Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture

By Shannon Hayes

Mother Nature has shown her hand. Faced with climate change, dwindling resources, and species extinctions, most Americans understand the fundamental steps necessary to solve our global crises-drive less, consume less, increase self-reliance, buy locally, eat locally, rebuild our local communities.

In essence, the great work we face requires rekindling the home fires.Radical Homemakers is about men and women across the U.S. who focus on home and hearth as a political and ecological act, and who have centered their lives around family and community for personal fulfillment and cultural change. It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has benefited from feminism, where domination and oppression are cast aside and where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity, or relentless servitude.

Radical Homemakers nationwide speak about empowerment, transformation, happiness, and casting aside the pressures of a consumer culture to live in a world where money loses its power to relationships, independent thought, and creativity. If you ever considered quitting a job to plant tomatoes, read to a child, pursue creative work, can green beans and heal the planet, this is your book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Left to Write Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781603582698

Reviews for Radical Homemakers

[brigitte64 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book, not some nice theoretical ideas, everything is already tried and gathered together from all over the country, so the way of living Shannon Hayes describes is possible. Great motivation !!!

[willszal-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Awesome book, but not very fresh if you're already a homesteader. I can see how a book like this would be very reassuring for first-timers. Excellent subject matter.

[onebookmore · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I honestly didn't want this book to end. I related to this book so much that it made me a bit depressed. It's a very honest look at how our nation is driven by corporations and consumerism, and how there are many ways to live against those principals that will make you a happier and healthier human being. I definitely want to read this again sometime, and I hope that by making small changes, little by little my family will be happier and healthier, too.

[swivelgal · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Intelligently written. Even though I do not agree with all of the suggestions or models described in the book, I highly recommend Radical Homemakers to anyone who is interested in reducing the accumulation of "stuff" and increasing happiness.

[oddbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Overall, I found this to be a pretty interesting look at a counter-cultural approach to living. Downshifters are nothing new, as this topic has been discussed in depth in many different books ever since the back to the land movement in the 1960s, but this updated look at this movement is definitely relevant. There are a couple of issues I don't think the author dealt with. One is that it would appear that most of those interviewed, as well as the author, live in rural New England. I think the book would have benefited had folks from the Southwest and South in general been interviewed because there are vast difference in rents, cost of living, and public transport availability between New England and places like Texas and Oklahoma. Second, I was a bit taken aback with the author's dismissal for the need for health insurance. No doubt there are problems with the American health care system and no doubt health care insurance is prohibitive in cost for many families. The author's sense that obtaining exercise and eating very healthy food can eliminate many needs for health care makes sense on one level. Americans often live very unhealthy lives and eating better and obtaining proper exercise can eliminate the need for some needs for medical care. Families that homeschool will also reduce the number of bugs brought into the home. I also appreciate the sort of fearlessness it takes to make such a decision. But it is troublesome to realize that the cost of being a radical home maker may mean exposing one's self to dreadful harm. Good food won't prevent genetically-linked cancers. Exercise won't make people bullet-proof, nor will it reduce the damage a human body receives if it is hit by a car. I really wish more attention had been paid to the idea that radical homemaking can leave families open to financial catastrophe or the very real possibility a family member could not afford life-saving medical care. This is a hard reality of living outside the realm of traditional paid work and it needs exploration. I would have given this book five stars had the author talked to a family whose child had cancer or kidney failure and showed how they managed or did not manage.

[aleahmarie_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Families nationwide are struggling with how to manage a growing sense of powerlessness as our world undergoes climate change, our economy flounders and public health worsens. Shannon Hayes, author of the manifesto “Radical Homemakers,” is not alone in her decision to return to the home – the foundation on which a healthy community is built. But this is not a call to return to well-coiffed housewives who wear heels as they keep house and bake pies. Not at all. Hayes is talking about turning homes back into net producers, about turning our backs on the corporate culture that has morphed us into the net consumers that keeps the corporations thriving even as the rest of us struggle to get by. While researching this book Hayes did extensive research. And it shows. Her passion for the cause is punctuated by well thought out arguments and cold, hard facts. You won't know how to can tomatoes or milk a goat after reading this book. “Radical Homemakers” isn't a how-to back-to-the-land manual. This is an overview of how the radical homemaker movement came about and how it has manifested itself in diverse households. It's a rallying cry for anyone who has been tip-toeing their way toward this way of life. I don't often read works of non-fiction from cover to cover. “Radical Homemakers” was an exception, once I started I couldn't put it down.

[etznab_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love the concept of this book; a less consumer focused culture, and a return to homemaking and homesteading values. I found the chapter that explains the origin of the word husbandry to be fascinating. The book asks us to re-examine some of our values and question why we do certain things.