Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

Two hectic—and expensive!—days

by

Good grief, these past two days have been hectic! And expensive: I’ve mortgaged my patrimony to renew my wardrobe.

The state sent me a notice saying I had to get a new photo for my driver’s license. Some time back, the State of Arizona decided testing and retesting people for driver’s licenses was just too much government intrusion, and so they instituted long, long renewal periods. Now instead of making your renew your license every few years, they make you get a new photo once every twelve years. No driver’s test: just a photo. When you reach the age of 65, you have to take a vision test and renew your license, after which you have to renew every five years.

The state has laid off workers in every department, including DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles). Some of my students reported waits as long as four hours.

So I carried the 439 pages of proofs I’ve been editing with me to the closest DMV office, 11.3 miles from my house, and prepared to settle in for the long haul.

The wait and the process of jumping through hoops wasn’t as time-consuming as expected. After sitting for a few minutes—not long enough to get a running start on editing copy—I was called to a desk where I was made to fart around with a form. Fortunately, they didn’t give me any argument: we’re told that if they can’t find your photo in their system, you’ll have to prove you’re a U.S. citizen, and so I had to dig out my birth certificate and carry it with me. Then it was off to sit in line to get a new photo—here, too, I barely got started reading copy before they hauled me up to the camera. Sit and wait again while they processed the new piece of plastic.

Took a good look at it and saw the expiration date was still May 7, 2010. Back to the front desk: “How do I get this thing renewed?” They had failed to do the eye test when I showed up, and so I had to start over and jump through all those hoops again!!!

It took two hours to go through the whole damn process twice.

I had already decided that since I was going to be on the west side, I would go up to the strip mall near Arrowhead (home of the highest per-capita proportion of millionaires in the Phoenix urban area) that houses a Talbot’s, a Chico’s, and a B’Gauze, two of which normally have clothes that fit me. My clothes are all falling apart, because I haven’t bought anything other than an occasional pair of Costco jeans since last March, and at that time it was only a couple of shirts and a pair of socks. Otherwise, the last time I bought decent clothes was in 2007.

At Talbot’s and Chico’s, every stitch I put on made me look like a potato sack tied in the middle. Talbot’s was particularly discouraging, because their clothes used to fit me. I’ve put on weight, no question of it: about five pounds since 2007. And I’m getting saggy because I spend way too much time parked in front of the computer. But it doesn’t seem like a five-pound gain should cause every skirt, every blouse, and every pair of pants to look dumpy on me. After all, I haven’t gone up a size in jeans.

Chico’s clothes have never fit me, so I wasn’t surprised. I found one shirt, for which they charged me $64. Talbot’s used to carry great clothing—understated, classic, and perfectly fitting—but when the company changed its look, the wonderful fit went away. So, IMHO, did the good looks of the outfits Talbot’s used to sell. Which, I suppose, explains why I haven’t bought anything there in a while. I did pick up a knit shirt on sale: $24. When I wore it today, the dye rubbed off on my white pants.

B’Gauze carries light cotton gauze outfits that are great in the summer. But because they’re shapeless and loose, they look like what they are: fat lady clothes. That notwithstanding, I bought a decent blue skirt, very flowing and airy, plus two white shirts, one that looked great with the skirt and one in the same artist’s-smock style as a turquoise shirt I already own and love, which is wearing out. The bill: $194.

These two expeditions consumed half the day.

Then it was back to the house to read copy until 5:30, when I had to race up to the college to attend a workshop in the new BlackBoard version 9. As we’ve observed, BlackBoard is one of life’s prime time-wasters, and the new version is changed enough to require one to diddle away a great deal of time figuring out how to operate it. So that sucked up the whole evening.

By the time I got home, Cassie had hunger-barfed all over the living room floor, a fine ending to a tedious day. Well, not quite: I worked into the night to finish reading proofs—the copy was a tangled mess that apparently was never edited, the content tedious drivel that left one wondering who at the press has the author as his sister-in-law. Because I had to return the copy to the client today, I plowed through to the end of that, finishing around 1:00 a.m.

