Hearthbroken: Chapter Six

Hearthology 101: Reclaiming the Sacred Code

Can a Word Change the World?

A curious thing happened after I introduced the word Hearthologist in this chapter and later in a presentation.

Two thinkers I respect pushed back. One, a Brit, compared it to calling a bartender a “mixologist,” an attempt, he suggested, to artificially inflate status. The work of the home, he argued, is too sacred to benefit from rebranding. It stands above linguistic tinkering.

Another friend suggested we should restore dignity to the term homemaker itself, noting that “making” captures so much of what the role entails.

Both responses deserve consideration. Both left me with more questions than answers.

Can homemaker recover its historic weight?
Can a diminished word regain its gravity?
Or does a new term like Hearthologist help mark a genuine shift in how we understand the work of tending the human hearth?
Do the young people stepping into these roles deserve a fresh linguistic beginning, or does the inherited word carry a thread of cultural continuity worth preserving?
And if neither Hearthologist nor homemaker fully captures the role, what might? Have I overlooked a better word?

I do not claim a final answer. I am genuinely curious what you think. Enjoy.

Kathryn

Hearthology 101: Reclaiming the Sacred Code

“I believe that home is the organic unit of society, and that to elevate the standard of living and of life in the home is to elevate the whole social system.” — Ellen Swallow Richards, Home Economics movement founder

Every Sunday for nearly twenty years, I stepped through Ingrid’s door, her California kitchen bursting with her German sense of hospitality. She greeted me with a mama bear hug then handed me a cup of hot coffee before inviting me to sit at her table, which was always beautifully set with delicate china atop of her mother’s embroidered tablecloth. Her home radiated warmth, the kind that wrapped around you like a quilt. I always left with color in my cheeks and more life in my bones than when I’d arrived. I’d spent decades thinking I’d cracked the code on hospitality, feeding strangers by the thousands, but Ingrid, in her own way, showed me what I had missed: that true nourishment begins in the warmth of our homes, the unassuming heartbeat that sustains us all.

I’d felt that pulse before and had chased it across continents. In a Catalonian village, where an unassuming 90-year-old mother ladled haute cuisine from copper pots in her kitchen and her daughter poured wine and love into our cups like they were the same thing. In Peru where Quechua women stirred pots over open fires, their hands weaving nourishment into stories that held their people together through the toughest of times. These women were our first bioemotional engineers, mastering body, mind and soul with wooden spoons and watchful eyes. Their hearths buzzed with something ancient, something I glimpsed in Ingrid’s home, a reverence we’ve half-forgotten. We’ve all experienced it, if only for a moment, the undeniable comfort of being truly cared for.

The Status Illusion

When women left home, trading aprons for briefcases (or in my case, a chef’s coat), we weren’t just chasing paychecks. We were chasing freedom, independence, and a life that stretched beyond the narrow corridors our mothers had paced. The doors of opportunity swung open and we stepped through believing we had finally arrived at something better.

But now, decades later, the picture isn’t as bright as we once imagined. Despite our advances, happiness indicators haven’t just dipped, they’ve plummeted. Burnout is rampant. And birth rates are in freefall, as some choose to forgo having children while others miss out because the years that once held that possibility were consumed by work. We all sense something is off, but most of us are moving too fast, pushing too hard to pause and ask how to fix it, so we carry on.

As we saw in previous chapters, the market is indifferent to our struggles. Feminism urged us forward with a battle cry, but it rarely defended what we abandoned in the charge. When the market became God, workism crept in, reinforcing the idea that our worth is measured in wages and professional titles. Lullabies and love may shape a child’s soul, but they don’t count toward GDP.

And that blind spot isn’t just philosophical. If we were to assign a market value to the unpaid care performed in homes around the world, it would total nearly $11 trillion a year — almost half the U.S. GDP. Despite its staggering worth, this mission critical labor remains economically invisible. The market has failed to recognize, let alone respond to, this profound imbalance. And what the market doesn’t see, it doesn’t reward. As a result, the work of caring for our own children remains both economically precarious and culturally devalued.

It’s no surprise, then, that fewer and fewer women choose homemaking or full-time motherhood as a short or long-term path. Many return to their desks within weeks of giving birth, some out of financial necessity, others out of fear that too much time away could cost them advancement in careers they’ve worked so hard to build. In a culture that prizes professional identity, staying home can feel like vanishing from view.

