It does raise the question: why not the fish side of this equation? Perhaps because fowl feels feminine. Not female, frantic, futile, or even feathery, but feminine. Fowl embraces the contradictions of femininity: both game bird and poultry, simultaneously wild and domestic. Fish requires an evolutionary transubstantiation that might be one step too far. So I would rather be fowl, a pheasant or hen ruling the roost. And frankly, the wild pheasant holds significantly less appeal than a domesticated chicken.
Which brings me to the existential reason for being fowl, that of domesticity.
My British colonial education included that quaintly named subject, domestic science, for secondary-level students. Inclusive of the study of cooking, sewing, knitting, how to be a hostess and run a household, this was the one academic subject my mother considered pointless. At my school, streaming in form 4 split all us girls into arts, science, and domestic science. For Mum, it was bad enough that I had been streamed into arts but, Lord have mercy, at least I wasn’t in domestic science! Donning her woman warrior face, Mum marched into the principal’s office and demanded I be rerouted into science. A complicated battle, but in the end Sister Rose was no match for my mother and I suffered my secondary education as a science student.
Now, while essaying on gender roles and how they have affected my life, it’s something of a surprise to me that Mum is, in fact, astrologically feminine, a Capricorn, while I, Aquarius, am considered masculine. A greater truth likely lurks in this transgendered view of my existence, at least in astrological terms.
Domestic science eventually became known by its American equivalent, home economics, even in British schools. This academic discipline in the United States originated more than 150 years ago, championed by one Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1909 the American Home Economics Association was established, and its first president, Ellen Swallow Richards, was a scientist who promoted opportunities for women to pursue scientific education. It was nearly a century later, in 1993, that the association was renamed the American Association of Family and Consumer Science, which more accurately reflects the breadth of what this “feminine science” truly comprises.
Ellen Swallow Richards was the first female graduate of MIT, where she achieved a bachelor of science in chemistry; she died in 1911. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition, she was put in charge of an exhibit space known as the Rumford Kitchen. This initiative occurred under the auspices of the Department of Hygiene and Sanitation to showcase the “application of the principles of chemistry to the science of cooking.” Prior to that, Richards had refused to participate in a demonstration kitchen set up in “The Women’s Building.” Nutrition, she insisted, was not only women’s work because the knowledge involved was important for all people, not just women.
I proved a lousy science student, temperamentally suited as I was to the arts, which is where my life ended up. My maternally engineered secondary education is slightly puzzling in retrospect. Mum was extremely domestic, and she taught me to sew, knit, lay a table correctly, iron, cook, even launder and clean house. All this despite the three domestic helpers employed in my childhood home prior to Dad’s bankruptcy. It was necessary, she claimed, for girls to know how to fend for themselves in case their husbands couldn’t take care of them properly, which meant, presumably, couldn’t afford to provide a life of relative luxury. Mum said more or less the same of professional careers for women, which was one reason she wanted me in the sciences, in order to assure me a well-paid job; the arts, according to her worldview, did not require or offer real work. Yet she scoffed at domestic science as an academic subject, deeming it the refuge of the academically stunted. In fairness to Mum, there was a general snobbery about education in Hong Kong, especially with respect to the superiority of science over the arts. The domestic science stream was, I suppose, a way to provide girls who were less academically inclined with a secondary education. Those girls still had to study math, history, or geography and other academic subjects, so they were hardly uneducated. Besides, girls in Hong Kong who were not domestically skilled grew up to be women who were considered socially stunted. After all, what man in his right mind would choose a woman without abilities in domestic sciences for a wife?
Isn’t this conundrum of Hong Kong womanhood just plain foul?
However, I soon discovered things weren’t all that different in the United States either. My college girlfriends vied on the domestic front to bake the best chocolate chip cookies. The most ambitious wielded mastery over household consumer products—cleaners, detergents, household appliances, sheets, towels, the dizzying array of foods on sale at the typical American supermarket—with opinions about which brands were best in order to keep house that kept up with the Joneses. They cooed maternally around infants, even while they took the pill to avoid the child before its time. This was the early seventies, and a remarkable number of college-educated women wanted marriage or at least an engagement ring by the time they got their degrees. Whether this rush to domesticity had to do with maternal urges wasn’t entirely clear. But after college, when I returned home to Hong Kong, it soon became apparent that several secondary schoolmates had elected a kind of domesticity through marriage and motherhood, even though a significant number pursued professional careers as well. At our class reunions over the years, what struck me was that the most contented appeared to be the girls from the domestic science stream, whose own careers outside the home were secondary or nonexistent compared to their husbands’, while the so-called smart girls, especially from the sciences, the ones who pursued demanding careers in addition to courting that same domesticity, contended with fouler existentialist dilemmas. It wasn’t even a question of which spouse had greater earning power or status. When it came to raising the children and running the household, that simply was a wife’s responsibility, this unpaid labor around the domestic sciences.
