For those who have overactive guilt complexes like me…
Additionally, for the vast majority of human history the nuclear family either did not exist or existed as an integrated part of a larger family unit. People did not live alone. Which means people didn’t eat alone. Which means people didn’t cook alone. Meals were a large group endeavor with many people sharing all of the duties.
The idea that only one person would habitually do all aspects of cooking for multiple other people was invented in the comparatively severely recent history.
Human history is something like 200,000 years long. Urbanization which started some of these process that we consider normal today, started around about 7000 years ago. So the idea of anything like this at all, let alone being a dominant way, has only taken up about 3.5% of our most recent history.
That 3.5%, as above, was mostly in the context of people delegating food tasks for money and having other people cook for them a notable portion of the time.
We really only see the modern way of looking at things begin to emerge as a consequence of class division during the industrial revolution. Where how much time could be devoted to cooking and housework depended on socioeconic status. So we’re talking kinda around the mid-ish 1700′s. Or somewhere around the most recent POINT fifteen percent 0.15% of human history.
As the Industrial Revolution evolved. Poor people, men and women, had to spend most of their time at work. It was only in the growing middle class where there was enough wealth for one person to support a family and to therefore delegate the JOB of being a housewife. This was done in part to mimic wealthier people who could PAY for staff to do that work. Essentially having a housewife was a status symbol. It showed that the family was of a higher socio-economic level than the alternative. If you’ve seen Downton Abbey, then you have some idea of how the wealthy lived, there was no housewife making food and individual staff did not usually make food for their individual families, instead it was a paid group effort where everyone ate from the same stores and effort that was delegated around. It was the specific space of the middle class that was trying to thread that needle of the woman who had the wealth to have her primary task to be in charge of her household but did not have the wealth to delegate those tasks to others.
Behold the housewife. This is incidentally why she is shown as glamorous. Because she is that status symbol, a way to show the family’s wealth.
Then came World War 2. And if you really want to know where the modern way of looking at things came from this is it. Less than 100 years ago. Less than 0.05% of our history. WW2 started with all of this and then took male factory workers away, creating a deperate need for women to take over that job.
The state called:
There was active recruitment. Forget being a Housewife, the state needs you. there wasn’t really a rosie the riveter by the way, this was Rosie, the model, but Rosie was a fictional character the same as Paul Bunyan, a creation for the sake of advertising / propoganda.
Fine. But two things happened.
The majority of food production was taken over by companies delegated by the state, to provide food for the war effort and those in support of the war effort. This will come back later.
But of more direct import, the War ended. People came home. They needed work. The work currently being done by the women who were pretty happy with the personal autonomy it afforded them.
So policies were instated to help men get the jobs that the women now held. Such as promotions to hire veterans. And a new active campaign started. Instead of Rosie the Riveter, we get the created figure of the 50′s housewife
In commercial activities, Magazines, Radio, and Television, this mythic figure who never really existed in real life until families began to copy her. And there wasn’t only this myth. There was plenty of stick to go with that carrot.
To quote from The American Experience:
“Americans turned to the family as a bastion of safety in an insecure world… cold war ideology and the domestic revival [were] two sides of the same coin.”
Rigid Gender Roles The dramatic dichotomy in gender imagery in the 1950s makes people laugh 50 years later. In Dick and Jane readers, advertisements, educational films, and television shows, post-war Americans saw feminine, stay-at-home moms cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children while masculine dads left home early and returned late each weekday, tending to their designated roles as lawnmowers and backyard BBQers on the weekend. In More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote that psychiatrists, psychologists, and popular writers of the era critiqued women who wished to pursue a career, and even women who wished to have a job, referring to such “unlovely women” as “lost,” “suffering from penis envy,” “ridden with guilt complexes,” or just plain “man-hating.”
Yet Married Women Worked With the international expansion of the American economy after the war, men’s wages were higher than ever before, making it possible for the first time in U.S. history for a substantial number of middle class families to live comfortably on the income of one breadwinner. Yet the figures reveal that by the early 1960s, more married women were in the labor force than at any previous time in American history.
Domesticity and Money Pressures The reality of many middle- and aspiring middle-class families’ finances didn’t match their dreams. Many families wanted extra income – and required a wife’s earnings — to afford the lifestyle they desired. Yet middle-class women felt the pressure of the culture telling them to stay home.
