The REAL Opt-Out Revolution

There has been much talk in the news and among the mom blogs about the Opt-Out Revolution.  The phrase, coined by Lisa Belkin in a 2003 New York Times Magazine article, refers to highly-educated professional women who, upon entering parenthood, choose to stay home with their children as full-time caregivers rather than try to juggle the demands of parenting with those of paid employment.
 
Of course, reports of this phenomenon are often highly exaggerated.  "Opting out", or going from two incomes to one, is only a viable option for a minority of families.  According to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies, most American mothers – over 70% – work outside the home, either full- or part-time, and only 23% of families with young children have a parent who stays home with the kids.  Though some families are able to survive or even thrive with one parent (almost always the mother) functioning as family caregiver, this is the exception, not the rule.
 
However, some mothers who are fed up with pulling double shift, working for pay in addition to caring for their families with no financial compensation whatsoever and little support from employers or government, have started to explore another option.  Radical Homemakers are those who eschew many modern conveniences ("necessities") and choose instead to live an ultra-simple, low-tech lifestyle. In her research that led her to write a book about these homemakers, Shannon Hayes, during her research on this topic for her upcoming book Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity From a Consumer Culture, has found that people can follow this lifestyle anywhere – in a city, in the suburbs, on a farm, in a highrise. It is not necessarily about being a "back-to-the-land" type (though I’d say that those types are well-represented among the members of this movement), but about finding ways to practice self-sufficiency and low-cost living whenever and however possible.

Hayes acknowledges the tension between feminism and Radical Homemaking. We women worked so hard to get out of the kitchen and be more than "just a mom", many women would say, why on Earth would we choose to go back? I don’t think Hayes would argue that this lifestyle is an inevitable next step in the feminist movement, it is definitely not ANTI-feminist. In fact, her argument in favor of homemaking as the newest expression of feminism is compelling – that we should take back our lives from a culture that views our role as employee/consumer as paramount, with all else being secondary.

In these Radical Homemaking families, carework generally is shared among the adults in the family (as well as the children), sometimes along traditional gender lines but not necessarily, and if so only because that is where the members’ inclinations lie. Hayes, for example, has a Ph.D. from Cornell University and supports her family as an author while her husband does most of the house- and care-work. Her family also has a farm which they tend with her parents, the products of which they sell for additional income. For these "radical" families, concentrating on the home and family instead of a career outside the home is a political statement. Hayes says, "He who has the gold makes the rules, but if you don’t need the gold you can change the rules." In other words, these people are choosing to protest against against a workplace culture that frequently forces them to put money-earning above all else by simply opting out of the whole capitalist system to the extent that is possible for them.  They are deliberately, explicitly, and thoroughly choosing to make caretaking their priority.
 
For me, the life of a radical homemaker is attractive, though not in the extreme. More like Radical Homemaking Lite. I like growing my own food, cooking from scratch (baby food and all), making do with less, but I do still enjoy having a telephone and cable TV and paying someone else to change the oil in my car. I have friends who are totally off the grid and would be considered "homesteaders", but I don’t know that I’m up for that. Yet.  At any rate, I (as a self-described feminist) like the feeling of empowerment, as well as the fulfillment of my creative urges, that come from doing things myself.  Clearly, we still need people to fight for workplace equality and support for caregivers and caregiving, but in the meantime, the boycott approach has some appeal.

Kelly Coyle DiNorcia blogs at Ahimsa Mama