One might assume that better financial support would turn the tide, that if women were simply given more money, more time, more help, they might choose differently. But in places like South Korea and the Nordic countries, where governments have poured generous subsidies into family life, birth rates continue to plummet. The data suggest something deeper is at play. In cultures that revere market productivity above all else, no amount of money can mask the fact that choosing care over career often means stepping off the pedestal of public respect.

It’s become clear in recent years that the missing piece is something the market can’t effectively price — status. Johann Kurz’s powerful essay on Substack, “It’s embarrassing to be a Stay-at-Home Mom” highlights a striking move by Orthodox Patriarch Ilia II in Georgia who announced he would personally baptize and become godfather to every third child. With a replacement birth rate of about 2.3 children per couple, three kids was the boost Georgia needed to stay on track. The effect? Nothing short of miraculous; birth rates blossomed. Georgia is deeply religious, with 90% of its population Orthodox Christian, so you might assume faith alone drives higher birth rates. But that wasn’t the case here. Abortion rates had been climbing and the birth rate was falling, until Ilia stepped in. It took the status of a respected leader to change the trend.

Wealthy families in more secular-leaning industrialized nations like the United States offer a clear lens into this dynamic. For affluent men, a wife who stays home with their children is a status symbol. As Ivana Greco observes in her excellent essay, “Status, Class Divide, and Homemakers,” some affluent families outsource their child care allowing mothers to devote their time to leisure, spending their days shopping, brunching, or going to the gym. But many others gladly embrace the role of orchestrating family life. Alongside raising children, these women are often expected to cultivate social capital by curating networks that enhance their husbands’ careers and social standing. Their time and energy may also extend into civic or charitable work, reinforcing their families’ prestige while subtly shaping institutions and communities behind the scenes. Though unpaid, these contributions carry high status, serving as currencies of prestige woven tightly into the fabric of intergenerational legacy.

But what about the middle classes, where resources are tighter and choices more constrained? As sociologist demographer Rainer Kurz argues, many families adopt a different strategy for securing status: rather than having more children, they have fewer and invest heavily in their future earning power. Two children with university degrees signal more prestige than five with only a high school education. In this model, status is not displayed through family size, but through upward mobility. That mobility, however, often comes at a cost. With both parents working full-time to afford elite schooling, extracurriculars, and tutoring, time becomes a scarce and precious resource. Childhood becomes a project. Parenthood becomes performance.

But what if we reframed our priorities? What if we saw a full-time homemaker not as a luxury, but as a vital investment, one that benefits families and communities alike? Increasingly, we’re seeing the cracks in the alternative: parents grinding themselves down to secure a child’s spot at a top school, only to face a generation grappling with attachment issues, anxiety and/or chronic health problems — not to mention collapsing birth rates. If status hinges on outcomes, what happens when this pursuit leaves our kids and our families struggling?

This question persists because we’ve yet to fully reckon with what caregiving demands and delivers. Far from a passive role, it’s a sophisticated craft, one that rivals the complexity of any respected profession. True esteem and in turn high status for caregivers, men and women alike, must come from a cultural evolution. The recognition, reflected in our values, that places their work in the domestic sphere as an indispensable act of co-creation that sustains the human species.

Today, as explored in earlier chapters, emerging scientific research is rapidly dismantling the notion that homemaking and/or caring for children is menial or can be simply outsourced. Study after study confirms that children nurtured in warm, attentive homes tend to thrive academically, emotionally and socially. Yet we still cling to the idea that caring for children, organizing a household or tending to emotional bonds can be “squeezed in” after our day jobs, proof of our lingering bias that anyone can handle domestic tasks.

Effective homemaking and caregiving demands near-executive-level organization, a nutritionist’s knowledge, a teacher’s skill and a therapist’s empathy. Whether this work is split between partners or shouldered by one individual, it requires a commitment that easily matches (and often exceeds) the demands of conventional, full-time employment.

If we continue to treat care like a side gig, we not only exhaust those who provide it, we rob ourselves, and our children, of its long-term benefits. Until we all honor the mission-critical nature of this role, we will continue to suffer the consequences of its absence in our families, our communities, and our collective future. Perhaps true progress lies in honoring homemaking and care as central, not peripheral, to our collective well-being.

