[reb]

"Domestic servitude" is a poor way to present homemaking, but calling its historical pull a trap for women isn't far off. Obviously anyone who's struggled in the business world understands joining the game is only liberating along a couple of dimensions (economic, mainly).

The choice should be there for men and women to work or rear. Applying that freedom appropriately is the individual's responsibility.

[dragonwriter]

> "Domestic servitude" is a poor way to present homemaking

It is when you are absolutely economically dependent on the outside of the home work, from which you are functionally excluded, of a partner for survival, when even searching for an alternative in the same line is grounds for termination without support, and where the one on whom you are dependent has a legal right to use you sexually without consent (criminalization of marital rape in the US began in the mid-1970s after the mass entry of women into the workforce)? I think “domestic servitude” is an overly positive euphemistic description of the condition women were generally trapped in before their out-of-the-home work became normalized.

[reb]

I'm absolutely not making a case that women weren't effectively forced into domestic servitude in the past (and, depending on a a range of factors, in the present). I'm also not making a recommendation that anyone be a full-time homemaker. Given the state of the world, that's a very risky path.

But.

There are women (and men) who would prefer to work in the home and they should be free to do so. It's demeaning to equate a person's effort in homemaking with servitude. There is not something inherently inferior about maintaining a home and it's only a perverse economic system rooted in traditional misogyny that tells us otherwise.

As I said initially, the choice should be there. The social and institutional compulsion obviously should not.

[dragonwriter]

> It's demeaning to equate a person's effort in homemaking with servitude.

No one did that upthread. Someone compared the condition women were trapped in prior to the normalization of their choice to work in the general market as being trapped in domestic servitude. This is not equivalent to equating freely-chosen homemaking with domestic servitude.

[reb]

I clearly interpreted CalRobert's comment differently than you did. To me, it read as a comparison between "domestic servitude" and working a job.

[dragonwriter]

As I see it, he compares being trapped in domestic servitude (the problem before the economic transition since ~1973) with being forced to do work in the general market (the problem after.) He's not comparing two freely chosen activities, he's noting one undesirable compulsion was traded for another (less undesirable, but still undesirable and less recognized) compulsion.

[CalRobert]

Exactly. It's the lack of real choice. In 1950-whatever your chances of making it on your own, as a single mom, ESPECIALLY when the entire culture is built on the assumption of stay at home moms, were pretty slim. You didn't just move out, sign up at the local montessori, and go get your "pays roughly similar even if still lower" professional job, and go to the bank and get a mortgage, etc.

Corporate servitude also sucks but that's a result of nimby housing cartels (you're competing with two income households for homes).

[reb]

I think your reading makes more sense than mine. Agreed!