This morning it was off to the Friday classes, which mercifully end at 11:30 because the 101 section meets only on Mondays and Wednesdays. From the college, I had to drive into Tempe to meet Tina and pick up a batch of completed work. From there, it was up to mid-town Scottsdale to return her project and mine to the client.

On the way home, I had to pass Scottsdale Fashion Square. M’hijito has been wanting a sideboard, so I thought I’d drop by Crate and Barrel to see if they had anything. Or, more to the point, if anything was on sale.

No, and no on those two counts.

However, Dillard’s was having a bra-fitting event. The wait was half an hour, so I tracked down a much-needed bra and underpants on my own.

In my old age, I’ve come to find underwire brassieres singularly uncomfortable. The decrepit wireless numbers I have are worn out and leave me sagging and bouncing. Cheap bras are even more uncomfortable than good bras—the ones I bought in a package of three from Costco ride up, gouge, itch, and hurt. I tried on three bras in the $25 range and ended up buying a $60 Wacoal, another of the few clothing brands that now fit me. By the time the bargain panties were added in, the bill came to $93.

I wasn’t happy at having to pay sixty bucks for one bra, when I really need two or three bras. Oh well.

I found a pretty belt in Dillard’s notions department, another item that I’ve been needing: $17.

Then I decided to visit J. Jill, which sometimes carries linen clothes that sort of fit me. After Thursday’s miserable experiences at Talbot’s and Chico’s, I was pretty discouraged with trying on clothes. Nevertheless, I wrestled myself into a few things—the arm is still quite sore, and pulling things on and off can elicit quite the jab of pain. I found…

• An ankle-length knit dress with pleated front and near-empire waist that does a nice job of hiding the flab, lumps, and bumps. Matter of fact, it looks very nice.

• A plain black knee-length knit dress that also reveals no cellulite and hides the fat very nicely. Comfortable and socially acceptable. Perfect for church and general out and about.

• A black linen maxi-skirt that despite being a size 10 fits well around the flabby waist as well as around the capacious rear end. Astonishing!

• A white knee-length linen dress that feels like it has its own air-conditioning built in. Good for summer; also disguises the fat effectively.

• A pair of linen cropped pants that fit adequately and are not jeans, a style of which I am becoming royally sick.

• A white knot-button linen shirt with the same air-conditioning qualities, very nice with the black skirt and with the linen pants.

• A tie-died knit cotton maxi dress that also does a pretty good job of disguising the fat and the sags.

• A linen jean jacket which looks cute with the tie-died dress, works OK with the capris, and will look great with the endless collection of Costco jeans. And in the sort of shabby-chic style currently in vogue, it sort of works with the pleated maxi dress and the black skirt.

I needed these things very much, except for the jean jacket. I’ve been wearing the same two pairs of old washable wool slacks to church, week after week after week, and the Costco jeans have become so ubiquitous I wear them to teach in and sometimes sneak them into church. I had one rather gaudy casual skirt—a survivor of some long-ago trip to B’Gauze—and two ancient Eileen Fisher outfits, one of which has been resewn and has to be pinned together to accommodate the crumbling elastic in the waistband.

The bill for all this stuff? $730.

The J. Jill ladies gave me a coupon discount plus $73 off for opening a J. Jill charge account.

I really didn’t want to open an account there. However, these maneuvers cut the bill to $613; taxes raised the bottom line to a breathtaking $662.

Holy mackerel. I’ve never spent that much on clothes in my life. On the other hand, it is objectively true that just about everything in my closet is shot except for the dozen pairs of Costco jeans, one of which was now smeared with red dye from the Talbot’s pullover.

Well, I figured, I can afford it. There’s $3,300 in the savings account set aside for just such purchases as these, plus FaM cranked $450 on the late, great traffic spike: AdSense owes me more than enough to cover the bill.

Yesh. That’s what I thought.

Then I pulled in the driveway and got the mail.

