sourdough

Dinner today: steamed Alaskan salmon (lightly salted) on a bed of rice mixed with wolfberries, accompanied by fried onions, boiled broccoli and raw carrots. Salmon and rice turned out pretty good (it really does make an immense difference if you buy a better-quality, fresher fish…), and I was quite pleased by the contrast in the vegetable textures and tastes. I was contemplating raw onion at the start (also because I was a little lazy and wondering whether it be worth the effort of washing out the pan) but I figured that would be too biting, and I was right. Unfortunately, I think I have yet to get the hang of frying onions very well – I think it might have been because some of it was a bit thin? – and some of it was a bit charred. I didn’t eat those bits, though. *laugh*

I’m still unfortunately very far from true culinary prowess, however. One thing I do want to achieve this Trinity term is to perfect my grasp of the omelette, though. (I’m the kind of person who thinks that eggs should be a separate food group. More than rice or bread, I think I need eggs to be happy.) I think I’ve conquered the straightforward, plain omelette. I can do them fluffy or non-fluffy (I personally am fonder of them non-fluffy, though?) and while I doubt I could do them in my sleep, when I’ve just crawled out of bed and brushed my teeth, I think I’m pretty close.

So the next step is to be more imaginative. I tried a ham filling today, and that came out quite well. I’m wondering how many ingredients I could fold into an omelette before it gets unwieldy and strange, but one of my dearest fantasies is a ham-and-three-cheese-and-spinach-and-chicken-and-onion-and-bacon-and-pepper omelette.

Hey, a girl can dream!

But that’s not really the point of this post. The point is, I finished eating my dinner and was washing the dishes while fantasising about said omelette, and I just laughed a little to myself when I thought of saying, ‘Goals for Trinity term: get a first in prelims and perfect my omelette-making skills.’ It’s just not the sort of thing that one reports to the scholarship board, you know?

And then I caught myself. Why is it that I see it as a lesser accomplishment? And from there it rapidly segues into my belief that I don’t want to be a housewife.

Fresh from The Social Contract: one does something when one has the will (or inclination) to do so and the ability to do so.

I know I have the ability to do so. I can cook, clean, do the laundry, write the household accounts, etc, etc, so the basic elements are there. And I’m an intelligent person (I hope!) and therefore I could certainly learn any skills that I still lack. (Such as the ability to create my dream omelette.)

How about will? That’s rather more problematic. You see, the thing is, I don’t dislike the abovementioned tasks. I think they have their place in a well-kept home. I enjoy cooking and even the washing up after is tolerable, especially when the meal is good and it affords me time to think. (Nobody likes laundry, but that’s just the way the world turns, aye?) My heart goes all a-flutter in Boswells. I coo at egg timers and get excited by tupperware. I smile at the coffee makers and the salt and pepper shakers. I reach out to the mugs and the bed linen. So there’s clearly some degree of inclination going on here.

But I remember saying – and only recently at that – that I wouldn’t want to be a housewife because, to put it plainly, it’d be a waste of my degree.

I think there’s a very valid practical reason. If I get my degree and become an investment banker or a management consultant, I get pots of money. Housewives don’t get paid.

But assuming that I marry an incredibly rich man and hence the money consideration is moot. (And before you tell me there’s no such thing as too much money, let’s say I marry an oil sheik of some kind, in which case whatever salary I can realistically earn pales beside the immensity of black gold.) to be honest, I think (or at least, I thought, up to the point I started questioning myself and now I have to rethink all this and stop myself thinking what I’ve realised are illogical thoughts) being a housewife is a waste of my degree because it’s an unworthy job.

And that’s something that I think a lot of people think. The really scary thing, though, is that people think it on all sides of the divide. Chauvinists look at the housewife’s job and think, ‘Ah, women’s work.’ Feminists look at the housewife’s job and think ‘Patriarchal structure confining Woman and preventing her from manifesting her full potential.’ And ordinary people who have no chips on their shoulders about gender and gender roles presumably think of it as just mundane work. Or even less than that – it’s not even work at all, perhaps because it certainly doesn’t help that housewives are not paid, so there’s no obvious monetary value. Neither are there barriers to entry (say, the bar exam for lawyers). Further, there is no evaluation of a common standard of housewifery. (In any paid job, the obvious evaluation is how much money said person is making and how many clients he or she has, be that person a plumber, florist, singer, or doctor.) And it’s not a well-defined role, and there are no unions to represent housewives’ interests, and so on.

But isn’t that a damningly condescending attitude I’ve been taking? To be a housewife (and presumably a mother) is, if you really, really think about it, one of the most difficult jobs you could probably ever choose to do:

At the most basic level, you physically clean the house. That takes effort, and the maxim is true – dust just doesn’t go away. Beds always have to be made. The laundry (oh, the laundry) refuses to end. Maids are paid to do such labour, as are cleaners in public spaces – and a housewife is expected to be more thorough and do better.

But that’s just basics, right? The housewife is also expected to make her home pleasant. So she has to be an interior designer. She picks out the furniture and wonders whether the velour makes good curtains. She pauses over whether the floor should be in parquet or marble, and does she want a side table? Are the lamps too dim or too bright? She could buy a lampshade, or perhaps she should replace them altogether and put in a ceiling light instead… and then she takes a step back. The coffee table, the sofa, the television, the piano and the various knick-knacks  have to be arranged such that the room presents itself as neither cluttered nor empty.

