What makes New Domesticity “new”?
New Domesticity, the way I define it, is the re-embrace of old-fashioned domesticity by people who have the means and the wherewithal to not be doing this stuff if they didn't want to...These are people who are embracing this out of choice, because of environmentalist, political, or at the very least philosophical motivations.
What's wrong with retreating to the home? How is that potentially damaging to women?
The danger is that we want to have women in public life as much as we have men in public life, and if women are retreating, pulling back their participation in the workforce because the workforce is not meeting their needs, then the workforce needs to meet women's needs. I think this is a sign that something needs to be done...
You’re very respectful of all the subcultures that you venture into, but I can also sense your discomfort at different times in the book. Were you ever particular disturbed or disheartened?
There were two things. One was that a number of people I talked to seemed to have a skewed idea of what the feminist movement was. That is completely understandable, because the feminist movement is wrongly portrayed pretty much everywhere. So I think it's understandable why women now are like, “Oh yeah, feminists, they said everyone had to get a job, and that ruined home cooking, and they disrespected stay-at-home moms.” And that’s just—that's not accurate. It’s disheartening that so many people have been fed that wrong portrayal of feminism. That bugs me. And two, I was bugged by—a lot of this New Domesticity is very worshipful of all things it considers “natural.” And that can be anti-intellectual, and it can be, as I point out in the chapter about parenting, even dangerous when it comes to health and food stuff. The number one thing that bugs me is the anti-vaccine people. Again, it's understandable how they reach those conclusions, because there's so much cultural valorizing of the natural. You go into the grocery store and they're talking about “natural” and “unnatural,” and you have idiots on TV that are Oprah’s gurus or whatever questioning mainstream medicine, and people get it in their heads that it's good to be skeptical about medicine, that it's good to have a DIY attitude to your own health. Which to some extent it is—it’s good to be informed. But it goes way too far.
One of the most surprising conclusions you came to was that while New Domesticity seemed to be associated with privilege, it was ultimately affiliated more with middle class culture than wealthy culture.
My feeling was that people who are actually members of the elite don’t need to be doing this stuff...There are just less problems navigating work-life issues when you're a member of the super-elite. It was mostly a movement of people that were middle class and that were feeling really stuck, feeling unable to balance work and life stuff, and feeling dissatisfied with their job opportunities.
There’s a term called "values stretch." It means making a choice under duress, and then back-narrating it in order to show how you always wanted to make that decision.
That's absolutely true. There's a degree to which this New Domesticity helps people justify and feel good about the choices that they basically had to make. A lot of women are pushed out of the workforce, and nobody wants to feel like they're a pawn, nobody wants to feel like they don't have any power. I think a lot of the talk of opting out is more about being pushed out by some combination of forces. Women are encouraged to take that on, and say it was just their choice, which is something that benefits the corporations. If women are just choosing this, they don't have to work harder to make better policies to keep them in the workplace.
You end the book with a list of recommendations. I wish you would just touch on the most important ones to you.
The important ones to me are, one, to continue to encourage men in the domestic realm and encourage men into more equal, sharing relationships in the home. Because women are fully encouraged to go for it in the workplace, and I think there's less encouragement of men to take on traditionally feminine roles. There’s a lot of bluster about the "new stay-at-home dad", but stay-at-home dads are only 3% of all stay-at-home parents. I think stay-at-home dads still face a lot of sexist prejudice, and that needs to stop. And then, two, rather than retreating entirely, just beating on corporate culture to change. Because people need jobs. Most people can't not have jobs. Most women are going to work, most women want to work. And I think the corporate culture is waking up to this somewhat, but I think we need to keep beating on that. And then governmental policies. I still want to see universal daycare.