might even get totters towards failure, we learn that Maternal mortality rates have doubled in the US in 20 years, almost all of them preventable. Oh, and just for a real shocker, African American women die three times as often in childbirth as white women.
White women have a mortality rate of 9.5 per 100,000 pregnancies, the CDC said. For African-American women, that rate is 32.7 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies.
"This has been known for a while and no one has a good handle on it," said Dr. Elliot Main, chairman and chief of obstetrics at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. "This is a national disgrace and a call to action. Both numbers are a call to action -- maternal mortality and racial disparity."
The CDC analysis shows that deaths during pregnancy and childbirth have doubled for all U.S. women in the past 20 years.
In 1987, there were 6.6 deaths for every 100,000 pregnancies. The number of deaths had climbed to 13.3 per 100,000 in 2006, the last year for which figures were available.
A report called "Healthy People 2010" by the Department of Health and Human Services says that number should be around four deaths for each 100,000 pregnancies.
Statistics for other highly industrialized countries show that the U.S. goal of four deaths for every 100,000 pregnancies is attainable. Great Britain, for example, has fewer than four deaths for each 100,000 pregnancies, Main said.
"Women's health is at risk," said Strauss. "We spend the most, and yet women are more likely to die than in 40 other countries. And that disconnect is what makes it such a problem."
Note that this is tucked way, way down on the CNN front page - way below the news about a few Prius owners and their problems, way, way, way below the Death of Peter Graves or the induction of Abba into some hall of fame. Decline and fall stuff always is.
As the States struggle with their budgets, the easiest places to cut are with those who have no power - the disabled, the poor, children. The usual first victims. Here's a good example, in Virginia (I'm not singling them out, they just happened to settle their budget the other day):
Funding for schools will drop 6 million over the next two years; the state will also cut more than billion from health programs. Class sizes will rise. A prison will close, judges who die or retire won't be replaced and funding for local sheriff's offices will drop 6 percent.
Only 250 more mentally disabled adults will receive money to get community-based services, in a state where the waiting list for such services numbers 6,000 and is growing. Employees will take a furlough day this year, the state will borrow 0 million in cash from its retirement plan for employees and future employees will be asked to retire later and contribute more to their pensions.
Medical care providers will see Medicaid payments from the state trimmed, and fewer poor children will be enrolled in state health care, although those health cuts could be tempered by anticipated federal funds
States are between a rock and hard place, but refusing to raise taxes on the middle class and upper classes while stripping the most vulnerable of the basics is particularly charming - and fairly typical. I expect New York to do the same, if it can ever pass a budget. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, there's some proof that there's more fat to cut in state budgets - they don't have to wholly screw the poor.
On a more cheery note, I get a lot of questions about vertical farming, and I've often got to explain that the resource investment in hydroponics often is more than it is worth. But this is really cool - a low tech, low investment window garden model for people in apartments:
Willem Van Cotthem is a researcher specializing in combating desertification, an occupation he describes on his other blog, "Desertification". Here lies the origin of his low-cost, low-tech methods to grow plants and crops. Van Cotthem manages to grow vegetables and fruits in the middle of the desert with minimal water (pictures). Apart from the methods using plastic bottles described above, he also uses mini-greenhouses made of trash (yoghurt pots, plastic bags) to produce vegetable and (fruit) tree seedlings. All systems can be used both indoors and outdoors.
What all these methods have in common, is that they hardly use any water, basically by minimizing evaporation. Moreover, because of the low cost (using 100 percent trash), the systems can be used even by the poorest of people. Plastic rubbish is, unfortunately, everywhere. Van Cotthem's blogs can be a bit chaotic to navigate, but his work is definitely worth a look.
Also a nice BBC piece on the history of the Guerrilla Gardening movement. What I think is most fascinating about this is the degree to which most cities encourage and are pleased by people gardening this way - they can't afford to deal with urban blight themselves, but are grateful when it is done.