The Hearth Reclaimed

For much of Western history, the term “housewife” carried a weight and dignity that has all but disappeared from modern usage. In medieval and early modern Europe, the housewife was a steward of a productive household economy. She preserved food, spun wool, brewed ale, kept books, raised animals, and sometimes managed staff. The household was a site of labor, barter, and small-scale commerce, and the housewife was its operations manager.

Far from connoting servitude, housewife once signaled a role of authority and moral leadership. She stood as the guardian of intergenerational continuity, safeguarding the transmission of knowledge and values required for the resilience and endurance of families and cultures across time. Her labor was recognized for it’s essential contribution to her family and to her community.

This changed with the rise of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As home-based cottage industries gave way to factories and offices, the housewife’s economic contributions disappeared, and along with them, her status and to some extent, her agency.

The term homemaker began to replace housewife in the mid-twentieth century, a linguistic shift that mirrored deeper cultural transformations. Where housewife evoked an older world of marital duty, homemaker suggested something more modern. It aligned with the postwar ideal of the efficient, patriotic household and with the field of home economics, which sought to reframe domestic tasks as a science.

Marketers embraced the term too. Homemakers were not just wives or caretakers but consumers, making rational choices in a booming economy of appliances and packaged goods. Later, as feminism challenged the structures that they felt confined women to the private sphere, homemaker offered a softer, less “patriarchal” alternative, a version that focused on the space rather than the spouse.

But in stripping away the marital and moral authority once implied by housewife the new term also reduced the role’s historical significance. What had once been seen as the backbone of communities was recast as a lifestyle choice, a preference, a personal arrangement. Together, these structural changes in how society valued labor, gender, and care made it harder to see the homemaker’s true worth — and easier to dismiss.

As we enter a new era, one that’s beginning to acknowledge the full depth and scope of this role, it may be time to rethink the title we’ve long taken for granted. Homemaker no longer captures the complexity, intelligence, or cultural importance of the role today.

So what do you call someone whose work is to cultivate belonging, stability and growth within both a household and a community? This question sparked a lively discussion with my husband on a road trip a couple of years back, as we tried to imagine what such a title might be.

After fielding many options, we landed on “Hearthologist.” It immediately clicked for both of us, capturing something closer to the true mission at the heart of this work. It felt like the right neologism for a role that has been essential for millennia, yet never properly named in modern, professional, or philosophical terms.

After all, we’ve evolved beside the warmth of the hearth, and those who tended it have long been guardians of our survival. If this work is necessary for our well-being — and our future, shouldn’t it have a name that reflects its scope and dignity?

I floated the term by several friends, mothers and fathers, grandmothers, even a couple of academics, and every one of them nodded in agreement. Hearthologist sounded like it carried heft, like it belonged to someone with both wisdom and skill. If we choose to embrace it, then the role becomes an extension of Hearthology: a new field that explores the practice of human flourishing, inspired by the ancient Greek ideal yet adapted to the needs of our present moment. At its core, is the acknowledgment that the care we receive at home shapes who we become and safeguards the future of our human family.

So if care is the heartbeat of humanity, then a Hearthologist is its steward. They are systems wizards, bringing order to household chaos, nutritional alchemists, summoning sustenance from humble ingredients, stretching a lean budget into meals that fuel growing bodies day after day. They’re emotional architects, reading the unspoken in a child’s slumped shoulders or a partner’s clipped words, weaving a web of care that holds a family upright through all of life’s ups and downs. They’re cultural archivists, passing down stories, recipes and rituals, threading a sense of belonging into lives that might otherwise unravel in a world obsessed with the new. Then there’s kinkeeping, the labor of memory and connection. Hearthologists are often the ones who remember everyone’s birthdays, mend feuds with a phone call and gather scattered relatives around a table, keeping the family’s roots alive when distance or time threaten to snap them.

But most importantly, these are the women who, across generations, have taken on the sacred task of shaping young, wild beings into people who can think, feel, and stand steady. They teach resilience with a band-aid on a scraped knee, patience over a tangled shoelace, and curiosity through a bedtime story that lingers long after the lights dim.

