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Domestic Bliss

Homemaking as a 'Radical' Choice  Homemaking as a 'Radical' Choice Three times Shannon Hayes applied for graduate study at Cornell, and thrice she was turned away. The last time, just forty-eight hours elapsed between her interview and the arrival of a rejection letter in her mailbox on a dirt road in rural Schoharie County. So […]

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Homemaking as a 'Radical' Choice
 

Homemaking as a 'Radical' Choice

Three times Shannon Hayes applied for graduate study at Cornell, and thrice she was turned away. The last time, just forty-eight hours elapsed between her interview and the arrival of a rejection letter in her mailbox on a dirt road in rural Schoharie County. So Hayes picked up the phone and called Thomas Lyson, then the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Development Sociology and a member of the admissions committee. "You've made a terrible mistake," she told him. "Cornell is a land-grant university and I'm a New York State farmer. You owe me an education." It was a line of argument that Lyson, author of Civic Agriculture and a champion of family farms, couldn't reject. He made a few calls and by the time he was done, Hayes had full funding for her studies—a master's overseen by Lyson, who passed away in 2007, and subsequently a PhD in sustainable agriculture and community organizing.

Hayes, PhD '01, considered a career in academia; she even had an offer from the University of New Hampshire. Then—inspired by the book Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez—she and her husband, artist Bob Hooper, did the math. Even on two professional incomes, by the time they added a second car, wardrobe, and the myriad other expenses associated with dual careers, they'd come out only $10,000 ahead. Ultimately, she says, "we cared more about quality of life."

Shannon Hayes 

Hayes consulted her parents, who own Sap Bush Hollow Farm, the 160-acre grass-fed livestock operation in the Catskills where she was raised. "I told them, 'I don't think I can afford a job,'" she recalls. "There was dead silence." Soon after, Hayes and Hooper bought a small fixer-upper near the farm and started blazing a different trail. When Hayes isn't staffing the family's farmers' market stand, repairing fences, tending livestock, canning summer's harvest for winter meals, cutting and wrapping meat, or homeschooling her two daughters, the thirty-six-year-old, third-generation farmer writes. Her latest book, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, took the author on a road trip from rural Alaska and Vermont to inner-city Chicago and Los Angeles. Along the way, she interviewed families like hers who have opted out of the mainstream American dream: high-status careers, fancy suburban houses, private schools, brand-name fashions, and new cars. Instead, they set their own benchmarks, which Hayes boils down to cultivating family, community, social justice, and environmental sustainability.

The first half of Radical Homemakers analyzes the economic role of families as units of production in early American history, the transition to an emphasis on consumption, and the political and cultural implications of rejecting that lifestyle. In its second half, Hayes details how the twenty families she interviewed forged an alternative. They run home-based businesses, put up produce, repair their own cars, build their own furniture (and sometimes even their homes), sew their own clothes, make yogurt, pickles, and bread. Most thrive on incomes of $40,000- $50,000 a year; what they lack in cash they make up through trading, bartering, and sharing. When what Hayes calls the "extractive" economy crashed in 2008, most of the families she interviewed barely noticed. "On trains traveling across the country, I'd talk to people and hear their panic and despair," says the author. "But these homes were at peace, balanced. They were tied to a life-serving economy, not an extractive economy—and their economy wasn't failing them."

In a March 2010 New York Times essay, Peggy Orenstein coined the term "femivore" to describe women like Hayes. "Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide a family's basic needs," she wrote. "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. After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy: the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?"

Clad in the same green Carhartt work pants and long-sleeved plaid button-down she wore for morning chores, Hayes sinks into a rocker on the front porch of her parents' sprawling farmhouse. While the older couple is out of town, Hayes and Hooper are tending the turkeys, laying hens, broilers, sheep, and pigs. It's mid-August—the height of harvest season— and already the couple has put up twenty-eight quarts of green beans, a half-bushel of home-made jalapeño poppers and more than thirty quarts of pickled beets. A bushel of sweet corn, a bushel of blueberries, and twenty quarts of strawberries fill the freezer. Soon they'll turn their attention to peaches and tomatoes. "There's very little differentiation between work and play in this lifestyle. How can you spend a morning watching the mist rise and not feel moved to prayer and celebration and joyousness?" Hayes muses. "I'm doing what I love."

— Sharon Tregaskis '95

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