Chapter 7 Making and Keeping Summary and Analysis

Chapter 7 begins with a simple statement: you keep a house, but you make a home. Then, Mary Catherine Bateson elaborates. She claims that all five women interviewed in the book have been homemakers, but none of them keeps a house in order to define who they are. Their home is not their identity. Mary reuses the music metaphor and says that homes can be joint compositions and so can schools, neighborhoods, offices, and the world.

First, Mary describes Ellen and Steve's home in Chestnut Hill outside of Boston. It is a big, old house, and Mary uses personification when she says the house cries out for a tribe. She also uses the metaphor of an incubator to describe the home. It is a place where growth is encouraged and relationships are reaffirmed. Children and dogs...