Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture
By:
Shannon Hayes
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Lowest New Price: $15.18
List Price: $23.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Description:
Mother Nature has shown her hand. Faced with climate change, dwindling resources, and species extinctions, most Americans understand the fundamental steps necessary to solve our global crises-drive less, consume less, increase self-reliance, buy locally, eat locally, rebuild our local communities.In essence, the great work we face requires rekindling the home fires.Radical Homemakers is about men and women across the U.S. who focus on home and hearth as a political and ecological act, and who have centered their lives around family and community for personal fulfillment and cultural change. It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has benefited from feminism, where domination and oppression are cast aside and where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity, or relentless servitude.Radical Homemakers nationwide speak about empowerment, transformation, happiness, and casting aside the pressures of a consumer culture to live in a world where money loses its power to relationships, independent thought, and creativity. If you ever considered quitting a job to plant tomatoes, read to a child, pursue creative work, can green beans and heal the planet, this is your book.
Publisher: Left to Write Press
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
This book is amazing!!! - My discovery of this book coincided with my questioning of what I have been taught brings happiness. Growing up in the suburbs, I have always felt the pressure to "keep up with the Joneses," make a lot of money, and value my worth based on my money and success in a high powered career. This book validated my concerns with that belief that most people share, whether knowingly or unknowingly, that worth and fulfillment is all based on money. I felt a sense of emptiness, and, to be cliche, worry that I would lie on my deathbed regretting that all I had accomplished was a paycheck. This book provides an alternative, that may or may not be for everybody but certainly fit wonderfully for me. I do not want money as much as I want time - time to spend with my children, gardening, at church, canning tomatoes, etc. Rather than working to pay for food, clothes, repairs, etc., there is much I can learn to do myself or with a partner. This book promotes a family and community based lifestyle that is fulfilling and healthy/ good for the planet. It is hard work, of course, and takes much training to stop comparing oneself to others - I had to come to terms with my simple, used or handmade clothing, no new cars, and a summer vacation that consists of swimming in the lake or walking in the park. Ultimatly, I sincerily believe that by regecting this consumerist culture that will never make me happy (there is always a desire for more, more, more), this radical homemakers lifestyle will give me more time with my family, my community, and my home.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Wow!! - An amazing, eye-opening book with great factual statistics, interesting history, and easy ideas for change. A very good read and very inspiring!!
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A manifesto for radical homemakers, wish I'd had it 20 years ago! - I can't speak too highly of this book. Thank you, thank you Shannon Hayes for this well written and researched manifesto of radical homemaking. That's what this book really is--the why of people unplugging from our insane "extractive economy" and living life sanely and sustainably. This is not a how-to cookbook/fixit manual/gardening & livestock resource like The Encyclopedia of Country Living or Mother Earth News, it is a trenchant examination of how the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern marketing and consumerism plus the second wave of feminism in the USA have contributed to the unraveling of our families and our quality of life, and a manifesto for those working to break out and create a sustainable culture. For anyone male or female who has ever struggled to articulate why they have chosen to live a sustainable life and unplug from the consumer-culture Matrix, this is your book. It broke down years of feeling isolated in my choices, wondering if I was nuts/a loser/lacking in ambition for my lack of interest in a traditional career path. It has provided a roadmap for my husband and I on our journey toward satisfying and healthy work, life and community. Buy this book! It's worth it's weight in gold.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A Much Needed Perspective - I originally wrote this review for the July/August 2010 issue of the "Coop Scoop", the periodical newsletter of the Honest Weight Food Co-Op in Albany New York:
Up until now, we've known Shannon Hayes as a local farmer and the author of some of our Food
Co-Op's favorite recipe books. However, Hayes' new book, Radical Homemakers, took me
completely by surprise- to my everlasting delight.
Not content to fit snugly into any literary category, this book insists on being several
compelling things at once- each of them illuminating, transforming, and motivating the
reader in ways that continue to unfold long after the last page has been turned.
What you will NOT find in this book is how-to advice on making biscuits from scratch,
putting up the harvest, shortcuts for knitting or blueprints for a straw-bale home.
Instead, Radical Homemakers explores the deeper philosophical underpinnings of such
choices and the lives of several people who have made them. It is at once a clarion call
and an invitation to contemplate; an introduction to homemakers who've taken the radical
road, that we might better determine how we ourselves might fare if we joined their ranks.
Radical Homemakers, in a nutshell, are people who eschew the typical
American dependence on the extractive economy and instead choose to
focus on the home as a unit of production rather than consumption.
They make, grow, barter, share, and otherwise cultivate what they need rather than leave
the home to earn money with which to purchase what they need.
They lead bountiful, abundant,
and richly rewarding lives at about twice the US "poverty" level. How and
why they do so is revealed through a series of visits and interviews Hayes
conducted with twenty individuals and families across the country who are living the
Radical Homemakers lifestyle.
Both insightful and inciting, Radical Homemakers is a multivalent work. One
part takes a keen look at the early roots of domesticity as they intertwine
with the history of feminism in America, and how marketers used these
tensions to propagate the consumer-based economy in which most of America is
presently enmeshed. Intricately researched and written with the deft flair
of an accomplished storyteller, this section makes Hayes' erudite telling of our history
read like a well-spun novel. In fact, I often found myself pausing and looking around
for someone to whom I might say, "listen to this... "- it is without doubt a book you
will want to share.
Woven throughout are the stories of the Radical Interviewees; their sense of
abundance and relationships, the support they do and don't receive from their extended
families, and their responses to certain myths about
income-free living (regarding insurance, education, and retirement, among others). The
book is also strongly flavored by an ongoing contemplation of what constitutes "right
livelihood" among those who choose to participate in outside employment.
The book culminates with a consideration of the skills needed when making
the radical shift toward "homemakerism". Unlike the "handy" skills
mentioned above, the tools in the Radical Skill-Set spring from within; they
range from fostering community to developing fearlessness, and their
presence in these pages engenders a sense of "can-(indeed, must)-do-it-ness"
that is truly heartening.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
An Eye-Opening Look At Our Culture and Economy - According to Hayes, "Radical Homemakers are men and women who have chosen to make family, community, social justice and the health of the planet the governing principles of their lives. They reject any form of labor or the expenditure of any resource that does not honor these tenets." The resulting lives are both authentic and interesting.
Hayes organizes her book into two parts. The first part provides a history of domesticity and feminism and a critique of our current cultural and economic systems. In the second part, Hayes uses interviews with individuals who she believes live according to the tenets previously stated to show how Radical Homemakers live.
I will never be a Radical Homemaker. I need to have health insurance to feel secure and will not question whether my children should pursue higher education. Nevertheless, //Radical Homemakers// has value for people like me because it castes a new light on cultural assumptions and our "extractive" economy. For example, I will never look at processed food created by corporations in the same way and I will consider if new consumer goods will really make me happy or if I might be happier to work a bit less and spend more time with my family.
Reviewed by Annie Peters
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