Sharon
Viking Ghost Crew [Aardvarchaeology]
Last June a well-preserved mass grave was found near Weymouth in Dorset, southern England. It contained the skeletons of 51 decapitated young men and later-teen boys. At first the burial was dated through the inclusion of Roman-era potsherds. The pit itself had originally been a Roman quarry. But now some of the skeletons have been radiocarbon-dated and ten have been analysed for stable isotopes. As it turns out, the date is most likely 10th century and the men came from Scandinavia. Looks like a Viking raiding party that had bad luck. An interesting and very unusual find! It sort of lets us board a Viking ship and have a rare look at its crew. The ship from the Gokstad barrow has 32 oar holes and it's always good to take on some replacement oarsmen.
Thanks to Tim of the Walking the Berkshires blog and Roger Wikell for the tip-off.
[More blog entries about archaeology, vikings, dorset; vikingar, England, arkeologi.]
Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and talking out of your ass [On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess]
This week a couple of my Sciblings have been abuzz about an article published in some journal I'd never heard of... a minor impact journal...the Journal of Who Gives a Fuck Science Communication. Bora has a great break down of some of the major criticisms. Drugmonkey, one of the subjects of the "analysis" in this article, is also displeased and critical of the author's conclusions.
I've
since read the offending article and can only tell you this - I have no
idea what the balls the author is talking about. Seriously, this
article is about as informative as this:
Video 1: A current favorite at the Isis house. When emailed this video, PhysioProf
replied, " Couldn't they afford to animate some fucking legs on those
fuckers?" I have always wondered why Mr. Lunt has no eyes.
But, for those of you who are still interested, here's the run down...
Inna Kouper,
a graduate student in Library and Information Science at Indiana
University, somehow magically chose 11 blogs to study, one of which was
Pharyngula. Now, I'm not hating on Pharyngula. PZ plays an important role in the blogosphere and, while I think that sometimes his commenters get out of control,
he's got a unique voice and an uncanny ability to rally the troops. No
one can deny that the climate at Pharyngula is not necessarily
reflective of the entire blogosphere. Still, the fact is that Inna
Krouper sampled 11 blogs. There are 80 blogs currently at
ScienceBlogs, 8 more at Discover Blogs, and a bazillion independent and
network blogs indexed by the Nature Network. Yet, somehow Inna chose
these 11 blogs as representative of the genre and one of them was
motherfucking Pharyngula. Then, she did this:
A
combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques of content
analysis has been used in this study. The qualitative analysis
involved iterative close reading of posts and comments with the purpose
of identifying common types of statements and activities
conceptualized as modes of participation. This conceptualization was
informed by the speech act theory and the pragmatics perspective yet it
was purposefully left rather loose and open to allow for the categories
to emerge from the data. Each time a mode of participation was
identified, it was entered into a catalog, and then a post or a comment
was assigned a corresponding code. Along with the modes of
participation, the posts were coded for topics and sources of the post;
the comments were coded for the reader's identification elements (e.g.,
a nickname, first name, full name, link to blog, or blog author).
Subsequently all codes were counted and the analysis proceeded with the
examination of the most frequent and rare patterns and their groupings.
Translation?
Figure 1: Inna sat down one night, read some blogs, and then wrote some shit. She must really be itching to finish the ole thesis.
I
mean, I truly am baffled by these methods, especially when the author
brags that "it is necessary to analyze current practices of science
blogging. To date no attempts have been made to do that. The present
study is the first step in this direction." This article is a step
alright...
Figure 2: Problem is, none of realize where that step is taking us until it is too late to unlearn the stupid.
I'm
just plain ole disappointed by the "methodology." This author could
have taken the opportunity to perform a carefully controlled study with
randomly-selected non-scientists. She could have shown them blinded
content and administered questionnaires. Instead she wrote 10 pages of
opinion and passed it off as science.
