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Radical Home Making
A great companion reader to Genevieve Kineke’s The Authentic Catholic Woman is Shannon Hayes’ non-religious Radical Homemakers. Hayes shares the stories of a number of families who are coming up with surprising new answers to the old feminist questions about how women find fulfillment. She frames a diverse collection of approaches with the four tenets of a life-serving economy: 1) Respect and care for the community of life; 2) Ecological integrity; 3) Social and economic justice; 4) Democracy, nonviolence and peace. Catholics will find it easy to orient their concern for community and environment within the larger context of Church teachings about stewardship, social justice, and the recapitulation of the human person.
Radical homemakers, as Hayes ably demonstrates through anecdotal and historical evidence, are helping turn homes back into the havens of creative generativity and interdependence that, hopefully, will lure people away from the ‘extractive economy’ of corporate tyranny and media manipulation that predominates in our culture. The skill set she prescribes for this radical new culture-building includes familiar domestic arts and less-familiar capabilities like nurturing relationships, self-teaching, redefining pleasure, and having the courage to be counter-cultural. Intelligent, energetic, creative young women are going to love this manifesto for the reclamation of authentic home-culture, however they choose to put their energies and talents to work for the world!
Here are quotes from Radical Homemakers:
Radical Homemakers are men and women who have chosen to make family, community, social justice and the health of the planet the governing principles of their lives. …Radical Homemakers use life skills and relationships as a replacement for gold, on the premise that he or she who doesn’t need the gold can change the rules. The greater our domestic skills, …the less dependent we are on the gold.
The abandonment of the kitchen, the loss of personal finance skills despite rising household incomes, the relentless increase in busy-ness and the compulsion to replace emptiness and loneliness with consumer products have put us on course for an ecological, social and cultural train wreck.
The feminist concerns that women are enabled to have self-determination and independence are, of course, entirely valid. However, when they are framed only in the context of participation and prevalence in the market economy, they are trapped by the confines of the Empire paradigm where personal economic power is the only security. …though Friedan asserts that a domestic partner can be intolerable and repressive, so too can be a job. …[Radical Homemakers] have evolved a more sophisticated view of what constitutes an economy, and they have surrendered a false sense of independence to embrace genuine interdependence.
Further, in a life-serving economy, we individually accept responsibility for creating our own joys and pleasures….In taking these steps, we discover that true economic assets, unlike money, are intangible. Wendell Berry defines some of these assets as: culture-borne knowledge, attitudes and skills; family and community coherence; family and community labor; cultural or religious principles such as respect for gifts (natural or divine), humility, fidelity, charity, and neighborliness.
Homemaking is not something that stands in the way of our deeper fulfillment; it becomes the fertile ground that feeds it. Once the patterns for homemaking are set, there will appear opportunities to make the changes reach farther.
We must join together, focusing our energies on creating a world that is not only pleasurable, socially just, healthy and beautiful, but very, very possible. …And it all begins at home.
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