Of course, seemingly happy domesticities are not all alike, not once you peek under the sheets. My worldview is undoubtedly skewered by my own two divorces, an uncompromising unwillingness to bear children, and my willingness to risk material well-being in pursuit of the writer’s life. So why is it, as I cross life’s threshold from sunlight into eventide, I am feeling femininely fowl, desirous of courting domestic bliss?
A confession. At fourteen, I would have been horrified had I been streamed into domestic science. My strong subjects were English, literature, and French, and I could handle history and geography despite my attention deficit around the remembering of facts. Math was required of everyone in the public exam, and I could be competent enough when I wasn’t daydreaming. Domestic science, however, I probably would have failed, mostly because the science of anything was simply not my strong suit. It took me years to figure that one out, though, because teenage me craved Mum’s approval that was meted out for academic excellence and professional ambition. At fourteen it was easier to scoff at what my mother considered the “pretend” science of domesticity.
And yet.
I used to sew and embroider. In primary 4, when I was around nine, we had a class assignment to learn a number of different stitches, which I sewed along parallel lines as a pattern for an apron. I privately harbored great pride over that apron. It was an unremarkable achievement, one that received neither a high grade nor praise from my mother. But I held on to that apron for years, in love with this pattern of stitches—cross, back, running, chain, tack, tent, hem—amazed that I had actually managed to create it. Later, in college, I would embroider butterflies on my young American cousin’s blue jeans in bright and beautiful colors. She remembers this fondly, and even now she and her mother remark on this shared memory.
Similarly, I loved the dresses I sewed as a young teen on Mum’s Singer. Selecting the fabric, matching and contrasting colors, searching out the right Butterick or Simplicity pattern, such work never felt onerous. My handiwork was never all that neat or precise, so I stuck to uncomplicated patterns that even a monkey could get right—the straight sheath, the A-line without a waistband, the empire line that was easier to fit around the darts, zippers instead of buttons, plain sleeves or no sleeves, plain cotton that didn’t crinkle, bunch or otherwise slide out of my grasp. By adulthood this simplified approach applied to all other domestic tasks as well. My cooking is basic, and I don’t use recipes, mostly because that requires marshaling facts in the correct order, sorting out British versus American measures, and remembering to turn the oven off or on in sequence at the right temperatures. But I pride myself on being able to whip up a meal with anything that happens to be in the larder and fridge. I also excel at what I know are the easier domestic sciences, namely, the laundry, ironing, and housecleaning, all of which I actually quite enjoy and find a therapeutic and welcome distraction from the art of filling the blank page. Two marriages to men who wore suits and one who wore tuxedoes made me reasonably competent at ironing shirts. In another life, I would probably have been a pretty decent maid or washerwoman.
Because Ellen Swallow Richards wasn’t wrong. The higher domestic sciences such as nutrition, food preparation, and child rearing, along with the attendant knowledge around health and wellness, demand rigorous attention and require far more discipline than I could possibly muster. Motherhood terrifies me. Mothers need to know a shitload about pretty much everything and must multitask a daily roster of duties that would be way beyond most Fortune 500 CEOs. Yet they suffer the mockery of children who quickly become too cool for school and for Mom, are taken for granted by husbands who only have to be the good cop parent, and are assumed to have found their “natural” role in life, regardless of whatever educational or professional accomplishments they may have achieved—rocket scientist, concert pianist, commercial airline pilot, lawyer. Such achievements are merely, as Mum said, in case your husband doesn’t make enough and you need to go back to work.
It’s hell being a feminist. Much of my earlier professional life in business was spent mentally shooting angry birds at glass ceilings. You know the ones, those tiny little blue birds created by Rovio for its wildly popular electronic game, the ones best employed for smashing glass? There were many more men than women in my workplace milieu who competed to rise through the ranks of management. Even though I avoided the indignity of lesser pay, a boys’ club ruled the hierarchy, and whatever rise I accomplished was destined to be a solo performance of luck, persistence, and a stubborn refusal to cry “uncle.” Fortunately, I had a parallel career as a writer, an “indulgence” that kept my ego intact. What contributed to steeling me sufficiently to survive this reality imbalance had roots in Ellen Swallow Richards’s discipline, one that more appropriately should be named the science and art of home economics.
As an MFA grad student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I was assigned one semester to teach advanced expository writing in the Home Economics Department. It was an odd moment. I was in the last year of my degree program, had wanted some relief from teaching freshman writing, and asked the Writing Center to assign me an advanced course. My teaching evaluations were good, so I knew I probably would get priority. But home ec? I didn’t know whether to be pleased or repulsed.
