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Control [Draft]

🔁 Playback: Essay #3 – “The Woman of the House”

Confession: When I became a homemaker, I realized how intoxicating it was to be in control of the home. It was a power trip—and sometimes still is.

Core question: What does it mean to become a woman of the house?

You asked this years ago in your first married apartment, newly in San Francisco, possibly while watching The Gilded Age. The question was emotional, aesthetic, cultural, and feminist all at once. The home felt like a site of ambition, a place to exert design and intention—something to run, to shape, to perfect. But also, a domain steeped in patriarchy and limitation.

Tension:

There’s real pleasure in shaping the rhythms and rituals of home. You’ve made it a site of beauty, meaning, and creative care. But the danger of control—the desire to perfect the home because you can’t control everything else (your work, the world, your fertility, others)—is real too.

Deeper theme:

This isn’t just about domesticity. It’s about art. Home becomes your studio, your canvas, your installation. But unlike solitary artistic practice, home is shared. You’re learning how to make room, to let go, to co-create—and that mirrors what it means to write in public. Control vs. release. Mastery vs. collaboration. Protection vs. permeability.

Inquiry:

  • How have women historically used the home as a site of agency, identity, or rebellion?
  • What’s the difference between matriarchy and control?
  • What can you learn from Indian and Western models of womanhood in the home?
  • What would a reimagined, feminist, post-patriarchal “woman of the house” look like—not as ruler, but as steward, host, or artist?

📚 Grounded Research Threads

Here are specific readings and research paths to deepen and anchor the essay:

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Feminist Theory & Domestic Labor

  • Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero – for housework as economic labor and social reproduction.
  • bell hooks, Homeplace: A Site of Resistance – on the radical power of homemaking in Black feminist thought.
  • Angela Garbes, Essential Labor – contemporary reflections on caregiving, labor, and cultural expectations.
  • Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion – particularly the parts on comfort, space, and home.

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Historical & Cultural Studies

  • The Gilded Age (TV and actual history) – 19th-century domestic ideals of womanhood and moral authority (e.g., “Republican Motherhood,” “Angel in the House”).
  • Indian domestic traditions – look at the role of the grihini or the lady of the house in Hindu and South Asian cultural traditions; explore contrasts between service, status, and spiritual stewardship.
  • Marina Warner, Managing Monsters or Alone of All Her Sex – to consider mythical/archetypal versions of the maternal/domestic figure.

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Matriarchy vs. Power

  • Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade – a (controversial but generative) exploration of partnership vs. domination cultures.
  • Heide Goettner-Abendroth, work on matriarchal studies – particularly indigenous or egalitarian structures of matrilineal authority.
  • Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction – you already know this one, but it’s relevant here again as an alternative metaphor for homemaking and power through containment, not conquest.

✍️

Art, Control, and Release

  • Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost or Decreation – explores what it means to unmake oneself to create.
  • Jenny Odell, Saving Time – for reorienting time and value outside of capitalist modes (which intersect deeply with homemaking rhythms).
  • Essays or talks by Rachel Cusk, Meghan O’Rourke, or Deborah Levy on motherhood and authorship.

🧵 Structural Threading Ideas

You could organize this essay around three acts or threads:

  1. The Aesthetic High of Control
    • Your early marriage, the pleasure of arranging furniture, rhythms, the first taste of control
    • The emotional craving for perfection and the illusion that domestic control could offer it
  2. The Cracks in the Facade
    • Letting others live in the space (partner, child, dog)
    • What it taught you about power, and the difference between designing for someone and with them
    • The feminist reckoning—home as both a trap and a tool
  3. Letting Go, Making Room
    • What writing in public has taught you about control vs. release
    • Home as art—but not a still life. A living, breathing, co-authored piece
    • The redefinition of “woman of the house”—not as controller, but as steward, studio-maker, inviter

🗣️ Closing Thoughts

You’re not missing anything—it’s all there. The essay has a central emotional engine (control), a confession that’s honest and just a little uncomfortable (you liked the power), and an arc that offers complexity and contradiction. What makes it powerful is that you’re not rejecting control entirely, you’re reworking your relationship to it. That’s what makes it feel feminist and mature.