The air-conditioning company sent a bill for the work they did at the downtown house: five hundred and eighty-seven bucks!!!!

Damnation!

Well, M’hijito says he will pay for it. The rent he gets from his roommate will cover it. But we were both furious: normally the office will call when a bill of that size is proposed. I did not like being blindsided with a $600 bill for what I expected would be, at most, a $200 job.

So I think I’ll return the Chico’s shirt, which on reflection is kind of garish. And $65 is way, way, way too much for a knit pullover. The belt that looked like it fit at Dillard’s is actually too large, so I’ll take that back on Monday when I’m relatively close to the Paradise Valley store. And I’m annoyed enough about the Talbot’s shirt rubbing red dye all over my white jeans that I may demand my money back for that, even though I wore it all day Friday. One thing is for sure on that count: I never will buy anything from Talbot’s again.

Returning the overpriced shirt and the belt alone will knock about $100 off the total two-day damage. I don’t know whether I’ve got enough chutzpah to take the dye-leaking shirt back to Talbot’s. On the other hand, since I’m never going to shop there again, why not? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

My plan, at least before the AC bill showed up and shocked me back to reality, was to use this mound of clothes to build the basis of a new wardrobe. Throw out all the worn-out, tattered old junk, and the cotton jeans that have shrunk so much I have to lie down to zip them up, and get rid of everything that I’m not wearing.

Then, once the diddle-it-away savings recover, I’ll plan to spend about $60 to $100 about once every three months to build on this new foundation. Over the course of a year or two, I should end up with enough decent clothes in the closet that, even as things wear out, I won’t be stumbling around looking like a bag lady or a latter-day hippie. That’s affordable. And maybe I can even buy another bra sometime in the next year or so.

Summertime, and…what am I gonna do, anyway?

by

Only another half-dozen class meetings until the end of the semester. Then a blitz of monster student papers, and then…and then…white-hot silence.

For the first time in many a year, I’m looking at an entire three-month summer break with nothing to do. Even when I was in graduate school and couldn’t take summer classes because they didn’t give enough time to write graduate-level research papers, I had things going on in the summer: research projects, society-wife machinations, trips to Hawaii, West Virginia, Atlanta, England, and waypoints. When I was teaching at the Great Desert University, I usually taught in at least one and sometimes both summer sessions by way of generating a living wage. And of course, over the past five or six years I held a twelve-month administrative position. Though it had normal vacations time, I rarely took any because I had nothing better to do.

So. In the “nothing better to do” department, the question is what on earth am I going to do this summer? Choir ends on May 30, by which time I probably will have both my fall classes set up and ready to go. And in a 115-degree summer, there’s never much going on in Phoenix.

I’m thinking this will be a good opportunity to try to wring a book out of Funny. That’s been on the agenda since shortly after I started the blog. I haven’t done it mostly because I’ve been busy. Mining almost three years’ worth of posts for material that will hang together in a reasonable way will be a big job in itself. With that done, there’ll be the matter of rewriting the stuff to obliterate the blogginess and make it act like print book copy.

Another possibility is to focus on the blog itself and on trying to expand readership. In the past couple of days, Funny has experienced an amazing spike in traffic, apparently because an MSN Money Talks story that mentioned the Great No-Detergent Laundry Experiment was featured on Yahoo.com. The result was huge: in one day, Adsense earned more than it normally does in an entire month.

If daily traffic averaged half that much, 325 days a year, that plus the Social Security plus the normal flow of editorial projects would return my net income to about what I was earning at the Great Desert University. And I’d never have to read another freshman paper again.

It being unlikely that I’d earn that much on a book and certain that book revenues would not stretch out over a period of years, I incline toward spending six to eight hours a day on the blog: writing, marketing, and publicizing. If I actually sat down and organized my time intelligently, three months of that could at least set Funny on the right trajectory.

Or, in the “now for something entirely different” department, I could try to write a genre mystery novel. That’s also an idea that’s been percolating. But I dunno…it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm. I think I’d rather edit them than write them.

