Necessity Is a Mother! The Practical Roots of One Systemic Injustice

 

As Hannah Arendt explains in Eichmann in Jerusalem, when a population adopts an unjust ideology, even well-meaning people experience temptation, not as an urge to sin, but as an urge to resist sin. The sins of a large, self-validating group are invisible. Even if the sufferings of a sinned-against group are obvious, they are accepted as "just the way things are."

One example, comfortably resolved for most of us, is American slavery. It began with land surpluses and an extreme labor shortages in agricultural colonies. White indentured servants, the solution in most British colonies, had to be freed after seven years. Black servants--initially on par with whites--were so alien that planters were able hold them for life. It was "necessary" for economic success. Slave states became so dependent on black labor that Southern editorials in the 1850s condemned abolitionists as seditionist. An institution that legalized kidnapping, family separation, torture, rape, and murder wasn't evil. It was God's plan. Resistance to that system was the evil. If a Southerner pitied an abused slave and longed to help her escape, he experienced this longing, not as a stirring of Christian love, but as a temptation to steal. It took America's bloodiest war to overturn this view. If slavery was deeply immoral, how were so many otherwise decent people so blind to this for so long?

Slavery--at least as my great-grandfathers practiced it--is happily dead, but discrimination against women is a parallel systemic evil that has evolved in my lifetime. I was a young adult when it broke into the news with "feminism," which faced widespread denial and derision (as "bra burning"), but today a public figure expressing old-school sexism can be shamed on social media. Old-school sexism excluded women from leadership and from most jobs outside the home, relegating them (especially if married and solvent) to housework and child-nurturing. A "good" woman was a submissive helpmate to her "head of household"--first to her father, then to her husband, and (if widowed) even to her adult son. With a few exceptions, a married woman was (like a slave) a life-long dependent without her own property. If she disobeyed, she could be beaten. If she denied her husband sex, she could be raped. I recall the definition of rape in my 1950s dictionary: "Illicit carnal knowledge of a woman without her consent." Illicit here means unmarried. "Obey" in the marriage rite gave consent.

Of course, extreme biological determinism had weakened by the time I was born. Married women could vote and earn and spend their own money, but old patterns lingered. My mother was a high school teacher when she met my father in 1934, but she resigned after they married and never taught again. She signed her name Mrs. Howard Green. It was assumed that my classmates had mothers at home to bake cookies, keep us out if sick, and meet the bus. Culture reinforced this. Lucille Ball, an actor, studio executive, and producer, played a childish, dependent housewife on I Love Lucy, nearly the opposite of her relationship with Desi Arnez. 

Women in the 1950s were obviously capable of more. I'd avoid the trope that they were exploited by scheming males (though this happened) and instead suggest a legacy of the 19th century, when most Americans lived on farms or in rural villages. In these conditions, division of labor by gender generally benefited both sexes. It was, broadly speaking, necessary (at least highly convenient) and appeared as a systemic evil only as this ceased to be the case.

I grew up within walking distance of all of the town of Auburn, including the state university. With foreign students, professor's kids, and two bookstores, the town was almost cosmopolitan--more-so anyway than most of Alabama. My best friend was British, my high-school crush half-Chinese. But my usual childhood vacation was a week with my mother's parents on a farm in Bibb County little changed from the 19th Century (in fact, not much different from farms in the Middle Ages). It was a second home, particularly as we stayed there when my father was stationed in Germany and it's the first place I remember, my personal Rosebud. 

         The old farm eight miles out of Centreville on a dirt road had very little 20th century about it except for a stack of Progressive Farmer magazines and a treadle sewing machine. There was no car, no tractor. Trips into town for supplies took four hours on the dusty road. Grandaddy farmed with a horse and mule and traveled in a wagon with iron-rimmed wooden wheels, the kind on Civil War cannons. Staples such as salt, coffee, flour, baking soda, vinegar, sugar, and canning supplies were store-bought, but the farm provided most of its own needs, as it had when my grandfather was a boy in the 1880s. I drew water from the well, fed the chickens, pooped in an outhouse, and froze or baked in front of a stone fireplace in the winter.

Mother's parents were semi-retired by then, their children grown and no sharecroppers in the cabins beyond the pasture, but in his sixties Granddaddy still kept stock and made crops. A self-styled gentleman farmer, he spent most of the day outdoors in khakis, a straw fedora, and rubber muck-boots. By kerosine lantern light before dawn, Grandmother toted in wood (my job when I visited) and built a fire in the huge iron stove, filled its reservoir (the only source of hot water) from the well, and fetched eggs from the henhouses. Breakfast was eggs, bacon from the smokehouse, slow-cooked grits, and buttermilk biscuits rolled out, cut, and baked in the black stove. Butter and buttermilk for the biscuits came from milk churned the day before. Syrup was store-bought by then, but my cousin has shown me the ruins of a syrup mill on the property. 