Hallelujah, we’ve finished with the living room, haven’t we? Now there’s only the rest of the house to be concerned with.

Well, she comforts herself, interior design is a once-off, major job that occurs only when she first moves in. Now that that’s over and done with, we slide smoothly into the kitchen, where she’s expected (again) to clean, but also to cook. So here she becomes restauranteur and chef and nutritionist. Who is she cooking for? A husband with high cholesterol, a couple of picky children. She has to cook meals that give them all the dietary balance that they need, and it had better look appetising because that’s part of giving them that balance, after all. So she trims the fat carefully from the chicken and earnestly reads books on the positive properties of different vegetables and superfoods and tries out different recipes, and every time her food is sent back, she will smile like a proper restauranteur and redo it the next time. When it’s eaten, she smiles in satisfaction.

But that’s not where it ends, does it? She dimisses the chef’s hat and picks up the accountant’s calculator. She begins to think about her husband’s salary and how she can write the household budget on it. She keeps track of the ins and outs, she files the taxes, she studies the various investments and insurance policies that they could buy to determine the ones they should buy.

Alright, the money’s been settled and the college fund has been set up. But on the subject of the college fund, speak of the little devils, the children are home, they’ve finished lunch, and suddenly she’s the teacher and mentor that they need. She’ll help them do their homework, she’ll stay up night glueing ice-cream sticks together so they can take the model house to school tomorrow, she’ll set them boundaries and teach them about life. She’s a first-aid worker too, occasionally, when they go out to the playground and come back with scrapes. And unlike an ordinary teacher, she’ll have to learn how to deal with children ranging from the time they’re tiny tots to the time they’re terrible teenagers.

And then her husband’s come back from work, and she’s an amateur psychologist, because she’s got to smile and listen while he tells her about anything from work stresses to childhood traumas and his quarrels with his parents. She serves as a willing listening ear, and later that night she’s available for his sexual gratification. What does one call that job, I wonder?

And, calling to mind that proverb about straws and camels, this is one job that you can never finish.

*

To be fair, I exaggerate, of course. You can hire domestic help and interior designers and nannies and eat out, and that makes the situation a lot easier. It gets exponentially better if you’ve got a husband who’s willing to do his share and while the litany of things to do seems rather bleak, I’m sure there are plenty of happy housewives.

The point I’m trying to make is that I think housewifing (hardly a word, but still) is an underappreciated, overlooked profession. The thought of a woman who has a PhD or a DPhil who does nothing but stay at home inspires pity in me. I personally experience this incredible terror when I think being in that situation myself.

Amongst my circles, it’s just not PC for a woman to say, ‘Yeah, I want to be a wife and a mother.’ Just like I would tell my scholarship board: ‘I wrote a novel’ or ‘I acted in a play’ or ‘I got a first in prelims’, but I wouldn’t say ‘I cooked the best damn omelette ever.’ But is that truly in keeping with my feminist principles? If every profession should be open to women, why should I feel distaste for the woman who chooses one of the toughest and unrewarded jobs there are? I can respect lawyers, actresses, aid workers, marathon runners. I could even respect a prostitute. (If she chose the profession. This statement does NOT apply to women who are victims of sex trafficking, but that is a rant for another day.) What gives me the right or rationale to think that the dowdy woman in the mum jeans and the tangled hair and the food-stained sweater is not as capable – or even more so – than the woman striding along the streets in the Louboutin heels and power suits with her immaculate coiffure?

I still don’t want to be a housewife. But after that epiphany while  washing dishing in the sink, I won’t allow myself to think that it’s because housewifing is not challenging or a waste of my degree. (Hell, if I decided to abscond to Frisco and write novels after I finished here at Oxford, that’d be a waste of my degree too, but I wouldn’t think it was a bad decision – at least, not if I made it.)  I still think that parts of the feminist argument on housewifing is valid (because women still feel compelled to adhere to a role, because there are women who want to be something else but are housewives because of social pressure to be such). There are only two justifications that I will allow myself to think from this point onwards:

a) I just don’t have a taste for it. It’s like why I prefer to write prose instead of poetry.

b) Being a housewife’s too damn hard. I’m not equal to that task.

But yeah. A jolt for my feminist self, this time, to remind myself not to fall into the complacent commonplaces and in doing so, shoot myself in the foot. A woman should be able to choose whatever she wants to do. I have no right to judge. Even if she’s a Harvard PhD or an Oxford DPhil, if she personally and genuinely finds being a housewife more rewarding than writing academic papers or having a high-flying job – I have no right. None at all.

(I’m very tempted to talk about how Rousseau thinks you can be forced to be free, though, i.e. are these women truly acting in their own interests? How can you ever tell if her judgement on her personal satisfaction is ‘valid’? If I were talking to a woman who’d grown up somewhere in the rural Middle East, would I be quite as generally accepting of her choices? But this entry is really too long as it is. Going to go read Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Really, the thing about writing something as mindblowing as Brave New World is that people tend to neglect the rest of your work. Am off to remedy my ignorance.)