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Sidney Paget. Public domain.

Cost of commuting

by

Here’s a trade-off for you: Buy a house in the far-flung suburbs to save a few bucks and end up spending half your income on the combined costs of housing and transportation.

In a recent Play-Nooz story, ABC’s Phoenix television station reports that people who think they’re saving money by purchasing in remote suburbs have to pay so much more on automobiles and gasoline that the combined costs of housing and transportation consume about 45 percent of their family income, an amount generally considered unaffordable. Anything this outfit says has to be taken with a large grain of salt, because the reporting can be…well, pretty laughable.

So I checked out this interactive map by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a nonprofit that promotes urban sustainability. Indeed, it appears that when you combine housing and transportation costs, a large part of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area becomes unaffordable. Factoring in housing costs alone does cause a larger region to consume less than 30 percent of the family income. Add transport to the mix, and you see that more people spend 45 percent or more of family income on driving plus housing.

At first glance, this sounds credible, given the astonishing cost of gasoline. I have no car payment, yet in the past month I’ve paid almost $110 just for gas—and I haven’t gone anywhere except up to the college and to a few stores, most of them on my way to and from the college. If I had to pay $300 to $600 a month for a car, as many people do, transportation expenses would run 18 to 32 percent of my income—when I’m teaching three sections. In the summer, when I can’t get a job, such costs would consume 31 to 71 percent of net income.

Spend a few moments studying the housing-only map, though, and you’ll see that large parts of the “drive until you qualify” burbs never offered any bargains. The Southeast Valley—Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe—is pricier than the close-in districts to start with. Granted, they’re new, shiny developments (so shoddily built that they won’t stay that way for long…), and granted, the city of Phoenix has done everything it can to thump centrally located neighborhoods. (The city and the county are run by developers—they take office on boards of supervisors and the city council. It’s in their interest ensure that the central city deteriorates, fostering white flight, so that people will buy their plaster-and-Styrofoam houses in the ever-expanding sprawl.) Scottsdale has always been ridiculously expensive; it’s an enclave of whiteness that has worked to develop a upscale reputation. The area to the northwest is largely occupied by retirement communities; cost of housing and taxes are lower there because of the downward pressure exerted by the demographic. The area to the south of the central city has been low-rent from the git-go; much of it is dangerous slum, schools are horrific, and few who can afford to live elsewhere willingly settle there.

So, I would argue in the first place that new suburban housing is more expensive than centrally located middle-class housing. It’s not true that people buy in the sticks to save money; they buy in the sticks for demographic reasons (if you don’t know whereof I speak, consider the latest bit of hilarity from the state house, which reflects the tenor of our elected leadership) and because they hope for schools that are more or less adequate. People who buy for those reasons don’t concern themselves with the cost of transportation—they regard it as just part of the cost of living.

When you add the cost of automobiles to the cost of housing, you do get a total that consumes way too much of net income. However, Drachman Institute Associate Director Marilyn Robinson’s claim that “If a household can get rid of one car, they can increase their available income by approximately $8,500 a year. They can do that if they have access to good and frequent transit service and if their neighborhoods include amenities like shops and recreation within walking distance” is an absurdity, at least where Arizona cities are concerned.

Few central or suburban neighborhoods are within walking distance of “shops and recreation.” The two  grocery stores closest to my house are in unsafe areas and are overpriced specifically because residents living nearby can’t afford cars and so form a kind of captive consumer base. These stores can charge anything they please, because too many of their customers can’t easily shop at the competition. The closest grocery store where I feel safe to get out of my car in the parking lot is three and a half miles from my house. Bicycling over the homicidal streets is out of the question, and you can be very sure I’m not walking seven miles in 110-degree heat to buy a few groceries.

