Not long ago a book was recommended to me: Arlene Cardozo's Sequencing.
And get this subtitle: Having It All but Not All at Once. . .A New Solution for Women Who Want Marriage, Career, and Family.
The book, published in 1986, is only 19 years old, but I swear I will do my best to vanquish it to the dustbin of irrelevance forever. I can barely stand to read it; it's like one of those books you check out from the library, only to discover that it's so nauseatingly permeated with smoke you can't bear to handle it once you get it home. The stench in this case, however, is that really revolting one of greedy, mis-guided feminism gone awry.
Yes, there is some common sense in the notion of "sequencing", i.e. staying at home when the children are little and going back to work when they are in school, if you are privileged enough to be able to do this; yes, it's good that someone pays attention to the children, but not to the exclusion of caring for their environment. In hindsight the excesses and mistakes of this books are sadly clear. It's clear, for example, what a number this book did on women, how it turned them into the anxiety-producing Monsters of New Momism. Listen, for example, to this:
Who Does the Housework?
This generation has demolished the myth that child care and housework go hand in hand. No more. No way. A couple cannot expect that the mother's sequencing will mean a clean house. For the woman who chooses to sequence to be expected--because she is "home anyway"--to do all the houswork would be to repeat the mistakes of the generation of the 1960's. . .These women were so inundated and bored with mundane, repetitive, purposeless household chores that when they heard the new message of "liberation" they lumped housework and children into one bag, weighed it against paid work--in a clean office--and fled the laundry, dishes and vacuum cleaner.
(A clean office. That's the height of liberation?)
In contrast, today's educated, career-experienced mothers have left their careers for the express purpose of caring for their children. [italics added] They did not leave their positions as attorneys, physicians, editors, nurses, educators, secretaries, computer programmers, therapists or executives to clean house!
Of course they didn't! Why, the indignity of actually having to care for your own living space!
So what did that leave us with, Ms. Cardozo? Stressed-out kids living in either neglected chaos only resentfully cared for or in pristine magazine spreads tended to by cheap domestic labor. Either way, what sort of message does it send to the next generation? That care, of one's home, and by extension, one's environment, is shit work. And now look at what a mess we're in!
So much to be redressed.
First off, this notion of the perfect house just has to go. How did we get so hung up on it? (Human pride?)
That being said, I am, as soon as I post this, going to go make beds and pick up the house a little. It's one way to combat my disgust at the folly of humanity--in service to the ideal of adequacy, with knowledge that my repetitive motions help create a modicum of intimate order, peace, and civilization. What I am about to do is not going to create ooohs and aaaahs from any Queer Eyes, but I'm going to do a few repetitive, boring, mundane chores, with a complete faith in their transformative powers and in the greater good they provide.
And then I'll sequence my way right over to the kitchen for lunch.
This is a crappy post, but I'm a little riled up.
11:29:33 AM 
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