In Praise of Housewives
(Why Housewives are so much more socially useful than women with “brilliant” careers – and memories of my Yiddishe Grandma)
Feminism taught us that women who had careers stood at the very zenith of the female sex, saving the world while housewives made a fetish out of highly polished plates that could double as mirrors and agonized over one cubic centimeter of dust on the living room carpet.
Feminists taught at that women with careers always did such terribly important things. Female lawyers could defend the right of industries to pollute rivers with carcinogens. Female advertisers could convince Americans to drink more, smoke more, buy more wasteful cars and could serve the nation by being a second male sex – as if one male sex weren’t enough. Females could be Leona Helmsley, who in her queenly conspicuous consumption and sadism seemed the offspring of Cleopatra and a general of the Third Reich. Females who worked embraced the ethos of capitalism which, at root, comes down to this: Buy something worth 20 dollars, convince some poor shnook to buy it for 50 dollars, and you too can be a blood-sucking money-making son, or daughter, of a bitch.
Feminists taught us that housewives did wasteful, stupid work fit for peasants. For example, housewives were leaders in volunteer work, and when the sixties died, we all learned that volunteer work was for losers. Housewives did all that stupid stuff that no one paid for. They were the premier organizers and foot soldiers of the March of Dimes, which fought against polio and later birth defects; the Women’s strike for peace, which, in the early Sixties, brought attention to the mounting levels of radioactive isotypes in the environment and prompted Kennedy and the Soviets to sign the test ban treaty; and the anti-War campaigns of Gene Mc Carthy, Robert Kennedy and George Mc Govern and were the only group of Americans, save the students, who opposed the Vietnam war at the outset. By contrast, feminists taught us that women are so much more valuable to society when they become cookie-cutter copies of men, adopt a G.I. Joe frame of mind, and serve in the armed forces so they can kill and be killed for the greater glory of Uncle Sam.
We also learned that life could be so much more expeditious and organized if we all learned to live in one huge sterile dormitory instead of a home. This may seem strange, but I feel this most acutely with respect to food and the way we eat. In recent times, American cuisine may have reached the stellar heights of utter gustatory magnificence, but none of it seems as good and as fine as the food my Grandmother made.
My Grandmother was born in Russian-occupied Poland in 1898. She was a Jew born into a poverty-stricken Jewish family that suffered a shortage of bread and a superfluity of blows and scars from Christian bullies convinced that we used the blood of Christian children to make Matzoh. When the family came to America, they finally could buy food in abundance. My grandmother, who knew that the family should shield itself from a cruel and heartless world, never felt a scintilla of shame for taking care of her children and cooking them fine food.
Whenever I eat chicken soup sold by a goddamn restaurant, it always seems like hot saline solution with lots of yellow die (That’s a Freudian slip; I mean to say dye) compared to the fragrant broth made by my Grandmother. A local “Jewish” deli, known as Sarge’s (They have pork on their menu; all of capitalism is a fraud), will sell you a pint of the aforementioned hot, yellow salt solution for $9.95. Man, lets call it hot piss, and put me in a time capsule and take me to Brooklyn, circa 1948, and give me Kasha and Kishka and Kasha Varnishkas.
Sarges has other Jewish savories and sweets, but they bear the sins of just about everything else one can purchase in a restaurant. Everything is a goddamn rip off compared to what someone who loves you will cook. The Chinese restaurants will serve you sweet and sour shrimp made from shrimps so scrawny they apparently were mated with ants but appear larger as they have been encased in an enormous, soggy coat of batter. The Spanish restaurants will give you one slice of meat, a couple of millimeters thick, sitting atop a mound of rice so thoroughly congealed that it resembles concrete.
Things really got rotten in earnest around 1980, when Reagan ascended to the throne and feminism and hyper capitalism seemed to come to an accord of sorts. The new republican administration deemed that schools would not have to serve vegetables for lunch because Ketchup qualified as a vegetable. Food, even if it was upscale and elegant, scaled new heights of barbarism. People developed a fetishistic preoccupation with chips and would drink beer and chips and the salty, fatty, fried and ulcerating chips escalated in price almost as steeply as the rental prices for rat-infested studio apartments in New York. Actually, in what some people think is a sign of my paranoia, but which I think is a testament to my imaginative Marxian flashes of brilliance, I think that food critics pushed certain foods because of what they could do for culinary capitalists, notwithstanding that the food was unhealthy and crummy to boot.
A few years ago, it suddenly became really chic and cool to eat Mexican food, and it was a massive scam because the foodstuffs that go into Mexican food are cheap, but after a food critic gave the shit a rave review, a restaurant in Manhattan could give the food a huge mark-up and charge an arm and a leg for the chow. Obviously, they would not sing the glories of lobster because restaurants would have to spend much more money to buy lobster. Quite frankly, I would bet a very large sum of money that 97 percent of Mexicans would choose lobster over tacos.
By contrast, when a grandmother or mother is giving you grub, her primary impetus is not to rob your wallet. However, in this feminist, capitalist dystopian world, how we eat is of no consequence.
Orthodox Jews used to say that a Jewish woman, in taking care of her children and Husband, and in cooking. cleaning and making a Kosher home, got closer to G-d than a man who utters a thousand prayers at the Eastern Wall. And I think of this as my mouth secretes saliva like tears as I recall the succulent foods my Grandmother made, the Kreplachs that are to Matzoh balls (apparently the only Jewish soup deracinated American Jews ever heard of) what Challah is to white bread, the ruby red Russian borscht of strikes and smokestacks, the shmaltz on rye bread, I ate after playing ball, to tide me over till dinner.
And when my Grandmother got senile, her three children took her money, made her eligible for Medicaid, and she lived for another two and a half years in a miserable nursing home. But liberated, feminist women know that their “brilliant” careers are so much more important than their dying Mothers.