#12 I am not going home (Eng & Fra)

Debate with myself about domesticity

It’s been a trip around the sun for Transgression already! Thank you so much for being here. If you like this letter, please forward it to your loved ones and help me spread the rodeo spirit!

My grandmother had a Kingdom, and it was her home.

During the course of her life she had several houses that she governed like a proper ruler. As a child, I got to know the one house that turned out to be her life’s endeavour: a ruin in the East of France that she took on renovating and later became, well, my childhood’s kingdom. It was the gardens, the colors, the rooms’ names, the details, the details, the beauty. I now feel she really put herself in her houses. Organizing, decorating, fixing, she put her body and soul into those places like in an extension of herself and a true act of creation.

My grandmother was born in the 1930s and at first sight there is nothing extravagant about a woman of her generation dedicating herself to her home – to domesticity.

After all, since the beginning of times home has been the only perimeter women have been allowed to explore, their only territory of freedom, their cage. Except maybe for a handful of Queens, the women of power that History remembers (think Madame de Maintenon! Think Madame de Staël!) exercised their influence from behind closed doors, in their salons, at their table, in their bedroom. A Kingdom surrounded by curtains, shut.

But thinking of my grandmother, I now realize that her home was also a source from which she drew power.

It was not just out of convention that she became a home maker. It was a life’s pursuit to find the fullest expression of her being through domestic life, and that she took to an art form.

Woman and wave by Hokusai (1760-1849), which makes me think of domesticity sometimes.

It was her taste, her choices, her decisions that she put out there for everyone else to see, saying “This is who I am”. There was assertiveness there, no compromise, radicality and no effort to please. Power.

This is where I ask myself if domesticity could be something more than the monster that eats us alive and prevents us from realizing ourselves outside?

Last week I also watched the documentary film “Martha” and got even more ambivalent about domesticity. Martha Stewart built an empire promoting the art of domestic life. Selling cooking recipes, bed sheets and wedding planning advice to women, she became a prominent figure of the business world during the 1990s decade of capitalist orgy, and eventually, the first female self-made billionaire in America (before falling from her pinnacle and bouncing back again in the most incredible way). The women’s world in the men’s world. Martha drew her power from knowing how to entertain, elevated to an art form.

Again, domesticity as a way to exist out there.

But then I read an article about Mikki Kendall, the “respectability stress” and the pressure that comes from restricting ourselves emotionnally and behaviourally in the workplace, and fell back on my feet.

Here she is Martha Stewart, controversial figure in her own right, who states in her biopic: “Had I not bought that house in the 1970s, I wouldn’t have been “Matha Stewart home maker”, I would have been someone else. But I would have been someone”.

The workplace is a world where women are not permitted to exist fully. We are officially allowed there, but under the implicit condition that we behave a certain way, express ourselves a certain way, perform a certain way.

It’s a limited perimeter that we are allowed to explore. Beyond its limits, we are no longer tolerated.

Here is what the workplace does: it recreates domesticity within its walls.

It tells us: “Ok for you to be here, but stay there, stay right there between those lines where I can see you. This is where you belong. Trespass, and you will no longer be welcome among us.”

A woman who performs? Accepted. A woman who asks for fair compensation for her performance? Discarded. A woman who says 'I agree'? Accepted. A woman who says 'I disagree'? Discarded. A woman who is offered a promotion? Accepted. A woman who asks for more money and responsabilities ? Discarded!

Domesticity all over again. Domesticity as an invisible but tight bond that keeps us under watch, if not geographically, behaviourally. A limited perimeter to explore, a tiny territory of freedom, a cage.

And a professional life forever faded.

Women got out of their kitchen many times throughout history. It is certainely not to be retained in a smaller, cheaper version of it at work now.

We are out, and we are not going back home.

So I guess my answer to myself today is: domesticity in private life? Sure why not. Domesticity at work? No.

Now on your saddle, and off you go.

Clara

Ma grand-mère avait un royaume, et c’était sa maison.