About ten years ago, I could not imagine being a housewife. Reared in the 80s, I had some pretty strong viewpoints on the rights of women and believed rather firmly that any woman who was a housewife was surrendering her right to be her own person.
Okay, now I didn’t say I was bright back in those days.
Still, the concept seemed alien. What a difference a generation can make. Having been both a career wife and a housewife since that time and maintaining what I believe is a happy medium between the two (yeah, there is a happy medium) my viewpoint has changed dramatically.
First of all, marriage is about unity and not submission. When you form a relationship with another person and marry them, you are becoming a team and a unit. During the first two years of your marriage, you will through trial and error determine the roles you will both have. You will assume responsibilities and tasks either jointly or individually.
For example, when my husband and I first married – we were both working 60+ hours a week for a large company. We both enjoyed our work and were deeply involved in it. We took our jobs seriously enough that when one or both of us had to work overtime, we both understood. Work was never a factor that caused dissension between us.
Because we both worked, we split household chores down the middle. I took care of the laundry and he did all of the dishes. I did a lot of the cooking for dinner and he usually fixed us breakfast. Saturday mornings were our designated clean up day – the house would be rousted, dusted and vacuumed, so that Saturday afternoon and the rest of the weekend could be spent relaxing and playing.
It was a great system.
When I left my job after our daughter was born, things changed. Now that I was home during the day and he was at work – I ended up tackling the majority of the household chores. It was easier for me to do it since he was out of the house 8 to 10 hours a day and I was there. Some days were better than others, but when you have a baby it can be like that. About a year after I left my job, we were filling out our tax returns and I remember distinctly when the tax agent put down homemaker for my job.
Homemaker?
When did I become Donna Reed? Suddenly, every ingrained negative thought I’d ever had about housewives and homemakers in general reared their head. 30 seconds later, one comment from the tax agent burst that balloon of resentment and filled another. He smiled, almost patronizingly, when I told him that I had some income from that year.
”When you’re a homemaker, they don’t expect much.”
Boom.
There it was. The prejudice about marriage in the modern day came crashing down around my ears. Apparently because I chose to stay home with my daughter and be a parent and wife first over working 60 hours a week and letting a daycare raise our daughter – no one really expected much from me.
Now, I am not bashing feminism – I firmly believe it has brought us a long way in giving us choices and I’m a huge fan of choices. But that same feminism that gave us choices cannot make us judge one choice as good and another as bad. Housewives are a busy lot and make no mistake, staying home doesn’t mean they are lazy, incapable or slacking off.
I may not have worked 60-hour weeks in an office, but as a parent and wife, I didn’t get weekends off either. I didn’t get lunch hours away from the office or sick days when I could stay home in bed. Rain or shine, sickness or health, weekday or weekend, I was on duty. But we don’t share this distorted view alone, ladies. No, we do not have the singular view on this – husbands are just as prone to feeling the pressure of housewife versus career wife and it can cause a strain on a marriage from both sides.
To Be Continued