Vintage Living Today For A Future Tomorrow

The title -- and cover image -- gave me this impression: This book is going to be about women taking back the kitchen and crafts (and all the things once called "women's work") and are refusing to be told that they are anti-feminist or backward-thinking for doing so. They are reclaiming the word "domestic" from its status as a slur.

Yes . . . but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Matchar explains that that is what we think we're doing (there's the motive) but what we're really accomplishing, if we truly believe ourselves to be feminists, might be shooting ourselves in the feet (there's those repercussions).

...Some women who are quitting their jobs to bake bread and grow veggies and homeschool their kids are saying, as I did, when I dropped out of the workforce, "Work sucks and it ain't getting any better. Screw the middleman. I'm my boss now and my job is to feed my family." As noble as this seems (and, yeah, I was getting a bit of a head), Matchar thinks that we have jumped off a ship that isn't sinking, as we thought, but is, in fact, still struggling to get out of the harbor. Feminism hasn't failed -- it just isn't done yet. Just as we don't have total racial equality even though we have laudable civil rights laws, we don't have equality between the sexes, either -- not in employment or anywhere else. To use another metaphor, our mothers didn't fail to win, they just started the fight. They tagged us in and we've walked away.