At 09:27 AM 9/23/97 -0400, Heather MacLean wrote:
>The focus of our attention should not be on _money_, but on subsistence
>(since that is what we use money to obtain). Every human being is involved
>in obtaining subsistence through hir personal effort. The homemaker does it
>at home, the day-laborer does it out of the home. The homemaker provides hir
>own subsistence through hir efforts at home, the day-laborer simply has hir
>subsistence provided through the intermediary of money. Why should the
>homemaker get double subsistence?
Eh? The only people who obtain sustenance at home are farmers or
homesteaders. There are very few of those in the United States these days.
And even they can only obtain SOME of the things they need in this way --
for the rest they must trade, either via barter or the use of money.
The archetypal 50s-style homeworker obtains all her sustenance from
the wage earner of the household. In economic terms she is the dependent,
and since she produces no food and cannot buy with her own money, she is in
a position of diminished power in relation to the wage earner. In a fair
number of cases, the woman ends up being, in effect, the prisoner of the
wage earner. The pay-for-homemakers idea is an attempt to reduce or
eliminate this disparity in power. I haven't given much thought to whether
it would work or what the obstacles are, but I agree with Suzette that it
would be a great theme for a science fiction novel. (Of course, there are a
number of science fictional works which postulate a world or worlds
entirely without money. But I wonder how we can get there from here.)
-- Janice
-----
Janice E. Dawley ............. Burlington, VT
http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/jedhome.htm
Listening to: Radiohead - OK Computer
"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." - Lily Tomlin
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