The Housewife Theory of History

By Rebecca Solnit, Orion Magazine. Posted June 9, 2005.

On the west coast of Madagascar, there's a tribe called the Sakalava, who are theoretically monarchists, loyal to a line of male kings. Their loyalty, however, is to dead rather than living kings, and the wishes of the dead kings are made known through spirit mediums who are, according to David Graeber in his wonderful Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, "usually elderly women of common descent." Which is to say that, officially, the Sakalava are governed by elite men, but ordinary elderly women are the literal voices of authority.

I'm not sure we're much different. We are governed mostly by elite men, quite a lot of them seemingly dead, and everything in our culture encourages us to regard these rulers not just as the central but the 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 Kleinberg, widows of men killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center, started doing research and demanding answers from elected representatives, they gave rise to the 9/11 Commission. Nicknamed the Jersey Girls, they became experts on national security and terrorism. A year after the towers collapsed, one of them spoke forcefully to Congress about what had really happened. A year and a half after that, the 9/11 Commission issued the official verdict that there were no ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. By that time, the Jersey Girls were campaigning against Bush's re-election.

They didn't win that one, but they won't go away, any more than the Seattle-area mothers of mentally disabled children did when they ran into roadblock after roadblock to getting their children public school educations and other basic rights. Those three mothers, Evelyn Chapman, Katie Dolan, and Jane Taggart, went, as my friend Susan Schwartzenberg says in her forthcoming book, Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability, "from outraged mothers to sophisticated activists utilizing a well-honed network of politicians, labor leaders, legislators, judges and the media." In 1971, Washington State passed the law that paved the way for the national Education for All Act of 1975, renamed the IDEA--Individuals with Disabilities Education Act--in 1990.

I think of Lois Gibbs in Love Canal in upstate New York, who started investigating the rash of illnesses in her working-class neighborhood, founded the Love Canal Homeowners Association in 1978, and continued connecting the dots and fighting the power until she became a founding figure in the environmental justice movement. Today she is director of the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, helping people find the voice to oppose their own destruction and fighting to reduce human exposure to poisons like dioxin. Her work helped generate the Environmental Protection Agency. I think of Las Madres de Este Los Angeles, who succeeded in keeping a succession of toxic dumps, incinerators, and a chemical treatment plant out of their East L.A. neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s.

I think of Women Strike for Peace, who faced down anticommunist authorities at the height of the Cold War to protest the nuclear arms race, nuclear weapons, and the nuclear testing that was causing catastrophic damage to the environment and human health--particularly that of infants and children. They started in November of 1961 with a one-day strike in the mode of Lysistrata, more than a hundred thousand 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 they love, they cut straight through the quicksand of motives and purposes to point out that harm has been done and should be stopped. In some sense, they depoliticize politics, which is what makes them so politically potent. When asked whether they were in cahoots with the Soviets, WSP activists said that they thought perhaps Soviet mothers didn't want their children afflicted by fallout either.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Her latest book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, will be available soon from Viking Books.

This article originally appeared in the May-June 2005 issue of Orion magazine, 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230, 888/909-6568, www.oriononline.org ($35/year for 6 issues).

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