The changing shape of women’s lives
A home is a place where it is possible to learn and grow, a place where whatever work is done has a meaning.
Our lives are not only longer, they have a new shape. When you build a room on to a house, you discover that the verb "add" is deceptive, because when a house has a new space, it has a pervasive effect on the living within it. This kind of reconfiguration is what has happened to women's lives in our time, and we are still relearning who we are. I believe that even though childcare is necessarily going to take up fewer years, and many women for one reason or another will decide not to have children, nonetheless, we have to draw on the experiences of women's lives for the metaphors that will allow us to think about where our society, our institutions and our communities, are going. I believe that the experience of caring for a child is importantly paradigmatic. It provides a model, a metaphor for what needs to happen in our society and a way of thinking long term.
Women have worked out how to compose and recompose their lives between home and career, but this does not mean that caring has become irrelevant. Our whole system of adaptation and survival as a species depends on the fact that we are cared for intensively over the long period of time needed to become a member of a human society, and today constant change demands constant learning. Learning and adapting to change are stressful, which suggests the need to rethink the place of mutual care giving in adulthood. The human capacity to keep on learning, to remain young at heart and willing to learn, needs to be supported by cherishing.
Our model of work has to change also, to give proper value to caring. The domestic work of women is taken for granted. It's a freebie, like the air, except that the air isn't free anymore, either, since now we have to pay attention to making sure that the air is breathable. Women have earned less than men because of the notion that any kind of work that includes care giving is probably worth less than other kinds. We're going to have to change that and to bring the ability to listen and nurture into the highest levels of decision making. Care supports learning. Together they make us human.
We need to find different metaphors, different ways of thinking about work and caring and the meaning of home. We don't have to spend our whole lives caring for children any longer, but we should be full-time homemakers, working to make our institutions, our workplaces, our cities, our neighborhoods -- our planet -- livable homes. I don't mean places where you go to relax, the opposite of work. Home has never meant that to women. What I would like to suggest by the concept of home is this: A home is a place where it is possible to learn and grow, a place where whatever work is done has a meaning. That's something we need to create for our children, something we would like to have wherever we spend our days as we move through the stages of our lives, and a model for the uncertain future.
Our lives are not only longer, they have a new shape. When you build a room on to a house, you discover that the verb "add" is deceptive, because when a house has a new space, it has a pervasive effect on the living within it. This kind of reconfiguration is what has happened to women's lives in our time, and we are still relearning who we are. I believe that even though childcare is necessarily going to take up fewer years, and many women for one reason or another will decide not to have children, nonetheless, we have to draw on the experiences of women's lives for the metaphors that will allow us to think about where our society, our institutions and our communities, are going. I believe that the experience of caring for a child is importantly paradigmatic. It provides a model, a metaphor for what needs to happen in our society and a way of thinking long term.
Women have worked out how to compose and recompose their lives between home and career, but this does not mean that caring has become irrelevant. Our whole system of adaptation and survival as a species depends on the fact that we are cared for intensively over the long period of time needed to become a member of a human society, and today constant change demands constant learning. Learning and adapting to change are stressful, which suggests the need to rethink the place of mutual care giving in adulthood. The human capacity to keep on learning, to remain young at heart and willing to learn, needs to be supported by cherishing.
Our model of work has to change also, to give proper value to caring. The domestic work of women is taken for granted. It's a freebie, like the air, except that the air isn't free anymore, either, since now we have to pay attention to making sure that the air is breathable. Women have earned less than men because of the notion that any kind of work that includes care giving is probably worth less than other kinds. We're going to have to change that and to bring the ability to listen and nurture into the highest levels of decision making. Care supports learning. Together they make us human.
We need to find different metaphors, different ways of thinking about work and caring and the meaning of home. We don't have to spend our whole lives caring for children any longer, but we should be full-time homemakers, working to make our institutions, our workplaces, our cities, our neighborhoods -- our planet -- livable homes. I don't mean places where you go to relax, the opposite of work. Home has never meant that to women. What I would like to suggest by the concept of home is this: A home is a place where it is possible to learn and grow, a place where whatever work is done has a meaning. That's something we need to create for our children, something we would like to have wherever we spend our days as we move through the stages of our lives, and a model for the uncertain future.
posted by Mary Catherine Bateson at 12:25 PM
1 Comments:
Why is it that the role of woman as mothers is so undervalued? Is it because there is no money associated with it? How do we stop the perpetuation of this misconception? As a mother of two small sons, am I unconsciously instilling this in them? How do we change this?
p.s. I am now rereading "Composing" after 18 years. I love it!
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