Homemakers

I'm a former homemaker. I spent about two decades as a full-time homemaker and I think my oldest child was nineteen when I got my first full-time paid job during my divorce.

At some point, I read that there are programs for recovering homemakers, which inspired me to at some point have an explanatory page on this site introducing myself in the style of Alcoholics Anonymous as a recovering Pretty Young Thing. 

It probably made no sense to anyone else but me.

I'm a former military wife and so was my mom and my mom was descended from European nobility that sold the title at some point. Her mother's maiden name started with von which signifies nobility, so my mother never had a title and wasn't herself nobility, but she was inculcated with the values and expectations of the European ruling classes.

Historically in Europe, noble men were typically officers in the military. My sons tell me that historically in Europe, when the shit hit the fan and all the noble men were dead, you protected your remaining noble women as your only hope of having leadership available because the noble women were also educated and knew things the peasants didn't know.

Kind of like one of the Aliens vs Predators movies where someone says "Everyone keep HER alive." And someone makes a snarky remark about we can't afford chivalry in this situation and the comeback is to the effect of "No, stupid. She's the only one who can fly the helicopter. If SHE dies, none of us are getting out of here alive!"

I once wrote a piece about the military and women's rights that was wildly misinterpreted and maligned by some people on Hacker News and others did give pushback to that.

Big wars, like World War II and the Great War (AKA World War I), tend to improve women's rights. The Great War is why we went from hoop skirts and corsets in the late 1800s to flapper era mini dresses with loose waistlines. World War II gave us Rosie The Riveter, on site daycare to encourage moms to come to work and s women's baseball league as featured in the movie A League of their Own.

World War II was before television was the norm. Baseball games were broadcast via radio and team members were called by their surname or family name. Listening to a woman's baseball game on the radio was likely almost indistinguishable from listening to a men's baseball game via radio.

The piece I posted to Hacker News talked about the Greek Spartans, a highly militarized culture criticized by other Greek city-states for its outrageous feminism because in the absence of the men, women ran shops and farms etc. At some point, they concluded women were casting votes in the name of the husband and given there were no cell phones or email, most likely they weren't simply parroting the husband's opinion. 

When war takes men away, suddenly women are capable of doing a lot of things normally done by men and it tends to have a positive impact on women's defacto rights. To this day, American military wives who are nominally just homemakers in many cases typically have power of attorney so they can handle things for their husband when he deploys on short notice.

I suspect military wives are more empowered than your typical homemaker who probably doesn't have power of attorney, probably doesn't have to do "everything" on short notice when hubby suddenly leaves and who may never have to handle things like registering the car.

My understanding is The TAG Project was founded by a working woman in IT named Valorie King or she took it over shortly after someone else started it. She tried to turn a group of email lists into a registered nonprofit organization and expanded volunteer staff and I worked on it for a few months.

It was probably fall of 1999 when she put out a call for volunteers and December when she asked me to take on the role of lead moderator and board member. That would have me starting in that role in January 2000 and quitting probably in July 2000 after I came back from a month long trip and my energy was just not coming back and we had orders to move soon.

So while I didn't yet know it, it was already the beginning of a serious, lengthy and life-threatening medical crisis for me that involved about three and a half months of being mostly bedridden. 

In short, I was dying and didn't know it and it was my first serious professional position even though it was unpaid. For better or for worse, I gave her my unvarnished opinion on my way out the door even though I knew she was unlikely to take it seriously as constructive criticism intended to help her improve things.

I left all the tag lists and returned to just TAGMAX -- their homeschooling list -- at a later date while still deathly ill. The culture there continued to have elements I had introduced, though it was a shadow of what it had been when I was moderating TAGMAX.

My recollection is Kitt Finn owned the list at that time and had taken over ownership some time during my absence. Like me, she had been a board member during the brief time that Valorie King tried to make it into a nonprofit organization. I met her briefly once and I don't recall what we talked about. She put a stop to trying to make it a nonprofit and just kept it a voluntarily health and welfare organization (AKA a group of email lists with all volunteer staff).

She had been a traditional homemaker and raised something like five children total, some her biological offspring and some step kids. Her husband was Hispanic and likely a very traditional head of household and my impression is she was more sheltered than I was and never really washed that off so to speak.