After pages upon pages of presenting cherry-picked content, Inna concludes this:
Science
blogs examined in this study are very heterogeneous. They provide
information and explain complicated matters, but their evaluations are
often trivial and they rarely provide extensive critique or articulate
positions on controversial issues... It appears that science blogging
can also be characterized as relying on reductive analysis and
dependent reporting and drawing caustic and petty commentary. These
characteristics may as well be applied to the newspaper and magazine
science communication, but with the newer science communication outlet
such as blogging they indicate that the potential of blogging to do
something differently, e.g., to provide informed expert and citizen
commentary, is not realized. In their current multiplicity of forms and
contents science blogs present a challenge rather than an opportunity
for public engagement with science. Lack of genre conventions, which
for the audience translates into broken expectations and uncertainty,
impedes the development of stable readership and participation from the
larger public, which may also be very heterogeneous. The "neighborhood
bar" or "water cooler" commentary creates a sense of community with
shared context and culture, but at the same time it creates a barrier
that prevents strangers and outsiders from joining the conversation. As
a community of scientists or individuals close to science, the
existing readers may enjoy the entertaining nature of science blogs and
not need science blogs to serve as a place for discussion and rational
debate. Relying on such community of readers, bloggers may reduce their
interpretive activities and resort to copying, re-distributing, and
re-packaging of the existing information, which is still quite
rewarding given the background of the majority of current readers and
yet requires much less time and effort. This study provides further
evidence that blogging as a web tool has no magic properties on its
own. Without a concerted effort of different social actors involved it
will not solve any problems...
Reading this, I
realize that I did my PhD in the wrong damned field. I would be a much
more prolific publisher if I had entered a field where I could have
written whatever bullshit moved me on any given day and called it
"research."
I also wonder how many of you feel like you
simply add "caustic and petty commentary"? I question how Inna can
conclude that blogs pose a barrier to the conversation. That's a
difficult statement to take seriously, knowing that Inna had no access
to traffic data for any of the blogs she read. For me, I know that a
single blog will be read by 1000s more non-scientists than any original
scientific article I publish in a peer-reviewed journal. And, she
certainly wouldn't have found the analysis trivial if she had read some
of Ed Yong or Carl Zimmer's work, not that I find any of the blogs she included trivial. Then again, I think it is the diversity of voice is what makes the blogosphere so beautiful.
My
sample size = 1 is probably no better than Inna's sample size = 11, but
I can at least offer my experience to the data set. I get many letters
a week from young people interested in science careers and soliciting
advice on graduate school, fields of study, and professional
development. The number of people who have come to my office in person
to have these conversations is trivial in comparison. Thus, these data
would lead me to conclude that my blog presence has lowered the barrier
to engagement with this audience.
I'll also never forget one of the occasions,
quite a while ago, that I wrote about some novel research. It was a
topic semi-related to my expertise. One of you then went to PubMed (or
some other search engine) and called bullshit on me by citing some of
my lab's own work. It was glorious and I was proud of my scrappy
little muffins for months.
Inna does not take in to account the
benefit of blogging for the blogger. First and most importantly,
blogging is hilarious. I have met some tremendous people in the
blogosphere who have become valuable resources. I use a lot of the
folks here to bounce career ideas off of and I have met scientists that
are using techniques that I might not have considered. I suspect that
it is because of blogging that I am now totally bff with my academic
society. I might never have been noticed if I hadn't taught Marty
Frank the word "cocknozzle." Finally, blogging has allowed me to forge
some professional relationships that might not otherwise have been
available to me. I feel fortunate that MRU will eventually be a stop
on Rebecca Skloot's book tour.
Many of the people in the administration here were both thrilled and
surprised that anyone had contact with her. I only know her because
we're both kick ass, totally hot bloggers.
I'm not going to
take this article too seriously. I am, however, going to challenge
academic researchers to think more critically when they assess the
blogosphere. As scientists, we have access to an extensive toolbox and
a multitude of metrics that could be used to evaluate the impact of the
blogophere, without having to rely on Inna Kouper's poorly-organized,
half-assed ramblings as the first "scientific analysis."
Surely, we can do better than that. I mean, even this is a more honest analysis..
