The home project

On domesticity as resistance

In the months leading up to the election, I threw myself into home projects — ripping out the drop ceilings in my basement, cleaning, patching concrete, renting a paint sprayer, picking out knobs for a bathroom vanity, arguing with a contractor about the placement of a new upstairs shower.

My normally quiet home, where I do the majority of my work and also live my life, was thrown into upheaval. My garage filled with pieces of furniture once salvaged from yard sales, now completely ruined — metal beams, cardboard, large sheets of ceiling, boxes of broken plates, a storm-ruining picnic umbrella, toys, a table I’d once let my kids paint on now unsentimentally tossed aside.

Everything was in upheaval. Men trudged in and out. My dog Dolly, an Alaskan malamute who is deeply protective of me, began to lie in my office and give a low warning growl when the contractors approached.

All the men who came into my home during that time, plumbers, electricians, contractors, they all assured me they were fine with big dogs. They loved big dogs. They’d rattle off about the big dogs in their homes growing up. “Just leave her alone,” I told them.

But they couldn’t. One contractor kept trying to play with Dolly even as she grew more agitated. I had to intervene, pull Dolly outside. Ask the man, again, to just leave her alone.

It happens so often, I’ve developed a theory about men and my dog. She’s large, she looks like a wolf, she exudes the power of the traditionally masculine. Men I've dated have insisted on walking her and gotten offended when I refused. She didn’t respect them; she’d pull on the leash. I needed to be in control. She is beautiful and powerful and has the unnerving energy of something that looks like it belongs in the wild. Men who come into my house want to know she’s within their power, but she isn’t. She is mine.

I’ve had a complicated history with contractors. I am a single female homeowner. I am not desperate for help. I am not incapable. I know exactly what I want in my home and I am not willing to compromise.

I’ve had contractors make comments about whether I should consult my husband about a project or repeatedly ask if I was the sole decision maker. I’ve had contractors ask me out, call me a bitch when I asked why the quoted price of a project doubled for no reason. Once, after a contractor refused initially to put a fan in where I asked him to, I asked him to move it. He complied, left a hole in my ceiling, then later demanded more money. Even when things have worked out, it feels uneasy. A tenuous detente.

I have a low growl in my throat at all times.

This home is mine.

As our reproductive rights are taken away and any identity that pushes against the cis-binary is increasingly policed, women are being pushed out of public life and back inside our homes. Billionaire-backed PR machines for traditional values have remade the mother and homemaker as aspirational. Thin, white femininity is once again the idealized norm. In The New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, “We are in the midst of a cultural reclamation of the ideal female body that is suitable for our conservative/authoritarian politics. Our politics are back to projecting thin, pale, weak bodies. Ideally, blond, but that is occasionally negotiable. Being thin is never negotiable.”

It’s a body type and an domestic ideal that relies on women’s passive dependence. One that reinforces the traditional roles of wife and mother. We can decorate the home, but we can’t make the money to purchase it. We must fill the home with children and food, but not be capable enough to wreck its walls and build new ones.

And yet, even as a new administration gears up to pass more laws further controlling women’s economic freedom and participation in public life, more and more single women are buying homes. Despite the obvious structural disadvantages, such as earning less than men, and the soaring cost of homeownership, single women are the fastest-rising demographic of homeowners, far outpacing single men. In 2022, single women owned 58% of the nearly 35.2 million homes owned by unmarried Americans, while single men owned 42%.

When I purchased my home in 2019, friends and family urged me not to. I didn’t want to own a home, they assured me. It was too much. Passive dependence on a landlord or some other man would be preferable, I was told.

And I did expect this to be harder. But it isn’t. It was just harder to imagine this storyline. Imagining a woman’s life outside of marriage and family, even now, even in 2024, is difficult. So many women walk into marriage and motherhood and disappear.

A lot of women I know are talking about the case of the young woman who went running and was murdered; the man convicted of the crime is an immigrant. It’s a tragic story. And some women I know are now reluctant to run alone. But it’s not the streets that hold danger for us, but the four walls of our homes.

The efforts to isolate us inside these walls are not well-meaning. They are not designed for our safety.

I remember when my older sister was married. I’d go to her apartment and clean while I heard my brother-in-law shout. So often I couldn’t tell if what I was rubbing off the walls in the kitchen was blood or food. She left him, but I lost my sister inside that house.

And yet, here is my home, a place I am constantly remaking — painting, cleaning, reordering. It’s my place of peace. This is the place where I host parties and feed my friends. It is the place, even now, where a dog lies beside me, sun streams through the window, and I feel for the first time in my life, safe.

We are daily witnessing an encroachment on the freedoms to exist outside of the patriarchal binary and it’s only going to get worse. Each soft profile of Ballerina Farm, each meme about helpless girl culture, each state rolling back access to abortions, healthcare for trans people. We are being forced back into homes not of our own making but ones we cannot control.

What destruction and design do we have to do to these walls to make a place our own?

Home life is the next battleground of feminist refusal. Home life is the site of the struggle over our personhood and politics. What does home look like? Is it a childless cat lady drinking wine? Or a blond mother with six kids, a bunch of chickens, and a husband who pays for it all?

Homes are things you build. But they are also places you destroy. You renovate them. You create them into something new. This is what I am doing with my home, room by room – cleaning, painting, fixing, replacing, until what I have will be better, stronger than it was before.

Home can be a prison. But when a home is your own, a place where family is what you decide, where the space offers rest and respite from a world that is increasingly hostile to your autonomy and even your life, then home can be a place of resistance.

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