So here's a question....

Do you think prostitution is domestic work? It certainly has some of the characteristics -- beds, sheets, clean, dirty, repetition, boredom, oppression, expression -- I heard epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani speak on Fresh Air last week. The way she talked about her book The Wisdom of Whores, and the bureaucracy surrounding AIDS research and treatment, got me thinking about this. She says this about changing the way we educate about HIV/AIDS: "It would mean spending lots more of the available money on prostitutes, addicts and gay guys, and lots less on school kids, pregnant women and church groups. It would mean making fun things (sex, drugs) safe, instead of trying to make safe things (abstinence, monogamy) fun." I could say that about changing the way we think about a lot of domestic tasks ... we could try making fun things (hanging up clothes, arranging flowers, playing with children) "safe" -- that is, acceptable as domestic work, instead of making the acceptable things (scrubbing toilets, driving kids around in cars, ironing his shirts) fun.

I may have to look into finding photos and poems along this line -- that is if everyone agrees with me that sex workers can be considered domestic workers -- (is anyone listening to me?)

Magnificently Overqualified Mothers

MomsRising delivered nearly 9,000 resumes -- from working mothers -- to Senator McCain yesterday in support of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. If that's not a Laundry Song I don't know what is. A new kind of domestic beauty --

See the video and send your resume from their website.

I wonder what Daumier's laundresses would think of this? What does it tell you about those women that I don't even know their names -- or how to refer to them without the name of the man who painted their pictures? I think I'll freshen up my resume today. Just in their honor. 5,000 loads of laundry a year and proud of it. That reminds me -- there's some wet stuff that needs to get hung on the line right now -- before I go to work.

Bessie Thomashefsky

This past week the SF Symphony has been performing "The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater" -- a wonderful music, multi-media presentation of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky and the Yiddish Theater in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Amazing to me was the feminist stance of much of the work Bessie T. did -- her newspaper articles, her songs, her beliefs about women's suffrage and birth control, her trouser roles. I particularly liked several of the songs -- and will try to recreate them here. Here's what the SF Chron had to say. Stay tuned...

Okay, so this is really domestic work

Another painting at the Stanford Cantor Art Center's exhibit (Saved from the Storm) -- this time by Renoir -- of a seamstress. All the proper Laundry Songs ingredients -- a woman, a bent spine, a window, cloth, sharp objects -- art and light and thank goodness the Impressionist painters loved these domestic chores.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919), Seamstress at a Window, ca. 1908, oil on canvas. Collection of New Orleans Museum of Art

Saving what you care about -- Floods and Flowers

"Painted in New Orleans, Portrait of Estelle Musson De Gas (1872), was the last in a series of portraits Degas made of his sister-in-law."

A wonderful exhibition is currently being shown at the Stanford Cantor Center. This photo is of one of the paintings saved from a museum in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina by dedicated museum staff. I love the picture -- although I'm not convinced that arranging flowers technically qualifies as domestic work -- saving something you love from a catastrophic natural disaster -- that might qualify. There seem to be many many gardening poems, almost as many as the laundry poems I've found in my searches -- but that's another topic. For now, I'm sticking with laundry, dusting, ironing, bed making -- I think there's another entire oeuvre of cooking and food poetry, too. For another day, another blog.

Tea as Domestic Art

This is one of the most beautiful photos I've seen all year. I've not really thought of tea (making, serving, brewing, drinking) as domestic art before today. Perhaps I should rethink my definitions. Thanks to the NY Times for the photo. And then, we need tea poems.

A Kashmiri woman carried a traditional teapot to family members who were planting the rice crop in Chak-e-Kawoosa, 16 miles west of Srinagar. India expects its rice harvest to increase by 2.4 million tons and wheat output to increase by over 1.2 million tons next year, a top farm ministry official said this week. Photo: Fayaz Kabli/Reuters

Laundress with Attitude

Here is one of my favoirte paintings. This is The Laundress (Renoir, Pierre-Auguste --1880 -- Art Institute in Chicago). She's really telling somebody to turn their socks right-side-out before they dump them in the hamper.