Gender

Whatever happened to the housewife?

   It started 40 years ago, when a letter to this paper led to a register
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   Local groups formed and a few years later acquired the name the
   National Housewives' Register. In the absence of a personal income,
   early members admit fiddling the housekeeping to raise the small
   membership fee. Today most groups meet every other week to discuss
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   this generation of women is by no means rushing to join. NWR may be
   celebrating its ruby anniversary but will an organisation born to
   alleviate the lot of the housewife survive to drink to its golden when,
   politically and personally, she is apparently dead and buried? Imagine
   the outcry if Tony Blair made an example of the housewife's foresight
   in the way Margaret Thatcher once did. The title has been banished to
   the social history archives and now rears its head only in the
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   questionnaires.

   The spic 'n' span 50s feather duster image of the British housewife
   went out with Hilda Ogden and Ken Dodd. Instead, the debate about women
   and domesticity has evolved into an anxiety not about keeping house but
   about bringing up children. So whereas it was better for "him" for a
   woman to stay at home, the argument now is it's best for the kids. The
   observation Jerman made about the mental "pay-off' a housewife makes
   still has echoes. What's best for the children may not be what's best
   for the modern woman. The lack of status implied by the prefix "just" a
   housewife has not died with the term but now attaches itself to the
   word mother.

   "Working mother" now rolls off the tongue with the ease with which
   "housewife" once did. These women no longer go into voluntary exile if
   they marry or have children but, argues Mary Dodkins, NWR's marketing
   co-ordinator, there is still a need for a space where you are not
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   school. Now 64, she notes that members have "partners" as well as
   husbands and many are divorced, widowed or remarried. Her life goes
   some way to explaining how, just as the term "housewife" has been made
   redundant by social forces, so it was also created by them. Reymond had
   to give up her job as a secretary at Royal Exchange Insurance because