Making Connections: What Homemakers Do

The work of social relationships

America is suffering from a lack of tight-knit social connections among her people. Jim Dalrymple at Nuclear Meltdown has an excellent post on this topic, noting that the U.S. Surgeon General recently launched a campaign against loneliness. This campaign follows an advisory the Department of Health and Human Services released on the negative public health effects of social isolation. Jim writes:

To kick off the project, Murthy attended a potluck in Washington, D.C., that is apparently a kind of model for what others might do. And next year, the project will expand to include “nationwide events like outdoor neighborhood dinners.”

Potlucks, of course, are wonderful. But many of America’s homemakers of fifty years ago would have considered merely bringing a dish to a potluck to be a kind of warm up exercise. I remember flipping through my great-aunt’s church cookbook, and finding recipes to feed 250 people. A modern version contains a section on “recipes to feed a big crowd.” In the 1950s, our foremothers were prepared to serve dinner to a couple hundred people, including the elderly, the lonely, and the alienated. Everyone who showed up was fed. Indeed, one of the beauties of these church dinners was their universality. The entire congregation was invited and came, gathering together very different people: the older widower, the newborn baby, the couple married forty years, the “confirmed bachelor.”

Hosting feasts is quite a lot of work. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Today, we struggle to organize a community potluck where our only responsibility is bringing a single dish. When we do so, it is often to gather people who are already quite similar to us: friends from college; parents of similarly-aged children living in the neighborhood. Hosting for a crowd is a skill. Our grandmothers that could competently feed two hundred people weren’t born knowing how to do so: instead they learned from experience. Likewise, the logistics of hosting cocktail parties and bake sales takes significant time and effort.

We speak often these days of the “mental load,” or the project-management skills that go into being a parent. The mental load is often carried by one parent (typically mom) because handling it well requires expertise and relationships. Just as not anybody can walk into a project-management job and run the show, it is very hard to equally split the work of managing a household. This is not to say that families that want to do so shouldn’t try. However, spouses typically end up with a fairly strict division of labor: one deals with the yard, the cars, and the bills (for example), while the other tackles cooking, cleaning and managing the calendar.

Both yard work and cooking are skilled jobs in the sense that the more you do it, the better you are at it. Somehow we find this easy to acknowledge when we hire those jobs out (like paying for a caterer or a lawn service) but harder to recognize when we handle them “in house.” When I’m cooking for the week, I might plan a series of meals that lead into each other. The roast chicken I make on Sunday turns into leftover shredded chicken that becomes chicken hash on Tuesday, and so forth. It’s hard for my husband to pick up the thread of this plan unless I give him detailed instructions. Additionally, managing a family home involves building and maintaining relationships. Mom may get a plumbing discount because she has established the working relationship with the plumber who is frequently called because a toddler has flushed a toy down the toilet again.¹ The plumber knows Mom pays on time, is a good customer, and so charges a little less to fish out the toy. In business, it’s understood that effective working relationships are mission critical. The same is true for households.

The same philosophy — that unpaid work requires specific knowledge and connections — applies to hosting social events. It requires skill: organizing, setting up, cooking, etc. It also requires relationships: who knows the pastor of the church that can host a large event? Who knows the other moms and grandmas who reliably show up to make the event run well? The amount of work that goes into forming community bonds is often invisible. Our grandmothers made it look easy. We assumed the social fabric would continue to exist without anyone with skill and expertise dedicated to maintaining it.

We were wrong. Instead, the community building events that used to tie people together often no longer happen. I hypothesize this is because of a modern phenomenon called “time scarcity.” As I have written about previously, when women joined the workforce in large numbers fifty years ago, families became much busier. Obviously. The Brookings Institution released a study on this issue in 2020, and found that:

The average middle-class married couple with children now works a combined 3,446 hours annually, an increase of more than 600 hours—or 2.5 additional months—since 1975. This average combines dual- and single-earner couples, but the trend is mostly driven by increases in the employment of, and hours worked by, women in dual-earner couples.