There is no credible public transportation here. Buses are slow, unholy inconvenient, uncomfortable, and full of unwashed and often scary transients—the homeless mentally ill, of whom we have a large population, use the buses and lightrail as rolling air-conditioned space. They ride around and around to stay cool (or, in winter, warm) and to come out from under the oleanders for awhile. The lightrail system is a cute novelty but less than useful for commuting and shopping. Though a bus does run up to the college, the city is about to discontinue that line by way of cost-cutting, and it’s not a viable means to get there—even if the buses were comfortable and safe, I wouldn’t think of spending an hour or more to make a ten-minute drive.

Thus there really is no part of the city where a family with two adults, both of whom work, would not genuinely need to own two cars.

So the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index doesn’t tell you much, except that owning a car is expensive and that housing in the aging central part of the city is cheaper than housing in the shiny new suburbs.

Try the maps on a metro area that does have decent public transit, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, and you get a different picture. Housing costs there are so high it doesn’t much matter whether you have to drive. Another highly desirable area, one supposedly designed for sustainability, is Portland, Oregon: again, housing costs in the outlying suburbs appear to be far higher than those in the central city; add the cost of transportation, and few areas are affordable. In New York City, equipped with a large and much-used public transit system, mode of commuting seems to make little difference in affordability. Houston residents, however, pay a high premium for commuting. For people who live around New Orleans, commuting apparently is quite a burden; however, that may be a function of low incomes there. Change the demographic on the maps from “regional typical household” to “national typical household” and the cost of living looks pretty moderate, whether you drive to work or not.

So, I don’t know what all this means. It’s not cheap to drive a car. But on the other hand, riding public transportation isn’t cheap, either: riding buses and trains costs something, and cities with full-service systems have high taxes and a high cost of living. While I’m not pleased about having to pay $110 for gasoline—almost twice what I budgeted for—the cost is far from drastic enough to get me out of my car. Even if it were, there’s really no choice, and so the issue is moot.

How much does it cost you to get around your city? And if you add your typical cost of transportation to your cost of shelter, what proportion of your income does the total consume?

Sold! Real estate returns to normal in our neighborhood

by

Incredibly, the rental house across the street, occupied of late by the obnoxious Biker Boob and Bobbie McGee, sold for $250,000. That’s dead center in the ball park of what houses were worth here before prices got stupid.

I was afraid it would be bought by yet another absentee landlord. But at that price, it’s unlikely they can rent it for enough to cover the mortgage—rental prices are still very depressed here.

Better yet, they’ve plopped a big dumpster in the driveway and sent workmen in there to gut out the interior! It looks like they’re rebuilding the kitchen—a decrepit dishwasher is sitting in the driveway waiting to be hauled off, and carpenter-like guys have been swarming over the place for the past two weeks.

So. This is a good sign. That’s twenty grand more than I paid for my house, and it’s about twenty-one thousand more than SDXB got for the same model. He sold way too low—the house was grabbed up  less than 24  hours after he put it on the market. So I’d estimate the price is about where it should be for that model.

Now…if we would just, please, see the same thing happen in the neighborhood where the downtown house resides…  We’re $75,000 underwater there, according to the ever-heartbreaking Zillow. But that’s because everything that’s sold there over the past three years or so has been a foreclosure, with the exception of one house that sold at a fire-sale price. Once all the foreclosures are cleared out, maybe values will begin to return to normal in that area, too.

20 Great Time-Wasters of My Life

by

Hah! Scored an amazing 219,400 points on Bookworm before one of the flaming tiles reached the bottom row. Two of the astonishing words formed during this time-killing jag racked up more than 3,000 points apiece.

Amazing, indeed. Amazing waste of time. I justify it by theorizing that I need a break after having made it half-way through 439 of the most boring, pointless, annoying pages of copy I have ever edited in my life. We all need a break now and then, right?

Of course, I could’ve taken a break by trimming the dead roses off the plants, maybe making way for a new bloom before the heat gets too impossible.

