NH: Hi, Stacey. Welcome.
On Tue, 23 Sep 1997, Stacey Holbrook wrote:
>
> My husband and I made the decision that I would stay home and care for our
> daughter. No one really benefits from this choice except our family. No
> one else benefits from my clean floor, clean laundry, washed dishes etc.
> except my family. Why should anyone else pay for a choice that my family
> made?
NH: Because there is an economic benefit to society for the work you do in
maintaining a home. If I had someone to do my homemaking for me for free,
not only would I have more hours to spend at work or writing, I wouldn't
have to pay for the care I was receiving. The decision that you have made
is not only to be home with your daughter (obviously that has far more
value to you than the purely economic, but it's still another societal
saving, because otherwise, somebody else would have to be paid to look
after her and socialize her into being a participating member of society);
it's also a decision to do for free the basic work that allows a society
to function. Without the daily slog work of cooking and cleaning, we'd
fall apart. Certainly my apartment's on the verge of it.
My office, like so many other places, has had to downsize. One of the
ways they did so was to get rid of some 'support' positions, i.e. the
people who did the filing, the mailing, the phone calls, the data entry,
updating and maintaining records; the housecleaning, in effect. I now
have to spend a third more of my day doing that very necessary and
important work. If the 'support' positions in an office have a very real
economic value (and realise that I only keep talking about money because
it's the way in which our society barters and exchanges one service for
another), why shouldn't the 'support' positions in a household?
Especially those that involve caring for growing humans? Maybe we can
talk about a different medium of exchange than money, but I can't get
away from the conclusion that however you pay or don't pay for it, the
work has real economic and societal value.
I'm gonna bring this back to sf, and speak on a bit of a tangent. My
novel that's coming out next summer is my first, and I was learning about
novel-writing as I did it. I started with a setup of a young woman with
an unplanned-for baby living at home with her grandmother. And the story
stuck there, until I asked myself the question, "How do these women
support themselves?" Once I started inventing answers to that question,
the world of the novel began to flesh out, in some exciting ways. Then I
went to the Clarion workshop, where Chip Delany pointed out that a story
will always feel slightly unreal if your main characters have no visible
means of support. Ding! A light went on in my head. That really works
for me, and now I almost always try to figure out the economics that allow
my protagonists (whatever their gender) to exist, even though the specific
details don't always make their way into the story. I read some of Chip's
non-fiction, and discovered that he'd come up with this when he himself
was trying to figure out some of the reasons why female characters in some
of the novels he was reading seemed thinly drawn. He realised that often
the writer had omitted to anchor the character in the economics of her
world. Chip explains it much better than I do, but it really struck a
chord with me.
-nalo
>
"There are two kinds of dates; the kind that you go out with, and the
small fruit that you eat."
-my aunt
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