It seems likely to me that my writing about raising gifted kids has never gotten traction because I gave Valorie King a piece of my mind and most likely Kitt Finn treats the email lists as if they still belong to Valorie King and she's just taking care of them, almost like a little wifey role.

I never knew Kitt Finn well. Like me, she had serious medical issues and she seemed sympathetic to my behavioral issues and made it clear that putting my emails on review wasn't intended as punishment but was as much to protect me as other people and she is the person who let my argumentative emails post while I was on review and taking issue with a published author with a PhD that I guess she had criticisms of herself but didn't know how to address it.

He was the lone man on TAGMAX -- the homeschooling list -- who figured out how to regularly open his mouth on list without having his head handed to him, as described in a piece I wrote called Predominantly Female Spaces that talks about how such spaces are not typically better about respecting female voices than more mixed gender or predominantly male spaces.

He actively promoted ridiculous garbage like "Literacy rates were HIGHER prior to public schools becoming a thing!" Which I stupidly parroted once on Hacker News only to be told what I actually already knew: AH HA HA HA HA, NO, fool!

It's highly problematic when men get traction in a group of mostly homemakers and full-time moms and are willing to learn on "I have an alphabet soup of letters after my name!" rather than best practices for supporting an argument in public.

I was a spitfire and my dad had all kinds of baggage about people with college degrees, so for some years, I had an obnoxious habit of being all "Oh, YOU have a PhD, do you? Then you should have no problem winning a meaty argument with little ol' me homemaker! Show your stuff, LOSER, or STFU!"

I was well aware people used to be routinely illiterate, but somehow being on an email list for gifted education full of obviously smart people drinking the Kool aid because HE has a PhD and because homemakers just don't learn something about something and because homeschoolers are given so much crap by people that everyone just cheered him on with his ludicrous claims led to me repeating this idiocy myself on Hacker News.

The reputation of homeschooling seems to be based on people homeschooling for religious reasons who frequently don't teach their children all that well. My homeschooling experience was rooted in a completely different environment. The gifted homeschooling community generally shared more rigorous academic materials than was typical for the age or grade level in question. But that's not generally public perception of homeschooling.

And this was a problem even within the online gifted community where on TAGFAM and TAGPDQ people somewhat often announced ahead of time "And DON'T suggest homeschooling as the solution!" because homeschoolers of gifted youth were frequently ardently promoting the idea that this is the absolute greatest thing since sliced bread! 

They were sincere and speaking from the heart, but a lot of people didn't want to hear that "pushed" at them as a solution and these lists didn't generally have best practices worked out for how to share information effectively without making people feel like you are cramming something down their throats and people take parenting suggestions super PERSONALLY and get very fighty, very quickly.

So TAGMAX was the only space where gifted homeschoolers felt like no one was hating on them and it helped this guy promote this ludicrous retcon of world history and that's part of why Kitt Finn allowed my arguments with him to post to the list. Most people on list didn't argue with him. They just clapped and then in spite of being smart and yadda themselves, then stupidly repeated this nonsense elsewhere sometimes -- even ME.

Because to some degree we all use rubrics like social proof, so, you know, PhD and published author plus several hundred smarty pants eating this nonsense up just makes a lot of people go "SEEMS LEGIT!!!" 

I'm pretty sure he inherited wealth and was a published author via owning the publishing house and self publishing because he once posted something on list that was like a sneak preview and -- weirdly to MY mind as a homemaker -- assured us it wouldn't get him in trouble with the publisher. I think I looked into it at that time and concluded "He owns the publishing house. He's covering that fact up to maintain the illusion that getting published is some kind of vetting process and proof of credibility."

He was male and knew how to play the game while having no meaningful vetting of his idiotic ideas. And part of that game involved getting a bunch of homemakers and full-time moms to go "SEEMS LEGIT!!!! SQUEE! Homeschooling is SUPERIOR to public school and always was! People hating on me are just assholes!"

And that sold books to other homeschooling parents no matter what bullshit was inside of them. 

Kind of like Patrick McKenzie making the leaderboard and turning that into income though he's not really all that and a bag of chips and then, having conned a bunch of movers and shakers, no one dares say "I tried his suggestion and got fired!" So the bullshit just gets repeated ENDLESSLY.

See also The Double or Triple Whammy for additional thoughts on some of the social dynamics that tend to shaft homemakers.