Professor: Environmental Movement Bad for Women
“back to the kitchen”
A professor from USC is arguing that the environmental movement is setting women back and she makes a pretty good point.
Jonathan Stimpson writes at the Cornell Daily Sun:
Professor Argues Increasing Focus on Environmentalism Has Negative Effect on Gender Roles
Modern environmentalism has a woman problem, Prof. Jennifer Bernstein, spatial sciences, University of Southern California, said in her lecture Wednesday.
Bernstein led her discussion on why the link between gender and environmentalism may not be as benign as has been previously thought.
She said that the contemporary green movement — led by the work of food writer Michael Pollan — has become over-consumed with the promotion of a pastoral, de-industrialized ideal that emphasizes biking, freshly-prepared food and a return to nature.
“Today, a growing chorus of voices argues that to be proper environmentalists and nurturing parents, each night should involve a home-cooked meal of fresh, organic, unprocessed ingredients,” Bernstein said.
But this “back to the kitchen” approach to environmentalism, she argued, ignores financial realities, setting an unrealistic expectation for females who have just recently began to achieve economic independence from the domestic sphere.
“At a moment in our history when increasing numbers of women have liberated themselves from many of the demands of unpaid domestic labor, prominent environmental thinkers are advocating a return to the very domestic labor that stubbornly remains the domain of women,” she said.
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and they eat their own.
And to think that yesterday I canned a seemingly endless number of jars of green beans, jalapeno peppers, and carrots. I thought I did it out of love for my family and not wanting all that food I grew to go tow waste. Little did I know that I was falling into the trap of unpaid domestic labor that these feminists fight so much against. According to them I assume the proper behavior was for me to have left the food rot in the ground. Oh well, I guess I’m just making myself into a wonderful wife for my lucky spouse.
It just goes to show that sometimes when you really want a home-cooked meal the surest way to obtain it may be to go home and cook it.
Of course, it’s been a long time since anyone was permitted to just sit down and eat something. Because everything, absolutely everything all the way down to a PB&J (was that organic PB? On whole-grain bread?) simply must become a political act.