Does it ever seem to you that there are altogether too many time-wasting phenomena in your life? When you come to the end of the day and you haven’t gotten a heck of a lot done but you think you’ve been sorta busy, what have you been doing? Here are a few explanations on my list:

  1. Bookworm
  2. Mah Jong
  3. USA Today Crosswords
  4. Uncle Jay Explains the News
  5. Boomshine
  6. PointlessSites.com
  7. StumbleUpon
  8. Checking the stock market
  9. Cleaning house (doesn’t do any good: it just gets dirty again!)
  10. Driving (risking your life while waiting to get from Point A to Point B)
  11. Reading the vitriolic commentary on the local Play-Nooz
  12. Trying to teach students what a comma splice is
  13. BlackBoard Academic Suite, the single greatest time-consumer known to humankind, guaranteed to cut your pay rate from $15/hour to 15¢/hour
  14. Navigating punch-a-button telephone mazes
  15. Trying to comprehend bureaucratic rules
  16. Talking to bureaucrats who don’t understand their own bureaucracy’s rules
  17. Tracking too many bank and brokerage accounts
  18. Waiting for a pan to fill under one of those accursed water-conserving faucets
  19. Checking blog stats
  20. Figuring out workarounds in HTML and various programs to make things happen the way I wish.

Most of these, I’m afraid, are self-inflicted time-wasters, though I decline to take responsibility for phone trees, opaque bureaucrats, online courseware that operates at the speed of a galloping snail, and misguided “good”-for-the-environment plumbing inventions.

What wastes your time?

Women’s Work: A Manifesto

by

Simple Life in France recently wrote on a subject that seems to be worrying a number of women in my circle. It’s a concern that speaks with profound irony to women d’un certain âge. “What would my husband think,” she wonders, if she decided never to go back to work but instead to devote herself to being…ah, let’s say it: “just a housewife?” And into “what he would think,” let’s read the more invidious “what would everyone else think?”

A dear friend of mine here is wrestling with the same questions. She’s contemplating making her escape from the day job sometime in the near future. She agonizes about the prospect of searching for another job, full- or part-time, when in reality she very likely would be happy and successful taking care of her husband and their beautiful home and expansive semirural property. Though she recognizes she needs a break from the work world—possibly a permanent one—she also feels that she should be contributing to the finances of the marital community. Her husband earns a good living that will support them well; their child is out of the home and married; and so the question of whether she should be working is not a matter of necessity but of conscience.

It’s the conundrum of the post-feminist middle-class woman. We’ve gone, over the course of a single lifetime, from a social milieu in which few women were even allowed to work to one where women not only can do just about any job they please but are expected to work, whether they want to or not. By “work,” of course, we continue to mean work two jobs: the day job plus the other full-time occupation of caring for a man, his children, and their dwelling.

The subtext for both Simple’s and my friend’s conflict—and it’s an important one—is “how will I be valued?”

We live in a culture where a person’s value is measured in dollars. The more you earn, the better you must be as a human being, right? And so what does it mean when a woman earns no dollars? A woman who has focused her whole life’s energies on being “just a housewife” receives exactly zero credit toward Social Security. More humiliating, her Social Security benefits, if any, will be tied to her husband’s, and only if she has earned less than half of what he is entitled to…assuming she stays married to the guy long enough. What does that mean?

Unwittingly (perhaps), we’ve not freed women, but instead we have further institutionalized the little-womaning of the American housewife. As feminists, we’ve done it by insisting that women must fulfill some imagined “full potential,” which we have situated in the commercial workplace. As a culture, we’ve done it by raising the cost of living so high that a single paycheck will no longer support a family in a middle-class lifestyle. And we see it in the not-so-subtle message implicit in that Social Security rule.

We as women need to rethink the value of what we are and what we do, and we need to disconnect that value from the dollar. Let’s consider what’s entailed in working as “just a housewife.”

For starters, a woman who lives and works at home takes on the following base responsibilities:

• She raises and educates children (let’s face it: most of a kid’s education happens in the home).

• She shepherds the children through public school and works to extract the most value with the least harm from the institutional system.

• She cleans and cares for a house or apartment.

• She may care for a yard and garden, often including small farm animals and large pets.

• She designs meals and cooks them.

• She shops for food, clothing, furnishings, household goods, and all other necessities and luxuries.