Figure 3: Joseph Hewitt's comic interpretation of the ScienceBloggers. That's Dr. Isis in the top panel putting the choke hold on some dude and calling him a "muppethugger." For the full-sized image, hilarious commentary, and clues to who's who in the 3rd panel, click over to Joseph's website. Man, Ed Brayton is one ripped, muscley dude!
Additional Reading
Inna Kouper (2010). Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities Journal of Science Communication, 9 (1) Read the comments on this post...
It’s Pi day! [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]
Old time vinegar pie
It's Pi day or Pi(e) day...either way you look at it today is 3/14 so a good excuse to eat some pie and Scienceblogs and Serious Eats have teamed up to hold a pi(e) contest. Upon discovering this contest I enthusiastically embarked upon dreaming up something fitting for the famous number. After inspiration from some of the previous year's submissions, I came up with the idea of 'irrationally good' pie, since pi is an irrational number. I wanted something that sounded like it shouldn't be in a pie, yet it was good. My main hurdle was I couldn't think of anything that might be both tasty, and equally it needed to sound like something that shouldn't be in a pie. So what does one do when in a bind? Call in an expert.
I needed an expert in the field and consultant, so I called up my longtime good friend, and food writer Jess Thomson over at hogwash in a moment of much needed creative direction. Her first response: Think Vinegar
My first reaction: ewwwwww
But with a little google searching I found an extremely easy recipe for Old Time Vinegar Pie. For someone like me who isn't DYING to try out that newest greatest recipe, simple is good. I was slightly intrigued by the vinegar pie because I thought: surely it CAN'T taste good...can it?
But after talking further, we brainstormed some other ideas and remembered one of her own gems: A chocolate basil torte. The last time I had visited her was shortly after she made this amazing desert so when she reminded me about this recipe, I knew I had to make both. As this is actually more of a tort, I ended up taking this recipe and making it more pie-like by putting it into a pie crust from Jamie Oliver (minus the lemon zest).
So for Pi day I made not one but TWO irrationally delicious pies.
While I made both pies and both turned out quite well, I only entered the chocolate basil pie into the contest. Head over there to vote for it! It IS irrationally tasty!
Irrationally good chocolate basil pie
Recipes:
Irrationally Good Chocolate Basil Pie filling from Hogwash
Although a true torte typically replaces a cake's flour with nuts or breadcrumbs, this deeply chocolaty, dense confection, rimmed with dark ganache, just seems too decadent for the word cake. It's a take-off on a chocolate-basil truffle I tasted Seattle's Theo Chocolate.
Note: If you have a double boiler, use that to melt the chocolate.
TIME: 40 minutes active time
MAKES: 8 to 10 servings
For the cake:
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, cut into 16 pieces, plus extra for greasing the pan
4 ounces chopped bittersweet chocolate (65% to 75% cacao)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
1 packed cup fresh basil (leaves only)
3 large eggs, room temperature
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
For the ganache:
4 ounces chopped bittersweet chocolate (65% to 75% cacao)
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon heavy cream
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and center a rack in the middle of the oven. Butter an 8-inch round cake pan. Line the bottom of the pan with a round of wax paper or parchment paper, and butter the paper.
Place the butter and the chocolate in a small saucepan and melt over very low heat, stirring constantly. Remove the pan from the heat as soon as the mixture is smooth, transfer to a large mixing bowl, stir in the vanilla and salt, and set aside.
Next, make a basil sugar: pulse the sugar and the basil together in a food processor until the basil is very finely chopped and uniformly green in color. The sugar will look slightly wet.
Add the basil sugar to the chocolate mixture and whisk until smooth. Whisk in the eggs one at a time, blending completely between additions. Sift the cocoa powder over the batter and fold it in until no dry spots remain. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth out the top with a spatula.
Bake the cake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the top of the cake barely begins to crack. Let cool for about 5 minutes, then invert the cake onto a round serving plate.
