The Cyclical Nature of Chores

Emma Wilkins' excellent piece "On Housecraft" in The Philosopher, discusses Helen Hayward's book, Home Work: Essays on Love & Housekeeping in such a compelling way as to provoke some thoughts without having actually read the book in question. So this is a critique of a review of a book I haven't read, but on a topic most of us relate to intimately.

Like me, and many of us, Wilkins hates cleaning and is working through how to make the drudgery more palatable. She's "more likely to make the bathroom less dirty than property clean." Likewise, to take the confessions even further, cobweb strands are clearly visible from where I'm currently sitting in my kitchen.

Wilkins and Haywood raise a long-standing struggle for fairness in this field and pin the problem on daily chores being beneath our dignity, so they explore elevating the art of cleaning and finding personal benefits in the work. These paths might help, but I wonder if it could also help to revere the battle around equity and to lower and ground this regular exertion.

NOBLE AND ADVANTAGEOUS EFFORTS 

Haywood has found a way to embrace housework as a method of demonstrating caring. As an artform, it can become a noble pursuit to have a well-kept home. Wilkins writes that our disdain for chores is relatively new as Aristotle recognized that,

"...'oikonomia' or 'household management' contributed to the wellbeing of the community, thereby serving a higher purpose. … It’s not surprising that, in a secular individualistic culture, cultivating servant-hearted humility holds little appeal. Work done in the home might not earn us money, or praise, or even gratitude. But the more we’re motivated by care, and love, the more noble the work is."

Avoiding the Sausage Machine

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I attended an excellent masterclass on "Trans-Inclusive Philosophy" with Sophie Grace Chappell last week, put on by The Philosopher magazine. She wrote Epiphanies and Transfigured, and this paper will be coming out in a collection soon. She discussed system-building in a way that lit some lightbulbs for me. I was waiting for the video to be posted before writing about it, but, in lieu of that, here's my transcription of it. 

She starts by responding to a call to build a theory of what gender, transgender, and gender identity are, and she clarifies the problems with gate-keeping off the bat. People will demand that before anyone's allowed to claim they're trans, they first have to define male and female, and she likens this to saying before you can sit on a chair and drink some tea, you first need to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for chair and for tea, which is just ridiculous and very dangerous.

More interesting to me is her second argument, that defining what counts as transgender butts up against bigger problems with any system building. She prioritizing experience over theory because any attempt at an overarching trans theory will inevitably leave someone out. She has her own idea of what fits her, but it won't fit everyone, and other people might have great definitions for themselves, but they don't entirely fit her, either.