The term “housewife” is antique, a relic of a bygone era. It isn’t used in polite conversation anymore because it is considered an insult. It appears a sneer, as the “Desperate Housewives” whose life is an unreflective farce where the comedy writes itself. Yet this role was once the foundation of family and community, a bedrock that shifted tectonically never to be the same.
As the American middle class rose in the early twentieth century, fueled by the labor movement, one of the first things that happened was mothers found the ability to stay home and raise the children. This was no small victory, because prior to this women often worked. The Czecho-Slovak Protective Society (CSPS) down West Seventh from my home was founded in 1862 not just as a cultural organization, but also to provide health care and day care. Women working out of the home was the standard for laborers, and the ability to stay home and raise the kids was one of the first luxuries a family struggled to afford.
Women did not simply stay home for the kids, however. During the school day, there was time available to cook and clean and do all the other things that were so laborious before modern appliances. More importantly, these women were the backbone of the volunteer force that took care of the sick and elderly, trained the poor, kept track of events, and generally did the work that made the community function.
This volunteer work was, like all the “housewife” work, unpaid. But working class communities relied on it to be able to lift themselves up and take care of their own. Without this effort, communities like the West End of Saint Paul would never have been able to share resources and raise their kids to be good citizens. They would have been poorer without it, as a community and as individual families. The “housewives” were the bridge between the two, and kept both working to the better of everyone.
Eventually, the tight prescription of this role as “women’s work” became unbearable. While it was a great luxury to be able to afford one person at home doing the unpaid work that needs to be done, it was utterly unreasonable to fall on one gender alone. Women’s Liberation (I prefer the British term “Female Emancipation”) freed women from the bonds of being forced into this role and allowed them to achieve equality in the workplace.
But men rarely stepped into the role of “homemaker”, the less offensive and gender neutral term that arose. That work was left undone or, at times, professionalized.
It is rare to see the magnitude of this problem discussed. The lack of a person at home, of any gender, to do the family and community work has had vast ripples through our lives. This is especially true in the communities that have the least resources to start with. Just as so much of the family work has been handed over to professionals, like day care providers and nannies and the use of prepared foods in cardboard boxes, the work of communities is often done by program directors and case workers – when it’s done at all.
The idea of a “homemaker” has been trivialized, but to many people who had little it was something special. It was first the most desirable luxury – the time to do what you knew had to be done. The act of getting things done and keeping the community clean and orderly and humane came naturally from it. This was the difference between being poor and being middle class and proud – this was what America had to offer her people.
We came to sneer at this valuable use of our wealth because it was foisted unfairly on one gender over another. In the name of equity, we saw fit to abandon basic decency because it seemed too unreasonable to ask men to take over their half of this role. And so our lives are professionalized, and the role of the middle class parent is one of constantly reaching for their wallet to support their way of life.
It didn’t used to be all about money. It used to be about people and their values. What was important to them, they made time for. They did this in part because it was obvious that working together made everyone stronger and wealthier. Placing all of this on women is unreasonable, but it is equally unreasonable to expect that a strong family and a strong community is something that comes from a checkbook.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 
I think we are really feeling the effects of a lack of “homemaker” in the majority of households. Our kids are over-scheduled and overly entertained by teevee and video games. Parents are squeezed between trying to make a decent living to give their kids a middle-class lifestyle while they have little time for showing kids how to make a decent, nutritious meal or how to generate their own entertainment (books, crafts, etc). Now, as a person who’s mother did stay home while I was young, and was basically the unpaid homemaker, I did not really learn to cook. Or perhaps I rejected the role of cooking because I saw it as my mother being subservient to my father and the whole family. It is not purely coincidence that the men who have been my committed partners loved to cook. As far as cleaning standards in the 50’s they became ridiculously high with the new appliances available. Certainly most parents relate to spending much less time cleaning and organizing and more time with their children, a more memorable and rewarding use of the precious resource of time.
I like this topic. I think American society has a long way to go to figure out what it means to have a good family life in current economic conditions. It can be difficult to make choices that put us in positions where we cannot afford the latest tech toys for our children, for example. But what message do we send to them when we act as though having these “things” is more valuable than having time with them?
I never had a choice when the kids were young. We both had to work so we worked opposite shifts, one of us stayed with the kids and did the house work while the other was at work and then we switched places. It all got done we just didn’t get much sleep.