Home, Hearth Getting New Look : Old-Fashioned Domestic Values May Be Coming Back

We do not take home seriously enough. We love it, of course--it is the lace-frilled ambition of every newlywed, the stuff of those nagging dreams of childhood that haunts middle age. But it is seen as a place to come back to rather than a place to be.

“None of us have grown up in a real family, where the home is the center of social and intellectual life, and not just a dormitory for the people who happen to live there,” wrote Germaine Greer seven years ago. “With the devaluation of the home, women have lost meaning in their own lives. Why did women start chaining themselves to railings? Because the only alternative to joining men was to be stuck between four walls, alone.”

In the struggle by women for recognition of their right to a role in the world outside the home, domestic values have been an underestimated casualty. “Women should not feel obliged to stay at home. They should have careers,” wrote Margaret Thatcher, then a young bride, in the Sunday Graphic in 1952.

“In this way, gifts and talents that would otherwise be wasted are developed to the benefit of the community.” It was nonsense, she felt, to think that the family suffered.

Today the wheel has gone full circle. Woman may have gained recognition and respect in the marketplace, but domestically they are in a mess. Household management, once a highly respected skill, is brutally dismissed or approached with the same condescending sentimentality as women used to receive from men. Family relations are in disarray.

Most mothers now go out to work, but men and children have shown themselves in no hurry to change a lifetime’s habit of coming home from work and school to a tidy house and nourishing supper. Short of the generally unaffordable expedient of hiring staff to do the housework for them, such women have been reduced to performing an ambitious juggling act.

Placing the Blame

Frequently they blame an individual--usually their partner--for the fact that the structure of society makes few concessions to the needs of a dual career household with children. It is now recognized that quite mundane difficulties of household and family management are a major factor in the breakdown of many marriages.

Recent research by the Marriage Guidance Council has asserted that couples underestimate the importance of the practical underpinnings of marriage. They tend to stress the importance of the emotional relationship, and to ignore the need for domestic and financial planning.

The resolution to the domestic crisis is not for women to revert to apron and rolling-pin. To plan for the future we need to understand the past, to look at household organization with a sense of history rather than in terms of economic calculation.

Once upon time, in a predominantly agricultural society, household matters were arranged fairly simply. Husband, wife, children and dependents worked pretty continuously in support of the joint home--outdoor work for him, indoor work for her. The only difference was, in the words of Thomas Tusser’s catchy 16th-Century couplet, “Some respite to husbands the weather may send but houswives’ affaires have never an end.”

Philosophy of Egotism

That situation was profoundly altered by the substitution of work in distant factories and offices. The patterns of men’s working lives in the 19th Century produced a nation of individuals who used their families as springboards to self-fulfillment. A philosophy of egotism replaced an older vision of society rooted in analogies to the cooperative household.

“I teach you the Superman,” wrote Nietzsche. “Man is something to be surpassed.” Women were supposed to remain willing handmaids to these new Masters of the Universe, but they opted to be Superwomen instead.

There is a telling contrast between early 19th-Century books of household management, such as those produced by the harmonious domestic literary duo William Cobbett (“Cottage Economy,” “Advice to a Man on How to Be a Lover, a Husband, a Father”) and his wife Anne (“The English Housekeeper”), and aggressively defensive manuals of our own day, such as “The I Hate to Housekeep Book,” “Fathers Are Parents Too,” “The Working Wife’s Handbook,” “Super Sex in Marriage.”

As those modern titles suggest, what women have inherited most noticeably from the past is a sense of guilt. Aware of having chosen to rock the domestic boat, they feel they still have to cope in the home as well as the workplace. They underestimate both the very good reasons for which they have changed their social role and the extent to which technology and architecture is making the business of creating a home simpler and more efficient. But we still need a major consciousness-raising exercise on sharing responsibility for home-making around the family.

Changes Afoot

There are changes afoot. We are begining to revalue the home in emotional terms, to concede how much we all need roots, a hearth to return to. There has been a significant switch of interest from Freudian-based psychotherapy for individual--primarily sexual-- Angst to family therapy, which emphasises joint responsibility for any family member’s problems. The growing popularity of home as workplace, encouraged by new technology, means that Greer’s lonely dormitories are being used for all manner of interesting enterprises.