While Grandmother washed breakfast dishes and slopped the hogs with leftovers, the stove stayed warm because, after breakfast (maybe after making the beds and a quick sit-down), it was time to start making dinner (I was in college before I learned to apply that term to the evening meal). The noon meal was the big one. Everything was cooked from scratch, and not packages from a grocery. If chicken was on the menu, Grandmother had to select a victim, wring its neck, scald it, pluck its feathers, gut and clean it, and cut it into pieces. In season, vegetables and greens were fresh-picked from the fenced garden behind the house, which she tended. Out of season, there were shelves of jars to pick from, less labor that day but at the cost of long, hot hours during canning season. There were potatoes and turnips from the root cellar, hams from the smokehouse, a hand grinder to make sausage. There was always a skillet of cornbread. It was labor intensive compared to our supermarket culture, and in the farm's prime, there would have been hungry children and field hands to feed, a huge spread.

Supper was mostly leftovers, heavy on cornbread, buttermilk, butter, syrup, and whatever survived dinner, stored in over the afternoon in a "safe" with fly-proof sides of sheet metal perforated with nail holes. This left the afternoon for other work. Grandmother didn't just keep the house swept clean, but the fenced front yard too between its brick-edged flower beds. Except for Grandaddy's Sunday suit (count it, one), she sewed, washed, darned, and patched the clothes, sunned linens, kept the large garden, canned food, took care of the chickens, and, of course, bore and cared for the children. Grandmother had circulatory condition that stopped her at only two children, but otherwise she might have been expected to work for many years with a child on her hip and another in the womb. My father was one of nine children, my mother's father one of twelve.

For old farm families, children were assets--not only free labor, but disability and retirement insurance. Social Security didn't exist before 1935 and phased in gradually, so that, for all but the rich early in the century, only a large family insured a comfortable old age. Granddaddy, the youngest of eight sons, supported his mother on the farm for thirteen bachelor years after his father died, a slave of duty (along with his youngest sister). Both married the year their mother died. The sister was duty-bound too. As the mother aged, somebody had to step into the woman's role, and she was the youngest. In an all-male household such as a Balkan coal miners' boarding house in Blocton a few miles north, the cook was male, but it was still a full-time job. Somebody had to do it, and it was "natural" in a marriage with children for this to be the woman, who not only lacked testosterone muscles but was slowed by repeated pregnancies. 

         For centuries, biological determinism seemed symbiotic. Everybody kept busy, and the husband's dependence on the wife helped to ensure his good behavior. He didn't want her to leave him, like "Lucille" in Kenny Rogers' song, "with four hungry children and a crop in the field."

Two major trends have changed the system. First was the move away from subsistence farms and toward a cash economy in towns and cities--from nearly 90% of the labor force work working in agriculture in 1790 to 12% in 1950. More and more people in the 1900s bought food in stores and saw children as economic drains, not assets, particularly after child labor was outlawed in factories and mines. 

  Also, technology made cooking and housekeeping more convenient, notably the democratization of canned food after WWI, the gas stove, vacuum cleaner, washing machine, sewing machine, and the ice box, followed by the electric refrigerator and supermarkets full of prepared food, including Wonder Bread, Campbell's soup, Spam, and everything Betty Crocker. Families with cars could buy a week's groceries at a time and a woman (even a man) throw together a decent meal in half an hour. Add to this free public schools and growing number of nursery schools, and the American housewife was on a greased slide toward redundancy, no longer essential like "Lucille" or my grandmother. Idle and alone much of the day, available to do more, her function was no longer necessary and fulfilling.

Gradually, over the decades, women began to feel oppressed. As social and technological conditions changed, limitations imposed on their activities, always a little arbitrary, became egregious. Absent "necessity," these limitations emerged as systemic evils. I think we can see this as a paradigm for other social injustices. Life is, of course, unfair. Suffering happens. Instinctively selfish, we are quick to see whatever supports our customary privileges as necessary, even as part of the natural order. The resulting systemic patterns (including arbitrary gender, race, ethnicity, language, wealth, and class distinctions) may be gross violations of the commandant to love neighbors as ourselves but tend to be invisible or, if seen, dismissed as inevitable. Rapid changes in the last century, like a drought exposing new islands, have revealed some social distinctions as arbitrary and unnecessary, but others remain submerged. The challenge is to see them.