THE DISCUSSION on what wives and mothers should call themselves continues here. In response to a reader’s comment that housewives should respond with defiant witticisms to any challenge, I write: 

[T]he hesitation for a woman to call herself a housewife does not purely stem from uncertainty or lack of confidence, it also comes from deference to other mothers. A housewife often feels she must hide what she has in the same way a rich person may feel the need to downplay his wealth. The housewife possesses great riches in the time she has to act upon her love for her children and husband and even though she may have traded material comfort and live in reduced circumstances in order to attain this gold, she may not want to show off her enormous wealth. Therefore she hedges when asked to describe who she is.

All this is inevitable in a society that does not explictly affirm the role of full-time mother and wife. A society that does not explicitly affirm this role becomes one that explicitly affirms the opposite: the absentee mother and wife. The idea of balancing social approval is a myth; such balance is impossible to achieve because these are mutually exclusive ideals. Society cannot approve contradictory standards. People often say, well, we live in a world where women can be anything they please. While technically true, this is not practically true. This statement ignores the role of social conditioning, especially early in life, and children are never taught to just be anything. They are always guided toward some goal and if they are not guided toward some explicit goal then they are led to imitate whatever they see around them. What children see around them today is the absentee mother.

 Most middle class women who become full-time mothers and wives in America do so only after having rejecting this social conditioning, an often onerous task. And, absent this explict affirmation of what they do, traditional women are often the last people to defend their outpost because they by nature tend to be senstitive to the feelings of others and thus will not confidently say what they are.

                                                     — Comments —

Simone writes from Australia:

I often get asked if I work and when the person asking (almost always a working mother) discovers that I am a HOUSEWIFE, the next question is inevitably, “Will you be going back to work at some stage?” When my children were younger, I would always respond in the affirmative even though the thought of going back to work filled me with a very keen sense of sadness, unease and even dread. Back then, I’ll admit it, I did lack certainty. Until I found this blog, and looked deeper into my own religion, I didn’t really know many ‘out and proud’ housewives. Most of my friends and acquaintances self-described as ‘stay-at-home-mums’ and made a point of emphasising the temporary nature of their occupational status. Call me a victim of peer pressure or Marxist indoctrination, but I couldn’t help but think that there was something wrong with me for not wanting to rejoin the workforce and for wanting to be a wife and mother. Now when people ask me if I work outside the home or if I intend to go back to work when the children are a bit older, I confidently answer ‘no’ to both questions. The results have been interesting. There are still those who wonder why, to use their words, I would want to be stuck at home all day staring at the same four walls, letting a good education go to waste. But probably just as many have responded by saying that they yearn to be at home, spending more time with their family. How sincere these women are is often questionable but, as I see it, at least the pendulum is slowly swinging back in the traditionalist’s direction. Increasingly it is the working mother who feels obliged to justify her decision to work outside the home and, in some instances, even apologise for it.

Laura writes:

Dismissive comments about the “mommy wars” are common and to be fair, there is an element of normal female competitiveness about it that will never go away, but it is also about something very real. The anti-woman standards of feminism have increased conflict and competition among women. There is the feeling on each side of being embattled and the reason why both feel embattled is that they are.

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