Tackling Thanksgiving Tasks and Thinking about Womanhood
With gratitude to Dorothy Sayers
It’s that busy, beautiful pre-Thanksgiving time of year, when lists are long, new-bought groceries beckon with tantalizing culinary possibilities, and I at least think all manner of projects and jobs can be completed prior to the big feast that’s coming up. The tasks are here, and they are many. But there are times when the cheerful, rolled-up-sleeve optimist take can, in fact, dismantle small mountains—in this case, piles of papers to be sorted, bins of laundered clothes to be put away, stacks of dishes to be washed and dried and prepared to be used all over again (and likely multiple times, even before Thursday’s spread is ready). Various and sundry undone things require work, for harvest homes need order as well as delicious smells.
And here most of us are probably thinking of women in our lives—grandmothers, mothers, aunts, daughters, sisters, cousins, maybe even wives (hello, gentleman readers!). Women as a class tend to drift toward homemaking arts, be they planning or cleaning or cooking or baking or beautifying the home. You see the qualifier there, I hope; “tend to drift towards” does not mean “absolutely homogenously love.” For instance, while I crave cleanliness, I do not particularly enjoy filing papers. In fact, the only reason I do it is because it needs to be done, and I usually have to talk myself into it (and try to squash my tendencies to procrastinate said job even further). But I do cherish arranging my fall foliage and dishes to look attractive in my glass-fronted cupboards. I also love baking bread and pies. These to-dos are treats for me.
Dorothy Sayers, an early twentieth century writer and intellectual, understood the individual proclivities of women like me. In her 1938 address to a Women’s Society, she presented this idea with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek title, “Are Women Human?” Sayers already saw the problems with the inevitable changes in feminism from first-wave to second-wave, namely that feminists had already begun to miss the forest for the trees, so to speak. She said,
In reaction against the age-old slogan, “woman is the weaker vessel,” or the still more offensive, “woman is a divine creature,” we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: not that every woman is, in virtue of her sex, as strong, clever, artistic, level-headed, industrious and so forth as any man that can be mentioned; but, that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual [emphasis mine]. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
After all, women are human beings, and as such have our own individuality and things we like and prefer to do. “What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs,” Sayers went on, noting that both men and women tend to make these erroneous assumptions. So while the bulk of our Thanksgiving feasts will likely be planned and prepared by women, by no means is this universal. And our common sense tells us this. In our western society, we know that both men and women can be amazing cooks and bakers, and both men and women can be terrible cooks and bakers, depending on the individuals to whom we look. Believe me, you’d want Jon’s smoked turkey a million times over what my clueless efforts would produce (more like underdone or ashy turkey). And you’d want my homemade rolls over whatever floury concoctions he would make.
We women have more choices for how we use our hands now than Sayers and her contemporaries did, and this can be liberating as well as overwhelming. She clearly noted the problems with widespread assumptions about “women’s work” that her post-Victorian and industrial revolutionized society had produced. “It is perfectly idiotic,” she said,
to take away women’s traditional occupations [through household work being moved outside the home] and then complain because she looks for new ones. Every woman is a human being—one cannot repeat that too often—and a human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
For yes, as distasteful as work might be to us, we need it to discipline our sinful flesh and to shape us into the loving neighbors God calls us to be. Sayers understood that God created Adam and Eve in His image, and so all men and women are also dim reflections of our Creator. In this fallen world, humanity’s labor is both necessary for our survival and made manifest in our sanctified actions. This doesn’t make work fun, always or even usually, but it does humble us. Mary Wollstonecraft, an early Christian feminist who lived in the 1700s, wrote that
I . . . have vices, hid, perhaps, from human eye, that bend me to the dust before God, and loudly tell me, when all is mute, that we are formed of the same earth, and breathe the same element. Humanity thus rises naturally out of humility, and twists the cords of love that in various convolutions entangle the heart.
HT: “The Burden and the Gift,” an Eve Tushnet interview with Erika Bachiochi on The Rights of Women
As a Christian and as a woman, I see that my humanity is inextricably tied to my humility because He gives me love for the people He has placed around me—my husband, my children, my parents and siblings, my friends and neighbors. I can’t just live for myself, leaving piles to build and kids to scavenge for themselves and laundry to molder (though sometimes this happens because I can’t get all the work done). I still have my wants, but they are healthily constrained by neighborly needs. As Sayers observed, women want what men want: “interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet.” But my wants don’t make me human any more than my dislikes do. God made me a woman and a human, and He gives me work to do—tedious sometimes, but at its best, tasks in service to others that ultimately also enrich me.
I best get to it.
I discuss Sayers’ essay with Kate in our most recent discussion on the Penelope’s Loom Podcast. Check it out here.