Alongside them, men too have guided the young, teaching risk and restraint, daring and discipline, offering the sheltering presence of protection and the invitation to venture beyond the known. But it has traditionally been women who, more often and more intimately, have tended the hearth, managing the miracles of daily life with a deft hand, no applause, no paycheck or even a nod from the world beyond their walls.

When we choose to take on this work, whether for a lifetime or just when our children are young, we’re not “opting out” of progress. We’re inviting a rebalancing of values, where nurture, care and connection takes their rightful place at the heart of what we honor. In doing so, we’re taking a stand for human flourishing. And what work could be more meaningful than helping to shape the world to come?

Of Reverence and Rigor

Society often takes its cues from how we present ourselves. When we treat homemaking as a casual endeavor, we reinforce the notion that it’s unskilled or insignificant. But if we instead approach it as a vocation, one that deserves both reverence and rigor, we can begin to move the needle on how our culture values this work. This means honoring the role for what it truly requires: a well-informed generalist mindset, with enough depth to navigate everything from dyad dynamics and infant care to nutrition and family finance. Hearthology demands intellectual flexibility, practical wisdom, and a commitment to lifelong learning. Some Hearthologists will develop expertise in areas like cooking, entertaining, early childhood education, or eldercare and may even offer their skills and products to their community. Whether through formal training or custom-crafted AI curricula, this is a path worthy of study, discipline, and pride.

My friend Ingrid took her role seriously and it showed. She hailed from the last generation of women whose knowledge was handed down from her mother and grandmother. For most of us now, that lineage has been interrupted. Now these are skills we must seek out intentionally, piecing them back together to build spaces that truly nurture.

My mother, an overextended single mom, did her best but the art and science of homemaking weren’t among the things she had time or space to teach. I’m not sure why my grandmother didn’t pass those skills down, but I suspect she saw me as a girl boss in the making and destined for a career in the public sphere. She wasn’t entirely wrong. But I did eventually learn the skills of the hearth in my late twenties from my German mother-in-law, and to some extent through my career in food and hospitality. Now, having retired from feeding the public, I’ve stepped into the role of a mostly full-time Hearthologist and I’m more content than I could have ever imagined. Welcoming family, friends, and colleagues into my home, pouring my heart into making them feel the warmth I once found in Ingrid’s embrace, has become my highest calling yet. When we dignify this work with dedication, we help others to recognize the full measure of its worth and in doing so, we lift the stature of all who choose care and homemaking as their vocation.

Our grandmothers could hardly have imagined how far we’ve come. How much power, education, wealth, and equality women now wield. These hard-won gifts were forged in the blood, sweat, and vision of early feminists who fought to break us free from domestic inequality. In many homes, women had become little more than employees, at their husband’s beck and call, in exchange for food, shelter and security but rarely granted true partnership. That world is fading.

Today, the hearth is ours to reclaim and reimagine, not as subordinates, but as co-creators, equals in both love and labor. And men are not only on board, they’re embracing this evolution showing up at home in ways no generation before them has. Together, we are building something more balanced, more humane, and ultimately more sustaining for us all.

The Sacred Spark

We’ve been running on fumes for too many years, pretending the work at the hearth is optional — but it’s not. The care provided at home drives humanity’s operating system and without it, we crash.

In the end, human flourishing remains what it always was: a balancing act between nature and nurture, individual and collective. The hearth’s fire still burns, not in clay pits or temple altars, but in the mitochondria of our cells, the algorithms shaping our habits and the embodied language of care passed from hand to hand, breath to breath.

Hearthology, then, is not a new idea but a reclaimed one. It invites us to see the home not as a prison of obligation, but as a living lab where the future of human flourishing is being beta-tested daily, by those who’ve always known that tending the sacred spark of life is the highest form of science and art.

You might be wondering what all of this means in practical, financial terms. After all, if Hearthology is to be taken seriously as a profession, it needs more than elevated status — it needs real economic support. Unless we address the financial vulnerability of those who devote themselves to this vocation and the care of future generations, no amount of respect or titles will make the role sustainable in today’s economy.

The good news is that this new era brings a host of new tools, possibilities and unexpected pathways that can ease the economic strain of choosing Hearthology as a career path. In the next chapter, we’ll explore these emerging opportunities, where nurturing and earning no longer stand at odds, and where the hearth can once again serve as the engine of our collective future.