Homeward Bound Quotes

“Sweden had paternity-leave policies in place for years but found that few men were taking advantage of the benefit. While women felt comfortable taking time off to be with baby, men worried that they would look less dedicated to their careers if they did the same. So the Swedish government implemented a “use it or lose it” policy, mandating that the country’s thirteen-month parental leave cannot only be used by one parent – the other parent must use at least two months of the leave, or both lose those months entirely. Today 85% of Swedish fathers take paternity leave. The policy has helped redefine notions of masculinity and femininity in the already-egalitarian country.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“If women cut back on their ambitions en masse, institutional change will never happen and the glass ceiling will lower. We need to be there to demand equal pay, mandatory maternity leave, more human hours. Leaving the “dirty work” of working to the men is a way of muffling our own voices.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“The problem is that the media rarely discusses the real reasons behind why women leave their jobs. We hear a lot about the desire to be closer to the children, the love of crafting and gardening, and making food from scratch. But reasons like lack of maternity leave, lack of affordable day care, lack of job training, and unhappiness with the 24/7 work culture-well, those aren't getting very much airtime.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“when affluent, educated parents decide to homeschool, public schools lose out on involved PTA parents and capable school-improvement advocates. Or when parents spend all their money and energy searching for the best organic baby products, there’s little energy left to lobby for consumer product regulations that might benefit everyone.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“[Judith Warner:] Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“A privileging of individual rights over group goods can lead to serious problems, as we’ve seen with the antivaccination movement.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Being a stay-at-home mom to one child, a baby, when you’re a mom of one is not really a full-time job,” she says sotto voce, as if revealing a dirty secret. “You’ve got a lot of other time. I think that’s where all the canning and the cloth diapering and that frenzy comes in. You have this time vacuum. It really isn’t that hard to look after one kid all day long.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Does the burden of “do it yourself” fall harder on women than men?”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“[Joan C. Williams] Food has always been a class code, and since Alice Waters, the way to give an upper-middle class act is with food that is fresh and local...The class code of the upper-middle class literally links morality and political virtue with certain forms of high-intensity food-preparation activities.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“[Leslie Bennett] You have a teenager who desperately wants to separate...If you don't have a career, these New Domesticity types are likely to find themselves standing in the kitchen with all these domestic skills and no outlet for them, no way to earn a living.... [A]t that point your kids are not thanking you for having made the hand-pureed baby food and for giving them homemade cookies. They don't feel you've done them a big favor; they say, "Why didn't she ever grow up and take responsibility for her own life?”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Many men no longer want to be identified just by their jobs," said Bengt Westerberg, the country's former deputy prime minister.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Gardening and making your own soap and home-birthing your babies are fine, but these are inherently limited actions. If we want to see genuine food safety, if we want to see sustainable products, if we want to see a better women's health system, and if we want these things for everyone, not just the privileged few with the time and education to DIY it, then we need large social changes.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Choosing a simpler life does not offer me a paycheck, a pat on the back from the parents who paid for a “wasted” education, or reassurance from my feminist upbringing that screamed “You can be anything you want to be—and you damn well better want a career because we FOUGHT to shatter that glass ceiling for you, honey!” But what it does offer is worth more than any amount of money or recognition to me—the chance to fight for a shockingly healthy, lasting marriage, the opportunity to sit and sip tea while my child brings me book after book to read to her rather than hearing her day recounted to me by a daycare worker and the endless putterings and ponderings that my kitchen, my community, my Netflix subscription, my library and my backyard have to offer. Do I sit in my pajamas some days and eat homemade ice cream and accomplish very little? Absolutely. But am I blissfully happy, intellectually fulfilled and physically healthy while doing so? I’d have to say, resoundingly, yes. So no, my feminism is not squelched, but rather best expressed through an occupation that I find vital to the authentic sustenance of my family and community.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Why is it we don’t intervene in the bureaucracy?” asks Chris Bobel, the gender studies scholar, who has noted that many young activists prefer “DIY activism” – making art, changing their own consumer habits, making their own products rather than buying corporate ones. They tell her, “We don’t want to be in bed with the enemy,” she says. “That’s not where change happens. That’s old-school activism. We’re all about DIY’”. Bobel sighs. “A lot of these activists weren’t even registered voters.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Golden sees parental uninterest in collective solutions as part of a larger “decline in the social contract”… "As a scholar, I'm very disturbed that we have more [media] articles about toxins in the home than the fact that we don’t have universal prenatal care, she says. “We’ve moved from collective concern about infant and child welfare into this very privatized focus on “my child” and this intensive child-rearing.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“But she realized that modern homemaking could be creatively fulfilling in a way she'd never imagined. Unlike previous generations of housewives, who Erika imagines were bored and dissatisfied, Erika says women her age treat the duties of the home as outlets for their creativity.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“My grandfather so throughly considered cooking to be "women's work" that he wouldn't even enter the kitchen to get his own glass of water. My husband, born sixty-one years after my grandfather, shows his love by bringing me coffee every morning and whipping up chocolate-chip cookies for friends' birthday parties. I think it's fair to say that few young men these days feel less masculine for knowing their way around a kitchen.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“In progressive, middle-class circles these days, there's the overwhelming sense that procuring and cooking freshest, healthiest, most sustainably sourced food should be a top priority for any thinking person.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Jean Railla puts it even more bluntly: "Workplaces are still very sexist--it's hard to be a woman in the workplace.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“For women with children, the new handmade economy offers the tantalizing possibility of flexible, part-time, at home work--the "egg money" of the twenty-first century.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“We grow up going to school, where you get a gold star, you get the A-plus," she says. "At work you're constantly being evaluated. Then you become a homemaker and suddenly nobody is giving you feedback. Suddenly no one is paying attention to what you're doing. Blogging is a way to get this validation from other people. You put up a recipe and people go, 'Hey, that's a great photograph.'" Clearly blogs can give emotional value to housework. But if a blogger is actually making money from a blog, even a little bit of money, it cane make the blog even more validating.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“I was in need of some community," she said. "I think that's the reason so many women bloggers start blogging, just to find someone out there who knows what they're going through.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“Dozens of my own friends and acquaintances--ambitious, educated women who might have turned up their noses at anything domestic had they been born a generation earlier--have blogs dedicated to cupcakes or knitting or vintage home decor.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity