As a teenage girl, I spent about ninety percent of my time imaging what life was going to look like when I was free to do whatever I wanted to do. The one single space I had any control over was my bedroom.
I printed out images of women smoking at a French cafes. I draped fairy lights and Nepalese peace flags on my walls (even though I didn’t know what they meant.)
Most teenage boys rooms I saw were bare, almost hospital like, except for maybe a signed sports jersey mounted on the wall. For those unlucky enough to step into an all straight male share house in their early twenties, you have seen the depressing absence of the feminine in physical form.
What about the feminine equals good at nesting?
For centuries, women were and still are confined to the domestic space. She is expected to fulfil her responsibilities inside the home. She lives to pre-empt and fulfil the needs of others, while her own desires are deemed unimportant.
Women generally used to be much more financially dependent on their husbands which makes them vulnerable to abuse. They lacked the resources to support themselves or their family, trapping them inside their own life. Many women of many cultures live imprisoned by the societal pressures of what it means to be a mother, a wife and a woman. Her life sentence is spent washing, scrubbing, holding, sweeping, chopping, stirring and wiping until they must do it all again without reprieve.
Mary Poppins (1964)
My best friend Audrey, an extremely intelligent social worker and Uni lecturer (Hi Audrey), once pointed out to me that being blasé about being married to my boyfriend was a matter of privilege. The importance of marriage to some women is about survival. Being married to the father of their children guarantees his financial responsibility to them and makes it more difficult for him to abandon the family.
Women who are financially independent are half as likely to experience abuse as women who are not.
(2011 study by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) titled "Financial Empowerment and Domestic Violence.)
Many women have gained financial independence. The ability to earn and control our own money has given us more power within the home, and also the ability to leave. And now for some, associating women with domesticity at all can be seen as offensive.
For a brief or exceptionally long period of time, depending on where you live, our homes simultaneously served as safehouses from a global pandemic as well as containers for our depression.
However complicated the relationship between us may be, the home can be seen as a canvas for creativity. We can spend our hard earned money on seemingly insignificant but beautiful trinkets, we light candles and incense and prowl Marketplace for decorative pieces we are told we “don’t need.”
No matter what gender we are, taking care of the home (if done in the right headspace) can be utilised as a mindful practice. Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes in Women Who Run With Wolves: to do laundry is cleansing ourselves. We wash “the fibres of our being,” and scrub our identities for “the renewal, the revivifying” of our persona.
Sweeping the floor keeps our “psychic energy uncluttered.” By cooking, we are engaging in a kind of alchemy to nourish our physical bodies while also feeding the psyche.
If you are someone who spends their time watching “sunday reset” tiktoks while a pile of dishes and dusty skirting boards await you, you understand the emotional relief cleaning can bring a tired soul.
Our creative pursuits are just as important as our domestic chores or our jobs. In the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, she recommends washing up or potting plants (etc) as a way to stoke the creative fire. Domestic chores can be seen as necessary in the practice of presence, by cleansing old energies and inviting in something new by making space within your home as well as your psyche.
“In dreams, the symbol of a house comments on the organisation of the psychic space a person inhabits, both consciously and unconsciously.”
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Redmond Treehouse - photo by machumbi
We still struggle with the equal dividing up of domestic tasks when living with a partner in heterosexual relationships. Perhaps a partner will do some of the physical chores, there is also the invisible work of the ‘mental load’ which involves managing a household, e.g. remembering important dates, organising schedules, writing lists, anticipating needs. (Then add the constant reminding of these things.)
In 1981, sociologist Arlie Hochschild published her book, The Second Shift, which explored the unequal division of household labour between men and women. Hochschild's research found that women, even those who worked full-time outside the home, were still responsible for the majority of household chores and childcare. This additional work, which Hochschild called the "second shift," often left women feeling exhausted, resentful, and undervalued.
No wonder we feel territorial over the design of our domain. He rolls his eyes when we come back from the market with more plants. We groan dramatically when he objects to moving around the furniture, and we simply ignore him when he points out how much something suddenly extremely necessary costs. Then we huff and puff when he, for some reason, buys a hideous little statue and wants to place it on the mantelpiece.
(Then you feel bad about it so you let him put the statue there. As a joke, you point it out when someone comes over. You seethe at how entertained the guests are by it.
They are so enthralled by it that it becomes a personal joke between them and him that devours all the time they would have spent complimenting the rest of your home. The ugly little statue completely eclipses the gratitude they may or may not express for the hours in which you spent cleaning, cooking and intricately decorating the dinner table for their arrival.)
Women are made fun of by our counterparts for being irrationally territorial over the design of our homes. Considering how much of a woman's life is questioned, scrutinised, bartered, controlled - perhaps letting a woman reign over her personal space is only a fraction of the compensation she should receive.
Perhaps this is the reason men generally are less interested in crafting their own little world at home, since the outside world is already theirs.
Women love creating Pinterest boards and buying flowers that will die in two days. It makes us happy. We enjoy prancing around fluffing pillows and watering the plants. Without this creative spirit, we continue to be domesticated women. It is our privilege to afford our own trinkets and to have the time and energy to transform a blank space into a curated museum.
We have spent our lives shaping ourselves to fit the environment. As our space graciously shapes itself to us, adorning our domain becomes a form of payback.
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