The Political Liveliness of the Domestic

Abstract

This ethnography brings out aspects of social change, transformation and continuity in the realm of kinship and family. The kitchen emerges as that place which enables kin and intimate relations to be done differently, a conscious and visible shift away from the traditional family dynamics. This comes out through the life histories of these key participants, where it is possible to observe how things were already changing from the way their grandmothers and mothers behaved at home. A common characteristic also emerges in how as children they seem to have rebelled against anything that shackled them to a norm—from being taught a female and gendered language at home, that is, to be able to bake, cook and clean for their future husband; being taught differently from their counter-fellow students at school where they had to learn Home Economics; to any other sort of social injustice, such as staging a petition against school dinners. Such sensitivity towards injustice continues to be observed at different stages in their lives which came out through their life histories, and in the way they creatively used their kitchens and their homes to directly address political issues relating to women’s rank in society. In squats and collectives, they debated their (radical) feminist political agenda around the kitchen table where they were consciously raising awareness through a different way of doing politics. By taking hold of all that is feminine and turning it upside down, these women were able to change the status quo—for example, by publishing a feminist cookbook and their individual and collective pedagogical domestic practices as feminist mothers and grandmothers. The direct individual and collective engagement with a patriarchal and androcentric British culture which expected women to be housewives are acts of choice, agency, chance and power and also illustrate how change occurs at the fringes of society. The feminist Jana Sawicki considers three alternatives of power that women could adopt—to ‘speak in a masculine voice, construct a new language, or be silent’ (1991: 1). ‘Turning the tables’ was indeed a generational metaphor of resistance which did not construct a new language but used female stereotypes and archetypes in order to carve out a stage where women could speak from. This puts women’s roles onto the public front.