"Keeping House" Read-Along: Chapter 1, Part 1: "What's Christian About Housework?"

Willa, over at The Quotidian Reader, notes that this part of the chapter is not very practical, and I think that's what I love about it.

I understand the practical part of housework - the basic how-to. But this book is all about the "why" and in order to get to the "why", Peterson takes a step back and recounts the history of housework.

She points out that "housework" is a new-ish word, in the history of things. There used to not be "housework". Rather, there was "husbandry" and "housewifery", the two halves of the work needed to keep an estate running, the two sides of a coin. But when everyone started leaving home for his or her daily work, there was this whole category of jobs that were left undone during the day: housework. And ever since, whose job it is and how it should be done (and how much of it should be done) has been argued about. (This is a fact worth remembering when it comes to talking about gender roles: our assumptions about "women's work" are a lot more modern than we might, well, assume.)

Also, Peterson points out, the amount of work to be done hasn't changed much. In some cases, it's been added to (no one used to have bathrooms to clean, after all, because no one had indoor bathrooms or knew about germ theory, and no one had mountains of laundry to do, because no one had that many clothes). But we do have modern machinery that makes us more efficient at it. So: same amount of work, more or less, but we can do it faster.

(And that "faster" might mean that it takes us a couple of hours less than it took our forebearers - but those are a valuable few hours. That's enough to let you read for an hour before bed, you know? That's a luxury, that is.)

I'd add - because I've been noticing it a lot in my daily life - that we have yet another whole new category that I don't think Peterson mentions. You could call it "paperwork", but I almost want to call it "electronic work" - it seems like the "business" of the house exists in a miserable limbo between envelopes and email - and none of it is ever done.  I hate that part of housework. It's a lot easier to know if the floor is clean than if all the paper/electronic work is done. At least, for me it is.

Which is why I also appreciate the clarity of Peterson in this chapter, redirecting my attention from the paperwork morass: at its heart, housework is about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. That command to feed and clothe includes a lot more than our own families, but it does include them. The housework that Adam and I do does clothe and feed us and our children, and that's not the end of all work, but it's the work without which no other work gets done.

In Peterson's words:

There is undoubtedly more to the merciful service that Jesus describes in Matthew 25 than caring for the daily needs of the members of our own households. Housework is a beginning, not an end. But it is a beginning - not a sidetrack, not a distraction, but a beginning, and an essential one at that - in the properly Christian work of, among other things, meeting the everday needs of others, whether those others be our fellow household members, our near neighbors, or people more sociologically or geographically distant from ourselves.

I'm excited about the next section, where Peterson talks about God's own "divine domesticity" (stuff from the Psalms! always cool!), but I appreciate the time she takes in this first section to lay out the history and necessity of housework.

This read-along is hosted at the Quotidian Reader, here.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell