I recently heard about a book, a memoir of a successful career woman turned homesteader. This is a popular story nowadays, people going back to the land — raising chickens in their backyards, cooking tomato sauce from scratch, sewing their own clothing. Its vaunted as a way to be self-sufficient and save the planet, and I was unabashedly excited by the idea myself. But then Amy pointed out that in the vast majority of the cases, the people participating in this DIY revolution are women. Urban or suburban homesteading is a big time commitment, and more often than not it is taken up by women who have the time or make the time. Women who think it’s important to do more with less, feed their families wholesome food without pesticides, preservatives, or petrol, and who find enjoyment in the art of craft. This would not be at all problematic except that these women are whole-heartedly embracing exactly the roles that were expected of their mothers, grandmothers, and so forth. And as soon as homesteading is expected of women, it becomes a job rather than a choice.

Blogs glamorize this modern housewife: expert in the kitchen and lover of homemade cleaning products, often with a trendy design job or a successful Etsy shop. Recipes are lauded when they please picky husbands and children, and crafts bring back trends from the era of the Feminine Mystique. Men such as Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman tell us that we should only eat food our grandmothers would recognize, bemoaning the loss of home-cooked meals our grandmothers slaved over. Microwaves and frozen dinners have freed women from kitchen drudgery as surely as they reduced our health and culinary competence. This is not to say there is not a happy compromise, for there are many quick and easy ways to prepare good meals from scratch, but these books and blogs make clear that the image of Woman as the one responsible for how a household is run is still pervasive. The change to more sustainable and healthful lifestyles, these independent media tell us, is in the hands of women.

I feel guilty when I am seduced by beautiful photographs of domesticity, wanting to run my own household with expensive white ceramic dishes, standing ready for visitors with a platter of perfect tea cakes. Yet I also want to design my household to be efficient and easy to use, Amish in its simplicity and Martha Stewart in its brightness, but not a place for canning and laborious scrubbing. I research permaculture so that I can grow my own food without paying much attention to it. I am interested in this stuff, and it just so happens that Thomas isn’t. Fine. Except that this plays into a larger pattern that is disturbing in its conventionality. What can Feminism do if women want to sweep floors and bake cakes and make little handmade cards for all their friends? This just wouldn’t be a problem if all the women who did such things did so with as much love and conviction that ones you see and read about. The problem is that there is pressure building on the one side by glamorous women who homestead and show off, and on the other side by guilt-trips over Our Nation’s Health and The Environment. One way or another, women are the targets of this tide towards homesteading. I worry that many will get involved with laborious domestic projects without questioning whether or not it is their true passion. We’re not in a post-feminist world yet, and traditional roles can easily become black holes to suck up independent minds everywhere.