I was in my late twenties, recently married for the second time to an American jazz musician, overall rather non-domestically inclined in favor of being “the writer and artist,” and not entirely happy with life on the MFA track. I had given up a promising business career in Hong Kong, along with its corporate international travel perks and excellent benefits, and gambled on the Writing Life in the United States, only to find I was now competing for a financially unlucrative career where the odds of success were about as good as winning at roulette. For a time, later in my fishy-fowl existence, I haunted roulette tables at casinos around the world. Auckland, Amsterdam, Macau, Lisbon, Dunedin, Atlantic City were a few I visited. The spinning wheel was mesmerizing, as were the multiply layered odds a player could stake, and I chose to ignore the lousy probability that math and common sense dictated. I was simply a sucker for the long-shot one-in-thirty-six win, and if I hedged bets around the table and left when I had lost my limit, things usually balanced out. This ex-habit was my nod to flunking calculus in school.
But I was recalling a semester of home economics before roulette interrupted.
It was in an ambiguously uncertain mood that I wandered through the hallways of home ec, a department I had not known even existed at the university, to meet the person in charge of the course.
She was undomestic, this supervisory professor, which was the first surprise. What exactly had expected? A housewifely matron, perhaps, her apron pocket lined with recipes on index cards for angel food cake and pot roast? Instead, my supervisor more closely resembled my idealized image of a real academic, certainly much more so than the disheveled and forgetful, unprepared and underwhelming, cold and distant, intellectually snobbish, or, worse, predatory male professors who inhabited academe, all the ones encountered both as an undergrad and grad student. This professor was sharp, intellectual, professional, and her entire appearance and demeanor exuded subtly excellent taste. More significantly, she immediately commanded my respect and, I later came to understand, was one of the rare older professional women I encountered who proved a role model for my own life.
My second surprise was what comprised the student body. On the first day of class, I faced approximately thirty-five to forty students, all female, 95 percent fashion marketing and 5 percent “real” home ec majors. It was revelatory. Here was modern womanhood of the early eighties in all her glory. A couple of decades later, I was reminded of this time when Sex and the City recast that glory.
That semester was my introduction to being fowl, as I attempted to enact a kind of rule of law as the graduate assistant of the henhouse. It also forced me to rethink the true value and meaning of domesticity.
Of the many writing classes I’ve taught, this was the one that most tested my sense of a feminine self. Teaching freshman writing, which had been my main experience at the time, was a rite of passage for the MFA student to determine if a teaching job was her best option after graduation. I found that work entertaining. Where else would you get to read, out of the same pile of papers, a smart-alecky essay titled “How to Open a Bottle of Beer,” followed by an articulate philosophical meditation on the meaning of death, capped by the story of a national hero in a foreign student’s country, a story he never thought anyone would care to read. My student conferences proved an education in human desire and motivation. Here was the good girl who smiled too brightly, in agony over her lack of straight A’s during her transit from high school to college. Here was the mature student fighting to balance an unexpected single motherhood with deadlines for papers, and your heart melted as you handed out an extension. And that giant boy, the basketball player terrified of writing, who finally realized that yes, he did have something to say if he wrote about what he knew. It was easy being the teacher and grown-up for these eager, frightened, cocky, desperate, clever young things. As a rule, they really didn’t care who or what you were because all they wanted was to get through this course, this requirement that began for many with a groan but ended, at least for some, with a little more enlightenment about the meaning of their existence.
The juniors in home ec were another story.
Admittedly, my supervisor did roll her eyes when we discussed the fashionistas. It was a concession, she said, to surviving academia, as the enrollment numbers of fashion marketing majors kept the department alive. Besides, these graduates potentially would place in really desirable jobs that led to lucrative careers. At least this was true if you loved fashion, and what girl didn’t? Her practical take on the realities of college education was eye opening. In the English department where my MFA was housed, it was evident that creative writing was the lifeblood of the department, especially at the graduate level. As the masters and PhD students often told us, we MFA writers threw the best parties, where the booze always flowed. Yet it was also clear that not all the literature professors welcomed us. I had accepted the funded offer to do my MFA at UMASS, a three-year program with a curriculum that required graduate literature credits, because I was still partly interested in the possibility of a PhD. But the unwelcome response from some of the literature professors, who looked askance at my presence in their academically superior seminars, was off-putting. Clearly the writing of fiction was not, in their opinion, worthy of a degree. In fact, by the time my semester of teaching in home economics ended, I actually found that discipline more appealing than literature for a doctorate. Today, as a published nonfiction and fiction writer, I know a background in home economics would have provided excellent material for literary nonfiction, much the way the serious study of any academic discipline will yield knowledge for a writer.
Because the most challenging and exciting students I taught in that class were the home economics majors.
