Next Story: Happy marriage = sharing housework! * The stigma of a housewife The stigma of a housewife * Happy marriage = sharing housework! Happy marriage = sharing housework! -- Love & Sex » The stigma of a housewife The stigma of a housewife -- loader The stigma of a housewife By - -- Created: May 9, 2012, 00:00 IST facebooktwitterPintrest The stigma of a housewife Read on to find out why this term is being seen as an insult and evokes -- Over the years, the divide between generations has only grown and that probably will explain why the older lot is at sea when the younger generation (especially married women) abhor the term ‘housewife’. Housewife v/s homemaker: While there is nothing wrong with the word per se, it’s what that term has come to represent; that women have a problem with says clinical psychologist Dr Seema Hingorrany. She says, “Our facets of personality are shaped by conditioning since childhood. It is called ‘learned behaviour’. One of the thought processes conditioned within us is that housewives don’t have their own identity and are always dependent on their spouses, financially and emotionally.” The housewife-serial connection A housewife is generally portrayed as a woman who is unsatisfied with her being or is watching soap operas all day. This concept is based on the premise that since a housewife does not go out of the house to earn an income, even if she has the qualifications to do so, then she must be indolent. This becomes even more glaring when she always has to ask her spouse for finances so she can run the house. Women don’t like to be called housewives because they feel it is a label of being inferior vis-a-vis women who are working. -- Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, Varkha Chulani, claims it’s linguistics at play, and they are vital for our emotional well-being. She adds, “A person who is a housewife is ‘just’ that — a housewife. The meaning often attributed to that term is a person who doesn’t do much! A home-maker on the other hand is looked upon as person, who -- able to do much more than that. When I got married, I took a break from work for a while. And wherever I went I was asked about what I do. The term ‘housewife’ would get different reactions. While some would look at me with disdain others did probe further to find out if I was simply lazy or had no ambition in life. The term itself has now got a negative -- Seema adds, “My client Roma (name changed) refers to this as the housewife stigma because the term describes what a woman traditionally did within the four walls of her house. This includes cooking, cleaning and taking care of kids), which is not really valued by society. She feels that homemaker is a sophisticated word, and does imply that wives are not just sitting doing nothing but are fulfiling many domestic responsibilities. Most housewives are undervalued by their partners and by society at large. We forget that even though they are not being paid, the job they do cannot be quantified.”