Keeping the Home Fires Burning: What’s in a Phrase? (continued )

Last Monday my blog post raised this question: what’s in the common phrase “keeping the home fires burning”? I’m not finished with that question yet.

Let me begin today’s post by telling you something of my story. Before I became a fulltime householder with two children I was a graduate student. When I became a fulltime mother, the stark contrast between the world of the hearth and the world of academe/the workplace immediately became very evident to me.




The world of the hearth revolved around very different realities: the creation, sustenance and nurturance of life; attunement to the wellbeing of children; maintenance and structure of an environment geared to their daily needs and rhythms; and the necessity to obey nature’s timeline for growth and development. In brief, process, rather than end product, became my focus of attention. “Keeping the home fires burning” was a matter of life and death, for I was responsible for my children’s survival.



These pressing necessities bore no resemblance to the demands of the academic world, where the total focus was on development of the mind. Academe was geared to fast-paced rhythms: competition, class schedules, deadlines, exams, development of career trajectories. All of these experiences brought the satisfaction of learning , meeting goals, and reaching standards of excellence, which were measurable by one’s grades. In this world the work of all the women in my family meant little or nothing.

Despite my awareness of the differences between the two worlds, I was too busy to think much about how and why they seemed split apart. But I discovered an essay, titled “Women’s Liberation and Reconciliation with the Earth,” by Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. I had an aha! moment as I read her work.

Ruether spoke about how our lives are shaped by the cultural mythology in which we live. She said that the cultural mythology common throughout the Western world has been the outcome of a particular kind of dualism, which she described as hierarchical dualism. The most fundamental dualistic perception which has shaped western culture can be described in terms of two poles, she stated. A primary sexual symbolism is fundamental to this dualism. Woman/body/nature/instinct/the finite aligns with one pole. Man/intellect/culture/spirit/the infinite aligns with the other pole – and this latter pole is perceived to be the more important. More important = more dominant = hierarchical dualism.

Furthermore, said Ruether, these dualistic perceptions don’t merely inhabit the rarified ethers of philosophical inquiry, as we are wont to think. In fact, they have literally shaped our environment. One outcome has been separation of the world of work, dominated by masculine values, from the world of private life, the world of the hearth, dominated by feminine values. Another outcome has been creation of an enormously powerful psychic energy, which becomes destructive when it is disconnected from nature. The earth, our matrix of existence, becomes the target of this psychic energy. In its most extreme form, this psychic force expresses as technological assault upon earth and its people.

Now, I didn’t need Ruether’s essay to tell me that tending Hestia’s fire was less valued than the marketplace, for life in such a split environment reminded me of it daily. However, Ruether’s identification of our prevailing cultural mythology helped me see one important thing: the shape of my environment was a consequence of perception. It was perception which determined that the world of the hearth was less important than the world of the marketplace. Our perception creates our social reality.

Since the time I read Ruether’s essay more women have joined the work force, more women than ever before go to a work place every weekday. Today I read and hear that women are changing the marketplace. Yet I wonder, do cultural mythologies die all that easily? How many of you shuttle back and forth between the world of the hearth and the world of the marketplace? And how many of you feel there is a dualistic split between the values that govern these two spheres? I’m so looking forward to your comments. This could be a very fruitful conversation, dear BraveHearts!

Note: Ruether’s essay can be found in WomanSpirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, where the title of her essay is revised to “Motherearth and the Megamachine.”

Next Monday: we look more deeply into why an ancient Greek goddess has been nominated by other writers as candidate for an archetype. Stay tuned!

©2010 by Chickee Atalla, author of the soon to be released Conversations with the Goddess: Encounter at Petra, Place of Power http://www.conversationswiththegoddess.net In: Goddess Notes