A minimum of "self-reliance" is necessary in any society, but "self-reliance," in my view, is overrated in capitalist America. Too much of "household labor," as well as too much of responsibility to make a living, falls on individuals and individual families here.
As Americans have fewer children and live longer, the social norm must become assisted living, and socialists should demand guaranteed minimum incomes and social services (including so-called "housework") to enable individuals and families to function all right, provided by unionized and well-compensated public-sector workers.
At 1:21 PM -0700 8/12/03, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>My focus was on the idea that hired help is made necessary by the
>stubborn refusal of men to do housework.
That's a minor problem for women in general and feminists in particular. First of all, not all women live with men, nor do they necessarily want to. Some are singles, some are lesbians. Also, some men are disabled, some men have two jobs, some men are in prisons, some men have the sort of jobs that take them away from their families for long periods of time (soldiers, inter-state truckers, etc.), and so on and so forth. Also, remember that on average women live much longer than men, and many in their old age are likely to become saddled with care of their older and weaker male partners for at least a few years (as women tend to couple with older men), only to survive them on reduced incomes.
Also, capitalist America tends to pay men better than women for the same work and, more importantly, tends to employ more men than women for jobs that pay better than others. Imagine a couple (even a feminist couple), with the man who has a $25-per-hour union job, with a lot of opportunities for overtime pay, and the woman who has a $12-per-hour non-union job. The couple have a young child. Which partner is more likely to take up more of "household labor"? Wouldn't the couple find that it makes more economic sense for the man to work as much as possible and for the woman to work for less than forty hours per week to take care of the kid? The sexist gender-segmented labor market creates gender-hierarchical "opportunity costs," which in turn give sexist incentives to men and women -- for men to do more wage labor and for women to do more care-giving labor. This vicious circle, I think, can't be broken by feminist lectures on men to do more "household labor."
As for a minority of bourgeois families wealthy enough to hire live-in maids and nannies, neither men nor women of the class have ever done any "household labor" worth its name in the history of capitalism, nor will they in the future as long as class society persists, whatever Barbara Ehrenreich says. If the children of the bourgeoisie ever learn self-discipline, they will learn it in English public schools (Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, etc.) and like institutions.
BTW, in the past, some children of the English bourgeoisie probably acquired a taste for "personal correction" along with self-discipline.
Cf. Lytton Strachey, _Eminent Victorians_ (1918):
***** He [Dr. Thomas Arnold] was particularly disgusted by the view that 'personal correction', as he phrased it, was an insult or a degradation to the boy upon whom it was inflicted; and to accustom young boys to think so appeared to him to be 'positively mischievous'. 'At an age,' he wrote, 'when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind which are the best ornaments of youth, and offer the best promise of a noble manhood?' One had not to look far, he added, for 'the fruits of such a system'. In Paris, during the Revolution of 1830, an officer observed a boy of twelve insulting the soldiers, and 'though the action was then raging, merely struck him with the flat part of his sword, as the fit chastisement for boyish impertinence. But the boy had been taught to consider his person sacred, and that a blow was a deadly insult; he therefore followed the officer, and having watched his opportunity, took deliberate aim at him with a pistol and murdered him.' Such were the alarming results of insufficient whipping.
(<http://www.bartleby.com/189/301.html> & <http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/hst/biography/EminentVictorians/chap12.html>) *****
Servants, apparently, had a role to play in "personal correction" at public schools:
***** In one of the many books of Eton memoirs a boy recalls being flogged:
I was caught misbehaving in the chapel, singing a rude, ribald verse to some psalm. I was summoned to the Lower Master for a flogging. You had to take your trousers and underpants off and kneel on a block, held down by two college servants. You were birched on your bare bum. I was trembling all over, as white as a sheet, absolutely terrified. I got six strokes, which actually drew blood, and when I got back into my class everyone was shouting 'Where's the blood? Where's the blood?' I had to take my shirt-tail out and show the blood spots.
<http://home.freeuk.com/mkb/pubschool.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>