While the cake cools, make the ganache: place the chocolate and the cream in a small saucepan, and stir constantly over very low heat until melted and smooth. Using a flat spatula or knife, spread the ganache over the top of the cake, letting it drip down the sides, if desired. (Hint: Using the ganache immediately will mean a thin coating that drips easily down the sides of the cake; in this case, it's best to frost the cake over a cooling rack, then transfer it to a serving plate. You can also let the ganache cool a bit, then spread it just on the top, more like a thin frosting.)
Serve warm or at room temperature. To store, let cool completely, then cover and keep at room temperature up to 3 days.
OLD - TIME VINEGAR PIE from cooks.com
1 c. sugar
3 heaping tbsp. all-purpose flour
1 c. cold water
3 egg yolks
1 whole egg
2 tbsp. butter
6 tbsp. vinegar
1 (9 inch) pie crust, baked
Mix sugar and flour in saucepan. Add water, egg yolks (reserve egg whites), whole egg, butter and vinegar. Cook until thick. Pour into baked 9 inch pie shell. For Meringue: Beat reserved egg whites until stiff. Add 4 tablespoons sugar, spread over pie. Brown meringue lightly.
When You Are Plowing the Ground with a Human Femur… [Casaubon's Book]
After all that work, you'll want to plant good seeds. Glenn Beck approved seeds, ideally. Well, Stephen Colbert is right on board, aware that in a disaster, we'll all want raddichio. He's even started his own crisis herb garden, because, "I may be ready for a world where the streets run with blood, and zombies rule the night and feast on human flesh. But I refuse to live in a world where I can't garnish."
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| www.colbertnation.com | ||||
|
||||
Sharon
‘Wasabi protein’ responsible for the heat-seeking sixth sense of rattlesnakes [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
Take a whiff of mustard or wasabi and you'll be hit with a familiar burning sensation. That's the result of chemicals in these pungent foods hitting a protein called TRPA1, a molecular alarm that warns us about irritating substances. The same protein does a similar job in other animals, but rattlesnakes and vipers have put their version of TRPA1 to a more impressive and murderous purpose. They use it to sense the body heat of their prey.
Pit vipers are famed for their ability to detect the infrared radiation given off by warm-blooded prey, and none more so than the western diamondback rattlesnake. Its skills are so accurate that it can detect its prey at distances of up to a metre, and strike at objects just 0.2C warmer than the surrounding temperature. Against such abilities, darkness is no defence.
Like all pit vipers, the rattlesnake's sixth sense depends on two innocuous pits located between their eyes and their nostrils. With two pits on either side of its head, the snake can even 'see' heat in stereo. Each pit is a hollow chamber with a thin membrane stretched across it, which acts as an "infrared antenna". It is loaded with blood vessels, energy-harvesting mitochondria and dense clusters of nerves. The nerves connect with the visual parts of the snake's brain, allowing it to match up images of both heat and light. So far, so clear, but until now, no one knew how the membranes actually worked.
Elena Gracheva and Nicolas Ingolia, from the University of California, San Francisco, have solved the mystery but it wasn't easy. Rattlesnakes don't give up their secrets readily. Their genes have rarely been sequenced and, in what must be the understatement of the year, Gracheva and Ingolia describe them as "genetically intractable" and "inconvenient subjects for physiological and behavioural studies". To translate: if you're looking for a model animal to work with, you're probably better off with fruit flies and zebrafish than a four-foot serpent with a deadly bite.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics [Genetic Future]
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
Poultry is a Feminist Issue? [Casaubon's Book]
First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on... any writer worth her salt could do better than that.
Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.
Hayes pointed out that the original "problem that had no name" was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not changed -- an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic dependence on your husband -- only now, bearing them was considered a "choice": if you felt stuck, it was your own fault. What's more, though today's soccer moms may argue, quite rightly, that caretaking is undervalued in a society that measures success by a paycheck, their role is made possible by the size of their husband's. In that way, they've been more of a pendulum swing than true game changers.
Enter the chicken coop.
Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food -- who these days can't wax poetic about compost? -- it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?
