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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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While it's true that he could almost certainly do all the actual tasks, it's very likely that he couldn't do it happily, without becoming bored and alienated, which is actually quite rare and valuable. Assuming, of course, that his description is accurate.

I spend a lot of time around hippies where the women are into archaic revival stuff. They love to pick fruit and can it, do sewing and quilts, cook every meal at home, make candles, split firewood, stoke the fire in the wood stove, let a man slaughter but then pluck and butcher chickens, tend hens for eggs, pick up raw milk, worry 100x too much about recycling, run a homebrew kit, etc

(Ironically, the only thing that they don't bring back is washboard laundry. Washing machines are totally cool with hippies)

Anyway, housewifery was actually really fucking hard? Pretty sure the average modern man would have a nervous breakdown if they had to be a 17th century housewife.

It's a lot easier than it used to be but the level that women think on if they own housewifing is certainly something I feel like a tourist in and would be shitty at no matter how much a feminist dad I wanted to be.

Anyway, housewifery was actually really fucking hard? Pretty sure the average modern man would have a nervous breakdown if they had to be a 17th century housewife.

I suppose average modern anybody who has not the habit doing it and everyone's life truly would depend on it. Agriculture tasks that requires upper body strength are equally* hard and nervewracking, which is what the men would have been doing. On the other hand, house that would do well enough would employ servants.

Also, near all the the stuff you list sounds secondary. I remember reading that majority of 17th century woman's time would have gone to clothes and textiles, and not the "fun crafts" parts like quilting. Spinning is boring, and you'd have to do it for all textiles in the household.

  • ETA: figure of speech, not sure if 100% equal.

Anyway, housewifery was actually really fucking hard? Pretty sure the average modern man would have a nervous breakdown if they had to be a 17th century housewife.

It was. Let's assume you're still a farmer's wife with livestock and a gaggle of children to care for. The big changes are:

  • no homespun clothes: you don't have to spend every idle moment spinning and your winter making cloth and sewing by hand
  • no washboard laundry: this one you've mentioned yourself
  • indoor plumbing: if you want (have to) wash your gaggle of kids and at least your own feet, you don't have to carry all this water from the well and heat it first
  • no mandatory food preservation: you can still grow every vegetable and fruit and pickle/dry/can them yourself, but you don't have to. You can let your husband grow only cash crops and buy everything else
  • no mandatory cow: again, it's easier to buy milk and cheese from a creamery than to have your own cow
  • no mandatory breadmaking: if your husband needs some fresh bread for breakfast and lunch, you have to get up early enough to stoke the oven and bake it before he's up. Every day, because it doesn't keep like wonderbread

I know some women who are like that as well, and can see the appeal. You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.

Those are mostly creative, social kinds of hobbies that are fun to do with children once they aren't absolute babies. I was homeschooled, and basically did 4-H instead of middle school, so we were always keeping animals, sewing, quilting, making fancy leather projects, and so on. My family uses a wood stove for heat, and we have a dead fruit tree that at some point we need to chop and split for firewood, which we plan to do ourselves. My housemate used to do home-brew stuff, and it looked like fun, I would definitely consider it.

But also, those are things men also participate in, more than cleaning, probably because they're more interesting than cleaning. It's extremely hard to keep things clean in a truly equal house with children, where nobody is extremely conscientious. My parents' house is very bad in that way, but many home crafts have been made there.

You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.

I love reducing waste, but a few nitpicks: you probably only want to use the rinse water, and you still want to be careful about what kind of detergent you use, and you're only going to get enough waste water from the family clothes washer to cover a tree or two, so do have additional irrigation plans for anything large enough to call an orchard.

(my parents weren't "into" that, but they were frugal and we lived in a desert, so my dad would often switch the washer drain from a sewer line to a hose-out-on-the-lawn for a load's final rinse cycle)

That's true, a lot of archaic household tasks require true skill and specialization such that they're legitimately complimentary to men's work; I don't mean to diss actual traditional housekeeping. The problem is that we're living in the 21st century, and you can't meaningfully specialize into vacuuming and Crock-Pot operation.

Maybe I'm especially retarded but if I was house husband I'd probably outsource so much of the food and cleaning because I'd lose my mind trying to plan the day/week and stick to it and go to pieces if something came up that threw it off. And I'd also feel like none of this shit fills my cup and I'd be miserable.

To say nothing of how much worse it would be if I added kids to take care of.

My husband has done it, and finds it harder than most jobs, emotionally. We buy a lot of half prepared food from Costco. Out house is not clean.

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