Why? Because it was what the US thought it needed to do in order to maintain social order and thereby international supremacy. On the housewife was put the burden of proving AMERICA’s wealth, she wasn’t just the family’s status symbol anymore, she was the nation’s. It’s also important not to forget that the end of WW2 marked the emergence of America as one of the two super powers. The US chose gendered division of labor to prove its ideology. While its opposite, the USSR, chose to show its ideological might by having women work the same as men, in an equally mythological fashion. So the two states had to double down, the housewife became part of the symbol of Americanness as opposed to the take of the Red Menace where women should work in the factory.
Remember, this was not literal. These were cultural myths designed to achieve an end. And it did its job well. Enough so that even some eighty years later, families still feel this pressure. And because of the US’s socioeconomic might, this message was exported. Americas largest export from WW2 on has been entertainment. So all the propoganda we put into our entertainment for our own purposes filtered out to the rest of the world.
But I include the Domesticity and Money Pressures bit at the end for a reason. This stuff wasn’t real. And most people couldn’t really do all this.
So we return to the first thing that happened as a result of WW2, having turned themselves in to food making machines for the war effort, the factories and corporations now had a problem. They were made to make food and for the most part that food was now unnecessary. But there’s another market. A larger market. A desperate market. All those “housewives” who can’t really do the housewife thing because it was a myth. But if they BUY help, they can fake it.
And there was faking it. There’s evidence that a lot of housewives lied about making food from scratch while they did not because their husbands were under the impression they SHOULD be able to, from all the propoganda, when they simply COULDN’T because it was propoganda instead of real life.
Vast amounts of psychological work went into getting people to buy this stuff and to carry on the lie. You add milk to Pillsbury cake mixes not because the mix NEEDS to have milk seperate, it’s entirely possible to have dehydrated milk as part of the mix so no one has to add anything. But having the milk added strengthed the myth of the Housewife’s work while giving her some capability to live up to it which wouldn’t exist without it.
This post WW2 miasma of mythology is the modern inheritance: more work than a woman can do, made maybe possible by spending even more money to get hidden help that the non-cooks never see. So the non-cooks assume that these tasks can be done and they tell everyone else, until even the people who know it isn’t possible start to believe it and struggle to make the “home cooked” meal with all those fresh ingredients.
It’s the same reason why there is plastic wrapped show furniture in a house. Because the myth says a woman should be able to keep a house spic and span while doing all the other things she needs to do. When it’s impossible. It can’t be done. Unless you cheat and have plastic wrapped show couches that the regular family can’t use normally just to show off to company. It’s a way to make the lie work instead of acknowledging that it IS a lie that a single woman can take care of herself, her husband, her 2.5 children, her house, all of their food, and bring in a little income on the side because her husband isn’t actually earning enough to make the income necessary to allow all this to happen.
But whenever a struggling woman goes over to someone else’s house what does she see? A home cooked meal. A perfect couch. The other woman perfectly back from the salon to be ready for company. She sees the lie as if it is real and has no choice but to wonder if there’s something wrong with her that she is barely able to do this when everyone else pulls it off.
Same reason discussion of salary is discouraged in the case of “traditionally men’s work,” because everyone seems to be making it work on the same lines so long as no one talks about the details. Talk about what is really happening and the lie falls apart. So it’s important to keep the secret recipe secret so no one sees that it isn’t really working.
A survey once found that the majority of a country’s (sorry, can’t remember which one) secret family recipes, all supposedly handed down along seperate lines, the recipe held close to the chest to preserve it as the family recipe. All actually came off the same Betty Crocker box. The silence was a way to preserve the illusion that the impossible could be done.
We, having grown up with those illusions, have ingrained in us that this should all be possible. So why can’t we? But that opinion was intentionally fostered to get people to behave the way we as a society think is necessary without regard to the history or capabilities of people.
The Housewife is a historical aberation that did not exist for most of history, was forced to live a lie while she did exist, and is already being forced out to die because of our economic policies with only the shame left over to keep people in place.
This is one of the most thorough explanations of the ‘housewife’ that I’ve ever seen. I think I need to read this a few more times to really drill it into my brain.