You'd think I'd love this, wouldn't you 
? And in some ways I do, but I'm troubled by it too. It may well be that Peggy Orenstein's (the Times article's author) "friends with coops" are taking the first steps in a radical disconnect from their culture of affluence, but it is more likely that they are getting chickens so that their lucky kids won't have to eat factory farmed eggs. This, in and of itself is not totally trivial - every contribution to reducing the number of CAFOs in this country is a good one - but without larger context, it isn't an answer to the problem that women have rotten choices. It isn't a third way if it is only viable for affluent women. Nor is it a third way unless it represents the accomplishment of something meaningful - if it establishes the possibility that others could have the same set of choices.
Orenstein uses the word "precious" here - and I think it may be in her community. Contrast that, however, with the women that Hayes is writing about in her book (full disclosure, Hayes once contacted me about interviewing me for the book, but from one thing and another it never happened) - most of them with household incomes under 40,000 dollars, most of them engaged collectively (with extended family or partners) in a project where everyone, male and female, does a lot of domestic labor. Hayes' work is about rejecting consumer culture and the assumptions about the "housewifization" of economic activity that make invisible domestic labor, that translate into valuelessness. She focuses on women in _Radical Homemakers_ but finds that the most successful households are the ones that have the highest degree of egalitarianism - that is, what's radical about it is that everyone involved is working to expand the household informal economy and limit the control exercised by the formal economy. All of this may be true of the women Orenstein knows - but there's no indication of it in the article.
I have often argued that the version of American feminism that largely succeeded - the one in which freedom was framed in the terms money and the right to work 60 hours a week for someone who times your bathroom breaks - succeeded because it was so very profitable for industrial capitalism. Besides the enormous pool of new workers, it offered new consumers, and created a large market for households to purchase services once done for free by women.
My argument has never been that women alone should have continued to provide these services for free, but rather that it is no accident that parts of the feminist vision that would have been less profitable, like state subsidized childcare, or a truly egalitarian distribution of domestic work did not succeed. It was far more profitable to send everyone to work and privatize the making of meals, the cutting of lawns, the tending of children - and to shift the labor onto the poorest and often least white folks around. Since only the most affluent of us can afford to pay nannies and house cleaners fairly, the equity that affluent women and men achieve often is built on the backs of poorer people who take on the labor that they escaped.
Housewifization of labor renders the household economy invisible, and things that are invisible can be infinitely exploited. Reclaiming the household economy, then, is a radical act. Making the case for the economic and social value of household labor, and making it the valued territory of both men and women does make a major shift in the culture. Refusing to exploit other people - only using the labor of others when you can pay them fairly is a radical act. Reducing your dependence on the industrial economy, your vulnerability, and having a measure of resilience in the face of economic instability is radical. But it only works if what you are doing isn't precious - if you aren't just making sure your lucky kids have clean food and contact with clean ground, but that others do as well. It only works if what you are doing is not the recreation of a simulacrum of a household economy - rather like Marie Antoinette's farm, where she milked cows on a silver stool - but an actual household economy, where domestic work produces a meaningful part of your household economy. And that requires fundamental shifts in how you view your home, your family, your economic and social culture. Otherwise, it is just precious - and empty.
The chicken coop can be a symbol - it takes a service that has been done exploitatively and destructively, and says "I can do this myself, non-destructively and without exploitation." But it works as a symbol only when you recognize the larger context of the act - the industrial chicken is a legacy of our desire not to know what price is laid on others and on nature to meet our desires, it is a legacy of our sense that the household economy doesn't have value, it is a legacy of our sense that ordinary and everyday things aren't important - it is an enormously powerful symbol if you are aware of what underlies it, and live your life in accordance with what it symbolizes. But if all it is is a coop, a way out of the conversation that begins "Oh, do you work?" well, it just doesn't work.
Sharon
U.S. says no explanation yet for Calif. Prius claim (Reuters)
WASHINGTON, Mar. 15, 2010 (Reuters) -- Safety investigators have found no evidence so far to support or disprove a California motorist's claim his Toyota Motor Corp Prius sped out of control on its own, and cautioned the case may never be explained, U.S. regulators said on Monday. ... > read full story