My own background in marketing and advertising did serve for teaching the hens of fashion marketing. When confronted by an attractively chic bunch of twenty-year-olds who read all those fashion magazines I never read, my one hope of sustaining their attention in class was to entertain with my real-world experience. As sophisticated as they strove to be, I did have one up on them, having worked for an international airline and traveled to some of the great cities of the world, including Paris, London, New York. I’d even known women who worked in fashion and could talk knowledgeably about how New York designers traveled to Hong Kong and Taiwan to reproduce Parisian knockoffs for department stores in the United States. Truthfully, I had met exactly one woman who did that, but a good fiction writer doesn’t let facts get in the way of a good story. But I did hang out in New York regularly, thanks to my jazz musician husband, and knew my way around Manhattan. Somehow, I managed to eke out a reasonable amount of critical thinking from essay assignments as long as I could keep these girls awake. They were all generally sweet, earnest, and pretty girls; at worst there were airheads and at best ambitiously savvy ones who understood the value of researching the world they craved to enter and who therefore wrote decent research papers. I directed some of these latter students toward the MBA, a useful degree if money and power are desirable goals. None of those students are memorable. But from among the former, the earnest airheads, one girl still speaks to me through memory’s mists, even now. She was at best a C-plus or B-minus student, but she came to class, turned in work on time, showed up to student conferences, and always thanked me profusely for whatever help I tried to give her. At the end of our last conference, she spoke about her desire to go to New York, excited that I had actually been to the city of her dreams. “I so want to be in Soho,” she confided, “and be where all the yuppies are.” She was dead serious, but her enthusiasm was infectious. I wished her well in her quest for yuppie-dom.
However, it was the home economics major, the A-plus student headed for grad school, who became my favorite. My task was primarily to help improve the students’ writing skills, as I was not expected to be conversant in their academic discipline. The course supervisor oversaw the critical rigor of their research. In our early conference sessions, she expressed irritation at her fashion marketing classmates. I allowed her to vent but also played devil’s advocate, challenging her opinions and ideas, even though I privately agreed with her critique of their materialistic, wasteful world of fashion and its anorexic view of womanhood. Her own passions centered around a domestic feminist worldview, one that I had not at the time fully considered. She spoke about the undervaluing of the domestic sciences and the role of women as we progressed, postfeminism. Our conferences evolved into a Socratic conversation where we taught each other. I could be forgiving of the fashion business world because it offered more opportunity than most other professions for women to rise in power and take charge. She could articulate power for domesticity, this largely feminine condition, through her research and critical work. Perhaps in time, we agreed, the gender imbalance could correct itself, and the relevance of home economics had many contributions to make in this regard.
These days, when I retreat to my rural homestead, it is domesticity that gives me the greatest joy. Although I no longer sew dresses or embroider butterflies, I still launder and iron, grateful for the science of washing machines and dryers. I have lived in more than one home where it was possible to hang laundry on a clothesline in the garden and to inhale the fresh scent of sheets air-dried in the sun. Such memories ease the inevitable process of aging, certainly more so than the glass ceilings that persist, that deserve all the angriest blue birds of feminist outrage.
I work better in a clean and orderly home, where meals are nutritionally balanced and the food is prepared with fresh ingredients from neighboring farms. My professional life still demands that I travel here, there, and everywhere, appearing in fashion choices to make just the right statement as “The Writer,” hoping to impress the yuppies of the literary world as well as those who wield power. But the older I get, the less that really matters.
In 1873 Ellen Swallow Richards, then Ellen H. Swallow, submitted a thesis for her BS to the Department of Chemistry at MIT. It was titled “Notes on Some Supharsenites and Sulphantimonites from Colorado.” The handwritten manuscript opens with a statement about specimens of “silver bearing minerals” that were obtained in Colorado mines. “They were called by the miners,” she writes, “brittle silver or grey copper, but as they had never been analyzed, nothing definite was known as to their composition.” The rest of the paper is a scientific analysis of the presence and compositions of other minerals in the mines and is more science than I can fully appreciate. I think of it as a kind of giant recipe, one that shows us what these mines comprise should we ever wish to reproduce or understand their composition. I think of it as a record of intellectual curiosity, one that required hours in a laboratory, patiently testing and measuring these substances to understand more about their existence. I think of it as the early work of an unusual and very special young woman, who later applied her knowledge toward matters that would have a major impact on modern life. Her paper ends with a modestly cautious conclusion: “I have begun a series of investigations on the behavior of the other metals with hyposulphite with a view to employing hyposulphite in qualitative analysis, in some instances at least, instead of sulphuric acid. I think it might be used as a preliminary test and save much time.”
It is high time I became that feminine fowl, as this foray into the domestic sciences or home economics might suggest. Call it a preliminary step in my path toward old age as a more contented hen than the younger, angrier blue bird, flinging myself endlessly against glass. There are ceilings and ceilings. It isn’t only about the shattering.