Monday, August 4, 2014 - 16:50

The changing role of the ‘housewife’

Forty years on from the publication of her landmark book Housewife, ANN
OAKLEY talks to the Morning Star modern feminism and gender roles today

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   THIS year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Ann Oakley’s
   Housewife.

   Based on Oakley’s PhD research, the pioneering feminist book looks at
   the role of the housewife in modern industrialised society.

   “The study of domestic labour was not taken seriously at all — it
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   suburban London. She found they tended to be dissatisfied because of
   the monotony, fragmentation and social isolation inherent in the role
   of housewife.

   Therefore, as “housework is directly opposed to the possibility of
   human self-actualisation,” she concluded with a call to abolish the
   housewife role.

   “I was being deliberately provocative,” she explains about the book’s
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   Four decades later, what’s changed?

   “I think the whole notion of women being housewives has changed,” she
   replies.

   “If you asked women now to talk about themselves as housewives they
   wouldn’t know what you were talking about really.”

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   person,” she quips.

   Having read Housewife and Oakley’s stupendously good Gender and Planet
   Earth — a book that moves from men and meat-eating to critiquing
   post-modernism — I can safely say contemporary feminism is missing a
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   source of inequality between men and women.

   Housewife could therefore be the key text in the revival of feminist
   concern over housework that must take place if women are to gain any
   semblance of equality in the future.