{"id":267,"date":"2010-03-13T09:51:37","date_gmt":"2010-03-13T09:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/roddreher\/2010\/03\/chicken-keeping-as-a-feminist-act.html"},"modified":"2010-03-13T09:51:37","modified_gmt":"2010-03-13T09:51:37","slug":"chicken-keeping-as-a-feminist-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/roddreher\/2010\/03\/chicken-keeping-as-a-feminist-act.html","title":{"rendered":"Chicken keeping as a feminist act"},"content":{"rendered":"

Attention Julie Dreher! Attention Leonore Owsley! Attention Jacqueline Hill! Attention all hen-keeping women of the blogosphere! Did you know that keeping chickens is a feminist act? <\/a>The New York Times Magazine says so. Excerpt:<\/p>\n

All of these gals — these chicks with chicks — are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the work force to care for kith and kin. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: the omnivore’s dilemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper. “Prior to this, I felt like my choices were either to break the glass ceiling or to accept the gilded cage,” says Shannon Hayes, a grass-fed-livestock farmer in upstate New York and author of “Radical Homemakers,” a manifesto for “tomato-canning feminists,” which was published last month.
\nHayes pointed out that the original “problem that had no name” was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not changed — an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic dependence on your husband — only now, bearing them was considered a “choice”: if you felt stuck, it was your own fault. What’s more, though today’s soccer moms may argue, quite rightly, that caretaking is undervalued in a society that measures success by a paycheck, their role is made possible by the size of their husband’s. In that way, they’ve been more of a pendulum swing than true game changers.
\nEnter the chicken coop.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More:<\/p>\n

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?
\nThere is even an economic argument for choosing a literal nest egg over a figurative one. Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide a family’s basic needs — not to mention to guard against job loss, catastrophic illness, divorce or the death of a spouse. Femivores suggest that knowing how to feed and clothe yourself regardless of circumstance, to turn paucity into plenty, is an equal — possibly greater — safety net. After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing.<\/a>
\nIf you ask me, the mighty Sharon Astyk <\/a>is the Betty Friedan of the femivores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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