Betty Friedan’s analysis of the psychological consequences of compulsory happy housewifery for 1950s middle-class American women may not cut much ice in the twenty-first century, when two incomes drum up barely enough cash to rent a cardboard box under a Sydney bridge. But in recent weeks I’ve started to wonder if Her Indoors in the Henhouse may still, even in this day and age, struggle with The Problem That Has No Name.
Treasure has just spent several weeks in the nest box, trying to hatch baby Light Sussex chicks from golfballs. At about 11 am every day the frustration seemed to overwhelm her and she would leap from the coop, galloping madly around the yard, finally throwing herself into the nearest patch of scarified earth for a frenzied roll about. And then, after an orgiastic dirt bath, back to the nest for another thankless 23 hours of golfball-warming. After a month or so of this, she seems to have given it all up as a bad joke: she’s spending her nights with the other girls now, out on the edge of the fig tree barrel, in the rain. But she’s emerged from her confinement looking disturbingly downtrodden and scabrous.
Just to ramp up the poultry-keeping anxiety, we’ve also had an egg strike. Snowball occasionally pops out a pocket-sized effort which we have a slim chance of collecting, if we leap up the minute it’s been laid and leg it down the yard, hurling any object at hand at the awaiting brush turkeys. But otherwise, nada.
We have had these health concerns before. In the past our concerns about the wasting disease fatally undermining the chooks’ productivity has usually ended with a discovery like this:
After extensive searching of the spider-rich environs around the yard, a mother-lode of eggs has yet to be found, though I have come to the conclusion that “exclusion netting” may be something of a misnomer.
Could an infestation of red mites explain Treasure’s sorry state and the recent lack of omelettes? Oddly, Friedan’s account of housewives’ distress in The Feminine Mystique never references insects.
The henhouse has been duly scrubbed and even sprinkled with wormwood, allegedly a natural insecticide. If it doesn’t kill off the annoying bugs, perhaps we can set up a still in the woodshed, chuck in the left-over wormwood and help the chooks drown their sorrows with absinthe. What with the late Victorian bohemian vibe, I think chickens wasted on absinthe would have higher self-esteem than your hen zoned out on “mother’s little helpers“.
Not entirely persuaded that the beverage of choice of the nineteenth century Parisian art world would also do a good job with the modern mite, I also cracked out some evil commercial pesticide and gave the very indignant Treasure a good dusting.
In the spirit of equal opportunity ignorance, I’d been doing my best to avoid reading the manual or asking for direction. Eventually I cracked and consulted other, wiser chicken enthusiasts. Almost immediately I found out from Tim-the-Chicken that your broody light Sussex often sashays straight into the egg-free zone of the annual moult.
It’s The Problem That Has No Name no more. It has a name, and its name is moulting.
I’m not sure what insights I’ve offered into twentieth century women’s history here.  Can we read the rising popularity of the bikini in the the 60s and 70s as some kind of symbolic human female “moulting”? Will we see birth rates and valium consumption rise again with the increasing popularity of the retro one piece swim suit and the burquini? Who can say. I’m simply hoping, like a scary social conservative, that Treasure will come to her senses, cover up those naked bits, stop running around the town and get back into the henhouse.
