Jen writes:

I enjoy your site, but wonder why you don’t have any pics up; or even some insight to your everyday housewife occurences.  Your site, as interesting as it is, seems to favor the more simplistic, dowdy demeanor that is characteristic of men’s preferences.

So I wonder…are you really a “housewife” or a man? Just wondering.

Laura writes:

I know this website isn’t hip or cutting-edge, but I don’t think it’s dowdy. Perhaps I should seek professional advice. As for photographs, the human face is stimulating. At least it is to me. Every face is a story. However much it may be reminiscent of other faces, every face carries the impression of one.  I doubt I will include photographs of myself or family because I rarely view a face, except in passing, without feeling distracted and intrigued. Faces are overstimulating. 

Yes, I am a woman. I think I’ve been outrageously personal about my life in posts about dusting and cooking tarts and viewing clouds. I guess we have different standards about what is personal.

I admit that some of my best friends during my years as a housewife have been men, most of them long dead. There are very few housewives where I live and most of my women friends are not housewives. More importantly, I found only men were expressing and affirming the universal truths that underlay my vocation. Men such as Tolstoy and DeFoe, Dickens and Plato seemed to approve of my femininity in a way my women friends did not. The most I could get in the way of affirmation from other women was something to the effect of, “Well, everyone should just be what is best for them.” Dickens, on the other hand, through his portraits of Mrs. Maylie and Mrs. Joe and Agnes Wickfield, said, “Yes, you are a woman. And, nothing will change that.” DeFoe understood, better than many women today, the consuming task of making a home. Women need men to tell them who they are. 

So, contrary to being masculine, I consider myself almost too feminine for my times.

By the way, the title of this blog, The Thinking Housewife,  is not in reference to my own thinking so much as it is to an idea that lies behind everything I say. I believe the decline of domesticity threatens thought.

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