Shannon Hayes writes and works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in upstate New York. She is the author of Radical Homemakers, The Farmer and the Grill and The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook.

She is a feminist and, interestingly, she is a stay-at-home mom. As she writes in a recent Learnvest.com article, it’s not only the way to best raise her children, it’s also the most economic of her options:

(Learnvest.com) The “independence” of his-and-her careers isn’t independence at all. It means increased reliance on an external employer who typically requires couples to uproot themselves from support networks in their home communities and to take on excessive expenses for housing, childcare and education. Yes, each partner has his or her own independent source of money. But the increased cost of living makes them doubly dependent on external employers who don’t share the same legal responsibilities to employees as marital partners do to each other.

I studied this issue in earnest from 2007 to 2010. Many of my peers in the workforce suffered during the subprime mortgage crisis, but my husband and I slowly inched ahead (despite our comparatively low income). There were several factors:

We were living the life we dreamed about together: deep in lush, green hills and forests with no alarm clock, punch card or commuter traffic to take away from our daily bliss. This reduced many of the conventional strains on our marriage.
As homesteaders, we operated our home on a different set of rules. In conventional American culture, the household is a unit of consumption. It consumes things like food, clothing, electricity, entertainment, education and more. In order to do so, the household must have money. Instead, our household became a unit of production. We have been able to produce most of our own food, electricity (solar), entertainment and a lot of our own health care and education. Many of our other needs are met through barter and exchange with family and community members. We don’t think it’s truly possible to produce everything we need, so we’ve simply increased our self-reliance to the point that we produce more than we consume, freeing us to live according to our earth-centered values.