← NEWS COMMENTARY Politicizing the Housewife November 1, 2001 By Wendy McElroy What it means to be a housewife is being revised ideologically in order to impugn the choice some mothers make to stay at home. -- issue, “Playing God on No Sleep,” the Pulitzer–prize-winning Anna Quindlen argued that every mother secretly identified with killing her own children. She described the typical stay-at-home housewife this way: “She’s tired, she’s hot and she’s been up all night throwing sheets into the washer because the smaller of her two boys has -- potential, the next leap of logic is easy. Murdering moms are driven to violence by the men who impregnate them and trap them in the psychologically devastating role of housewife. Thus many voices in the media blame Andrea Yates’s husband—a man whom no one has suggested was ever violent—even while they express sympathy for Andrea herself. They -- Friedan Called into Question Interestingly, the current debate about housewifery comes at the same time as the validity of the book that sparked the original debate is being severely questioned. In 1963 Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, spoke of “the problem that has no name.” Stated simply, domesticity denied housewives their humanity and potential, making them suffer both physically and mentally. Friedan described the typical ’50s family as a “comfortable concentration camp.” Like camp inmates, suburban housewives had adjusted psychologically and become “dependent, passive, childlike” and lived at a “lower human level.” -- during which women flooded out of the home into the university and the workplace. As women continued to read Friedan’s book, the idea of housewifery as a pathology was cemented to feminism. Recent works have thoroughly discredited Friedan’s arguments, the power -- and the Making of the Feminine Mystique (1998), Daniel Horowitz explored Friedan’s background and debunked the myth that she ever represented the typical suburban housewife as she has persistently claimed. Friedan had been a staunch political activist on the communist left for decades before her first book appeared. Horowitz’s analysis is -- The fact that readers of Friedan’s book identified with her as a sister-housewife who had naïvely bought into the domesticity myth was one reason for The Feminine Mystique’s huge success. The same readership would never have identified with the real Friedan: a -- subset of the New Left. In addition to questions about Friedan’s credentials as a housewife, grave doubt has been cast both on her interpretation of the experts on which The Feminine Mystique was based and the “facts” presented by the -- Without the backing of solid statistics and research, Friedan’s work does nothing more than offer anecdotal evidence of the unhappiness of some housewives and then proceeds to define the reality of most on that basis. -- Despite the criticism, however, it is undeniably true that The Feminine Mystique spoke to many women whose lives were changed as a result of reading the book. For them, being a housewife was a negation of their potential as human beings, and they discovered the courage to reach out to make a different choice. But voices within feminism were not content to view domesticity simply as a choice that appealed to some women and not to others. So a new political mythology of housewifery was born. The Myth of the Housewife In the ’60s the mainstream of feminism was “liberal” and contained a -- do with motherhood. A new theory of the housewife was evolving in which the role had the political status of chattel. To gender feminists, marriage and the family became inextricably bound up with private property, the class -- relegated to the roles of breeding, maintaining men, and buying consumer goods. Mothers provided the next and appropriately indoctrinated generation of laborers for the capitalists; housewives maintained the male workforce by cleaning and cooking; housekeepers enriched the capitalist structure by consuming the products it -- Thrown into this economic condemnation of housework and the traditional family as bastions of capitalism are other accusations. For example, housewives are said to be kept in an isolation that encourages domestic violence. -- victimhood, which has gone unrecognized by society at large. A New/Old View of Housewifery Fortunately, voices of sanity remain. One of them belongs to Mimi -- Individualist feminism views staying at home to raise a family as a choice every bit as valid as entering the work force. Gladstein’s essay begins, “We don’t hire housewives,” because that is the response she received when she asked about joining the faculty of the University of Texas at El Paso, where she is now associate dean of liberal arts. Gladstein refused to be devalued as a human being because she was a housewife. That “job”—no less than teaching university English—expressed her worth and her competence. Even more, being a housewife was the training ground where she learned skills such as setting priorities and budgeting time. Gladstein writes, “All I really needed to know about chairing a department, I learned by being a Jewish Mother.” Gladstein describes how being a suburban housewife trained her to handle taking over as executive director of her university’s Diamond Jubilee celebration. She writes, “That job allowed me to use my housewifery skills to create and manage events as diverse as football half-times, city-wide street festivals, physics fairs, student retention programs, Vietnam Memorial dedications, city and university