America's Finest Environmental Magazine
   []
   https://orionmagazine.org:443/article/the-housewife-theory-of-history/

Join Our Email List
--

   Orion Magazine > Articles > Columns > From the Faraway Nearby > The
   Housewife Theory of History

The Housewife Theory of History

   Rebecca Solnit
--
   sole source of power. But history is changed again and again by people
   who are supposedly powerless, including the women veiled by the
   dismissive moniker housewife.

   When Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken, and Mindy
--
   of them in cities across the country leaving their homes to stand up
   against arms and war. The members of WSP subversively used their gender
   and their genteel, housewifely image to suggest that being against what
   the government was doing wasn’t radical but sensible, motherly, and
   kindhearted.

   This might be the secret of the housewife theory of history: These
   women take the qualities that are supposed to render them irrelevant
   and use them defiantly as well as strategically. Starting with what
--
   don’t pursue principles or seek to prevent further harm; instead they
   inflict it in revenge. Silkwood and Erin Brockovich are anomalies. They
   illustrate how the housewife-become-activist shifts from defending her
   own tribe to defending the principle that everyone should be free from
   fallout or dioxin, that everyone should have an education or know the
--

   The Greek word oikos, meaning house, is the root of the word ecologist,
   which could be defined as, among other things, housewife. It’s not that
   I’m so fixated on housewives, who are one among many categories of
   individual that have taken power to change the world, and it’s not that
   I believe that the category housewife is so compelling a definition of
   women who have other lives before and after and often during staying
   home with kids. It’s that, just as the Sakalava are officially ruled by