A Home for Men and Women

I enjoyed reading Peter Petschauer’s thoughts on the multiple meanings of the term “home.” For me, it incited a riot of conflicting ideas. In particular, he utilizes patriarchal words and definitions, i.e., ideas assuming power relationships, without addressing the question of power inequality. An awareness of the significance of these power relationships is central to understanding how these terms are used against and for women.

For centuries, women’s roles in the home have pivoted around caretaking, not only as the actual caretaker but also the signifier of what caretaking represents. The images of home have, at their core, the fulfillment of a need to belong. Further, psychological studies reinforce our intuitive recognition that “a sense of cultural heritage … positively relates to mental health and well being” within the group. (Olivia M. Espín, Women Crossing Boundaries: A Psychology of Immigration and Transformations of Sexuality, 1999, p. 33) For example, the recent rape of women in Bosnia was also a rape of the culture, the “homeland” that nation-states use to strengthen citizens’ loyalty. In Nazi Germany, the fecund, Aryan female represented the epitome of a pure Germany. As Peter pointed out, Bäumer, the hero from All Quiet on the Western Front, saw his mother at the center of home. Home and all it implies presents a feminine face. Psychologist Olivia Espín discovered from working with immigrants that “discourse on the preservation of cultural values usually centers on women’s sexuality.” (p. 13) Home represents culture, the womb of a family, an ethnic group, or nation; it is intangible; it is feminine.

If the idea of home or belonging were a Janus coin (home being the feminine face), then Peter’s use of “castle” and “sanctuary” represents the masculine side. Even “the homeplace” retains a masculine form. Growing up in the pre-war South, my family had its own homeplace that firmly fixed the meaning of this term for me. I can never remember a time when our family lived at the homeplace—it was a place of stories—and I never anticipated that any of us would live there. Yet, we often visited the house and land, and all it represented remains firmly fixed in our memories. During the Red Scare in the 1950s and 1960s, my mother used to say, “No matter where you are, if we are bombed, make your way back to the homeplace. There we can start over.” The day my grandmother sold the farm I felt as if our safety net had been cut from under us. The homeplace represented physical safety; it was tangible—the earth, the rocks and water—and it was power. What in my thinking had been a feminine or at least a neutral perception of homeplace, in reading Peter’s essay began to signify the other. It is his masculine usage of the word “castle” that I found to be very uncomfortable. Even his language changed when he began to use the term, it became a language of “power” with words like “hid,” “police,” and “military.” I experienced the tenor of the paper shifting from supportive to adversarial.

I would suggest that we might apply these ideas even further to his discussion of the private versus the public sphere. What is the first thing one visualizes with words like “castle,” “Heimat,” or “homeplace” and what does one visualize with the term “home”? What do these words signify? For me, and I would posit for many Westerners, “castle” is visualized from the outside, built of stone or brick and multi-turreted; a castle represents law and rights and power. On the other hand, the term “home” more readily conjures up an image of a glowing fire, comfortable chairs, and a welcoming kitchen with low glowing lights: it emanates an inner comfort and rootedness. “Castle,” this masculine symbol for home, is public—it faces the community, the world. “Home,” the feminine signifier, is the private, the heart and soul—the womb.

What does all of this “wordplay” suggest? I posit that a shift away from the private domain will demand a restructuring or redefining of the spheres traditionally viewed as realms of men or women. Perhaps the “loss” of a private realm, foreseen by Peter, will result in increased equality for women as they are allowed out of the dim, warm kitchen—the place of interiority and hiding—to a

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place of law, rights, and power. (Diana G. Zoelle. Globalizing Concern for Women’s Human Rights: The Failure of the American Model, 2000) A place where rape, for instance, won’t occur as frequently because its multi-layered meanings of culture and nation have been defused and it has become only an act of physical violence, not a desecration of the sacred. A place where a man’s home is not his castle but a home. The hearts of men and women are where the home is found.

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