A Conglomeration of Thoughts from this Summer and This Month

Most people who read this already know that my summer job was ironing clothes for a family of eight. This summer, I also read Home Comforts: the Art and Science of Keeping House (interestingly enough, written by a philosophy professor at Columbia) and Orthodoxy. So having read this, having been brought up in the Catholic faith, having been taught that women's roles differ from men's yet are both equal in dignity, observing the ways in which my employer family interacted with each other, and standing solitarily in a laundry room for hours upon hours (ten or more hours a day sometimes), being paid to play with children and teach other women how to bake, my head was left in a mess of thoughts which have been bubbling around in my brain which has been too busy to give them enough time yet.




When I came back to school, I was met with happy faces and lovely people who knew "the perfect guy" (who turned out NOT to be so) to set me up with! Yay! NOOOOOOOO!!!! As much as I am unopposed to the idea being dated and eventually married, I am dreadfully opposed to the idea of hooking up with someone just because no one is dating me now. Dating is not a game or an experiment; I am not a toy or an object (neither is any man). As I said in discussion with someone who said that dating is overrated, quite the opposite is true: dating is horrridly under-rated. Dating should not be thought of as a social activity, but as a step on the road to holiness- one that should be tread carefully and willfully, not playfully and at whim. SO, with this added to the last paragraph, my head has been absolutely full of thoughts to the point of explosion, I think- to the point of forgetting that I have paper for which I have yet to read due, anyway. For all of my loudness, quite a bit of my thoughts never come out audibly.


I have read a lot of 19th century American literature written by women (Alcott, Montgomery, Lovelace...) and I have been reading it since I was ten. Every girl should read this stuff. The role of a woman was clearly and intellectually defined- in no way was she ruled or lorded over by her husband; she was his helper and he was her support. She wasn't supressed or uneducated- even women who had never been to school had common sense and wit. Mrs Baehr (my hero- Jo March from Little Women - she married professor Baehr) ran a school, wrote books, and founded a college all while raising 10 boys and 2 girls and running her household. Of course, her household did include a couple of maids, but she ran the household and she did most of the work. A woman's role was not only clearly defined, but unquestionably held in high esteem. Especially (and I see this now, looking back; it wasn't quite so clear when reading it before I knew that I was looking for role models) the role of a married woman- of a wife and a mother.


This was only the foundation (not even really foundation, but it was indeed a big help for me) of my understanding of womanhood. What really set this in stone was watching my own mother. Well, being apprenticed to my mother... By the time I was ten, my mother had taught me enough that I could cook dinner, clean it up, do laundry, mop floors, clean bathrooms, and take care of babies (now I was ten, so I couldn't take care of babies like I can now, but I knew enough to be a "second mother" when Daniel was born). By the time I was twelve, I was cooking dinner regularly and by the time I was fourteen, I was pretty much in charge of dinner. I was a lucky little girl. I came to this conclusion over the summer while giving a "bread making seminar" and being asked by an eight year old (or maybe it was the six year old) "you mean, you can make bread?"



Going from my family to my employer family was a huge shock. I knew that women do not all care for their homes the same way and that some don't even care for them, but I had never lived in a household where just common sense housekeeping was absent. The woman fed her animals (of which she had plenty, something like 8 dogs and 4 cats) a raw diet. She would take the meat out of the freezer, leave it on the cutting board while she prepared dinner (so it was there a few hours), after chopping the meat, she would rinse the cutting board off and cut vegetables on it. I realized that most of the things that I took for granted that everyone just sort of knew were apparently not so well known: things like not leaving a sippee cup full of milk in the sink overnight because it will sour and smell bad and if it gets in the plug thingy can make baby sick; things like how to wash dishes (not with cold water...); how to hold a spatula while stirring batter; the simple fact that bread can be made at home; how to creatively make an entirely different meal out of leftovers instead of serving the same thing two or three times a week.



I was hired to iron clothes. The family consists of of the parents, a 16 year old girl, 15 year old boy, and 8 year old boy, and little girls aged 6, 4, and 2. The 16 year old girl was completely lost when it came to housework. She had never been taught to do laundry, wash dishes, or cook, and despite having four young siblings, she had no clue how to interact with little kids. I never once saw her hug her little siblings- only reprimand them.

As I stood in the laundry room amidst piles of clothes day after day after day, I remembered my old friends with worn covers. I remembered how the women would teach thier daughters that the mundane work (which was a lot more mundane in the 1800's) was a labor of love, beneficial to to the lover and the loved (whether this be son or husband, daughter or mother, sibling or friend). All of this was reaffirmed by reading Home Comforts in which Mrs. Mendelson not only explains the technical and practical things about housekeeping, but the reason why: out of love; love for yourself, and your spouse and your kids (if you have those things...).


John Paul II wrote that God has entrusted the world to women in a very special way because our femininity. Women are the nuturers of the moral and physical well being of society (so are men but in a very different- women are responsible for making the men responsible...). The old and over-used but very true saying that "behind every good man is a good woman" demonstrates the need for women to be women. I hear women complain about how guys act all the time. Perhaps if more women acted like women should (which does NOT mean a bare-foot and pregnant houswife), then more men would act like men should.


Perhaps this makes a little bit of sense. Perhaps I'm just rambling and confused and tired. Perhaps Dr. Hartmann is right and my biggest aspiration in life is to be a charwoman.