We All Could Do With Less

In one of my previous posts I mentioned the story in a 1930s Dutch Catholic magazine about a tailor whose fiancee ditched him because he refused to dress decently. The met again later in life and got married. By this time, the lady was 45 years old. In a modern society, she would have some glamorous office career or at least a job selling stuff in some department store, yet in the magazine, she was just content to stay home and do housekeeping for her father.

You'd think that the father was a wealthy upper class (or at least UMC) sort of guy, but he was just a hairdresser (even though he always wore a suit to work) who, btw, kept working right into his eighties. This story made me pause and think. Of course, unmarried women often used to work, even in the "good old times", however, it wasn't seen as an ideal situation, but rather as an unfortunate necessity. Those who didn't have to often stayed home as seen in the example above. How could they afford it?

The story doesn't give much background information about this woman, apart from the fact that she was content to stay home and go to the same church every Sunday. Most probably she didn't go on expensive vacations even though 1930s ladies' magazines are full of advertisements. It also wasn't fashionable for women in those times to go out every Friday and Saturday night and get drunk in a bar.

She probably cooked all her meals from scratch, made at least some of her own clothes and had embroidery for hobby. In those times, people were generally content with little and unless they belonged to the very wealthy, their life was rather simple and centered around home, quite unlike now. Nowadays, home is generally considered boring and you are supposed to spend as little time in it as possible.

Some women do have fulfilling careers, they get to travel or become internationally famous or some such thing, yet most of them spend their days changing diapers in a daycare, cleaning old people's homes, trying to teach a bunch of kids ABC, or sitting behind the cash register. These jobs may be necessary and I don't want to denigrate those doing them (though if more mothers stayed home we wouldn't need daycares and most shops sell tons of unnecessary trinkets made by third world people working for 2 cents per hour), but they are hardly glamorous, intellectually challenging or even very interesting. So why are they seen as superior to home life?

While I don't believe in various conspiracy theories it's difficult not to notice that there is a whole propaganda campaign behind increased female work participation, and on the international level, too. For instance, Israel has been recently criticised for failing to push more women into workforce.
Apparently, it would help them with their inequality problem. Yet the USA has also a great gap between the rich and the poor, and something like 80% of all women work there.

MSM contributes to the problem. Home life is universally presented as boring and housework as disgusting (I'm not exaggerating as recently I was reading a book which mentioned "various disgusting housekeeping tasks"). It's OK for the husband to do it though, after he works full shift. The question is, if housework is really so disgusting why not outsourcing it? Or is the purpose to further humiliate the unfortunate modern husband who is already the butt of all jokes? It's hardly susprising that so many marriages fall apart.

Our society promotes soulless consumerism above family. The good news is that we don't have to participate. And we all could do with less.