• She budgets and handles money.

• She cleans, a job that (as you’ll know if you’ve ever hired cleaning help) is a great deal more complex than we give it credit for.

• She decorates and maintains a comfortable sanctuary from the outside world.

• She does minor repair work around the house and property.

• She sees to the maintenance of the cars.

• She does sex work.

• She volunteers at schools, churches, and community nonprofits.

• She cares for elderly parents, whether her own or her husband’s.

• In her husband’s old age, she may spend her own elder years caring for a sick old man.

In the course of learning to do these jobs over a lifetime, she attains skills in child development, bookkeeping, money management, hygiene, chemistry, nutrition, first aid, child care, elder care, gardening, interior decor, crafts, cuisine, entertainment, the arts of sexuality. If she volunteers outside the home, she builds knowledge and skills in subjects such as early childhood education, social work, event management, newsletter editing and publishing, office operations, and who knows what else.

That’s if she’s an ordinary, garden-variety just-a-housewife.

Let’s suppose she either is a particularly energetic, college-trained woman or she happens to marry a professional or business owner and so is expected to perform as what we might, in old-fashioned terms, call a society matron. In that case, she gets up to these sorts of things:

• She represents her family unit and raises its profile through civic volunteerism and leadership.

• She participates in elite service groups such as Junior League. In doing so, she takes on middle-management to executive-level responsibilities in one or more civic organizations.

• She serves on the board of directors of one or more civic or nonprofit organizations, such as a museum, a social service agency, or a citizens’ group.

• She hires and supervises household and landscaping staff to manage the house in her absence.

• She entertains clients and colleagues in the home and at venues such as clubs and professional meetings.

• She entertains and socializes with her husband’s partners’ wives, and in doing so collects intelligence on behind-the-scenes matters that may prove valuable for her husband’s career or investment strategies.

• She builds and markets her husband’s profile in the community.

As a society matron—or, in more contemporary language, the partner of a professional—our just-a-housewife develops and engages all of the basic skills we’ve seen above plus management of household and landscaping staff, management of volunteers, event management, catering, public relations, marketing, fund-raising, office work, social work, fiduciary management, and a wide variety of other skills and knowledge specific to individual nonprofit organizations. If she has a college degree in business or some other technical field, she may apply that training to her unpaid civic work exactly as she would do in the workplace.

In either event—whether she focuses her energy and activities on her home, husband, and children or whether she also engages in civic voluntarism—the just-a-housewife manifests a wide variety of skills that, in any other context, would command a decent salary. Make that several decent salaries.

But because she doesn’t command a salary, we think of her as “just a housewife.” And she wonders if her husband (friends, in-laws, former roommate, college classmates) will value her.

My point here is that a woman is worth more than money. What she does can’t be measured in dollars, and so her worth can’t be measured in the currency of the marketplace.

When we feminists of the 1960s and 70s agitated to allow women into the marketplace, we did so because we wanted our daughters and grand-daughters to have a choice. We wanted women to be able to choose to enter the world of work, in any capacity, and not to be limited to the home or to menial, ill-paying jobs.

Choice works both ways. To be able to choose to do something means to be able to choose not to do something.

“Women’s work” and skills have great value—really, whether they’re engaged by a woman or by a man. A man, too, should have the choice to do or not to do, to work outside the home or not to work outside the home. The work we do, the knowledge and wisdom we possess should be valued for what they are, not for what they’re paid.

Of what real value are the bankers and financiers who so fabulously enriched themselves at the expense of the entire developed world’s economy? Of what value is the highly paid tobacco executive, captain of an industry devoted to sickening and killing its customers? These men and women are highly paid in the workplace, but we see their value as human beings: negative equity, we might say.

Value yourself for what you are and what you do, not for what you’re paid. Value yourself, and others around you will value you.

And, my friends, let us take up the torch again: demand choice, not bondage—neither to the home nor to the marketplace.

As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days;
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.

James Oppenheimer, “Bread and Roses“