What a Home Used to Be

Different people, in different places, believe very different things about what a home should be. I am going to try to say this carefully, because whichever side I lean towards, I will lose half my readers.

For most of human history, in most places, a home was the place where the adults worked and the children grew up, and most of that work and growing up happened together. The farm. The shop. The craft. The adults were there. The children were there. The extended family was nearby. The work of the home — the cooking, the cleaning, the caring — was a real job, mostly done by the women, and mostly considered important.

In the last century, this changed. Work left the home. The men went out to factories and offices. The women, in many places, stayed home and raised the children. Then, in the last sixty years, the women went out to work too.

This last change is one of the biggest in human history. It gave women freedoms and capacities they had never had. It gave the economy a workforce it had never had. It also changed the home.

Different traditions look at this change differently. Some see it as a liberation. Some see it as a loss. Some see it as both. Thoughtful people, including many thoughtful women, hold each of these views.

I am not going to tell you which is right. That is for you. What I will say is this: when the women went out to work, the work they had been doing at home did not disappear. The cooking, the cleaning, the raising of children, the holding of the extended family. Somebody still had to do all of it.

In some families, the men took on more. In some, the women did two jobs. In many, the work was outsourced to other women, paid to do it. In many others, the work simply did not get done. The family got thinner. The children were raised, for much of their waking hours, by people who were not their family. The old were housed somewhere else. The cousins scattered.

The home became a smaller thing. A place people slept, mostly. The things that used to happen in homes — the raising, the caring, the keeping of the family's memory — happened in other places, if they happened at all. Often, quietly, they did not.