This could also become a signature piece that sits at the intersection of your book and your Home as a Care Studio Library project.

Yes—this line of inquiry is so worth following. What you’re articulating is already very clear and smart: you’re pointing out that the archetype of the “woman of the house” is a product within patriarchy, not a counter to it. It’s a form of power granted under limitation—and therefore potentially illusory or even coercive. And you’re also sensing that there might be entirely other frameworks—like matriarchal or non-hierarchical ones—that don’t reproduce that same trap, but you’ve never had the chance to study them. That instinct is spot-on.

Here’s a breakdown of how you might explore this more rigorously, with a mix of sociology, anthropology, feminist theory, and cultural studies:

🔎 What You’re Describing, Conceptually

Patriarchal Bargain (Deniz Kandiyoti)

This is a foundational feminist sociology concept: women often find ways to exert power within a patriarchal system by accepting its premises. The “woman of the house” is often a classic example—her power is conditional and constrained, but it’s still real, and often emotionally or symbolically meaningful.

Hearth as Domain

In both Victorian America and many traditional Indian contexts, the home becomes a feminized zone of moral, aesthetic, or reproductive authority. But it’s always framed in opposition to public power, which remains male. The home becomes a consolation prize—but also a site of deep, complicated agency.

🌍 What is Matriarchy, Actually?

You’re right to want to pause and learn before using this word casually. Matriarchy is not simply the reverse of patriarchy.

📖 Key Distinctions:

  • Matriarchy ≠ Women rule over men

    • Most matriarchal or matrilineal cultures do not flip the hierarchy. They often operate on principles of balance, interdependence, relational authority, or horizontal power.

  • Matrilineal ≠ Matriarchal

    • A society can trace descent and inheritance through the mother (matrilineal), but still be patriarchal in terms of who holds power.

📚 Grounded Reading List

🔬 Sociological / Anthropological Studies

  1. Heide Goettner-Abendroth, founder of modern matriarchal studies
    • Start with: Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe

      • This book defines matriarchies as “societies of balance,” rooted in maternal values like care, nonviolence, and gift-giving economies.

    • She studies societies like the Mosuo (China), Minangkabau (Indonesia), Iroquois / Haudenosaunee (North America), and others.
  2. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy
    • A case study of the Minangkabau of West Sumatra—the world’s largest matrilineal society.
    • Describes how women hold real social authority without replicating dominance hierarchies.
  3. Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess
    • Though more archaeological and interpretive (and somewhat debated), her work explores pre-patriarchal European societies where goddess-centered, matrilineal structures may have existed.

🧠 Academic Frameworks You Could Use

  • Social Reproduction Theory – situates domestic work, care, and the home as foundational to the economic system (see Tithi Bhattacharya, Silvia Federici).
  • Gift Economies vs. Exchange Economies – explored by feminist anthropologists as an alternative to capitalist logics. Matriarchal societies often favor the former.
  • Kinship Studies – especially matrilineal kinship, where lineage, property, and even power run through women, but with different relational logics.

✍️ Application for Your Essay

Once you’ve read into this, you might return with a lens like:

  • “I once believed becoming ‘woman of the house’ meant claiming control in a man’s world. But what if the home could be something else—not a refuge from patriarchy, but a site of reimagined power altogether?”
  • “What if homemaking was never meant to be about ownership—but hosting?”
  • “If the patriarchal bargain offers us control only in exchange for our containment, what might it look like to practice power without domination?”

🧭 Final Suggestions for Study

If you want to do a focused deep dive, I’d recommend this 3-step route:

  1. Start with conceptual clarity:
    • Deniz Kandiyoti – Bargaining with Patriarchy
    • Silvia Federici – Wages Against Housework (short essay)
    • bell hooks – “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance”
  2. Then move to matriarchal case studies:
    • Peggy Reeves Sanday on the Minangkabau
    • Goettner-Abendroth’s Matriarchal Societies
  3. Then bridge to your own voice:
    • Read Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory again, now from this lens
    • Reflect on the home not as a territory to dominate, but a vessel to hold and host