Unsurprisingly, this increase in women’s paid work resulted in a decrease in their unpaid work, including the work of supporting local communities. In his superb book, Family Unfriendly (which you should buy!) author Tim Carney writes about the important work done by his wife, Kate Carney. A mother of six, she doesn’t work outside the home — but does spend significant time supporting friends and family. Tim notes that when he went on a writing retreat, he was criticized for not giving Kate “alone time” to work on her book.² He says after a stranger at a bar implied he was preventing his wife from achieving her potential:

I called Katie first thing in the morning and ran this argument by her. She reminded me of the times she went up to New Jersey for a long weekend to stay up all night feeding her sister’s newborn twins. We recalled the times I was home alone with our own kids so that Katie could stay with nieces and nephews to give another sister a chance for a romantic getaway. We remembered the times Katie dragged a depressed or stressed friend out of her house for a walk or a drink, and was able to give undivided attention not to a manuscript but to someone she loved.

We gained a great deal when women joined the paid workforce, but we lost important things too.

We recognize the value that homemakers brought to the working world when they left the home. However, society still has not fully internalized what we lost when they did. Part of that loss, I argue, is that people no longer have the time to form the skills and create the relationships that made possible the community networks that wove us together. The result is what Carney calls “Alienated America.” While I applaud the Surgeon General’s focus on encouraging people to host potlucks, I suspect little will change while U.S. policy is single-mindedly focused on convincing both parents of young children to join the paid workforce. Without homemakers to knit us together, society is falling apart. Carney has said we need more stay-at-home moms. I agree.

Further reading:

• I co-wrote an essay for the Institute for Family Studies on how Congress should consider stay-at-home parents in making tax policy.

• I am deeply grateful for the many wonderful comments I get on this Substack. It has profoundly shaped my thinking and writing. I got one such superb comment by email on my last post. With the author’s permission, I am sharing it below. He is a stay-at-home dad.

By staying at home, my children receive a bespoke education and my family bespoke consumer products (e.g. food and entertainment) that far exceed anything that my family can access directly through the market economy.

Just because I don't directly participate in the entrepreneurial system through taxable wages doesn't mean that I only marginally participate in it. My role is simply that of directly competing with business (in terms of efficiency and quality)--I try to find areas where I can personally do it better and more efficiently. And I do the same thing as businesses when I find an area ripe for competition. I acquire capital and raw resources; I combine the capital and raw resources to produce value-added products and services that are provided to the singular market that is my family. The profit is then pocketed, which will inevitably be reintroduced back into the broader economy as investment and additional outlays, all of which are themselves taxable.

The ultra-wealthy are afforded the right and ability to have exclusive access to personal assistants, au pairs, tutors, professional chefs, gardeners, house-cleaners, etc. I do all of these and more for my family (at well below market rate), using the same methods, tools, and products that they do, but the wages I receive and any profit (or losses) generated remain within my household such that it can be used for further consumption and investment. I still pay sales taxes on the capital and raw materials, but I try to lower my tax burden and vertically integrate like any other business.

Discounting all this as non-productive to the economy commits the same fallacy as the parable of the broken window. Profit can be generated in two ways: increasing revenues or to reduce costs. The home economist simply focuses on the latter to the exclusion of the former.

That I am free to choose to engage in this mutual exchange (voluntarily and to mutual benefit) with my wife and family is the bedrock foundation of liberal capitalism and a free society. Frank Hyneman Knight, one of the forgotten architects of the Chicago School of Economics and the teacher of Milton Friedman, frequently stated in his works that the individualism of liberalism should be more accurately called familism (a term that I hope has a healthy future), because the basic effective economic and social unit is not the individual, but the family.

He's absolutely right; and any society that loses sight of that basic fact jeopardizes itself and its future.

1. We have spent many hundreds of dollars on toddler-related Plumbing Incidents in the Greco household, alas.

2. I reviewed this book for Current. You can read the review here, if you are interested.