Don't look now, but "femivores" are back in the news. Femivores, if you recall, are women who embrace ultra-local food production as feminist statement. Usually this involves some kind of light farming or heavy gardening, possibly some chickens. It's only a matter of time before the New York Times Magazine does a feature on urban beekeeping as a feminist statement. A couple weeks ago, Peggy Orenstein argued in those pages that keeping your own chickens is the cutting edge of feminism:

 

"Four women I know—none of whom know one another—are building chicken coops in their backyards. … Apparently it is no longer enough to know the name of the farm your eggs came from; now you need to know the name of the actual bird. All of these gals—these chicks with chicks—are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the work force to care for kith and kin. … Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. […] Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide a family’s basic needs—not to mention to guard against job loss, catastrophic illness, divorce or the death of a spouse. Femivores suggest that knowing how to feed and clothe yourself regardless of circumstance, to turn paucity into plenty, is an equal—possibly greater—safety net." [NYT]

As I wrote in an earlier post, women are not going to upset the patriarchy by piling on more labor-intensive chores. Instead, women should be fighting for the free time to pursue their own interests, whether it's gardening or something else.

Today, Echidne of the Snakes addresses another facet of the same trend: "reclaiming" traditional feminine handicrafts, like knitting, as a feminist statement. Echidne wonders why today's young women are embracing something that earlier generations regarded as drudgery.

It's a paradox. Here's my attempt at a resolution. Liberation has two components: objective and subjective. Objective liberation is about concrete gains in the real world like expanding rights, passing laws, raising wages, expanding opportunities, etc. In order to fully enjoy the fruits of objective liberation, however, members of oppressed groups must also subjectively liberate themselves from the self-hatred and reflexive deference has been drilled into them from birth.

Some women find it liberating to openly embrace the feminine and the domestic because it's a way of defying the old gendered value system that says that anything feminine is automatically inferior. It's analogous to minority groups reviving their lost languages. Is writing poetry in the heretofore dead language of your ancestors really going to make your group more objectively free?  Probably not. On the other hand, there's a huge psychological boost that comes with reveling in an identity that the dominant group has branded as illegitimate.