Leon de Smet

WHEN I was growing up there was a television soap opera (I can’t remember the name) that I watched occasionally. One of its characters was a middle class housewife who always appeared in scenes in her kitchen.

Her kitchen was small and modest by today’s standards, especially by Hollywood’s standards, and she was not glamorous, like many soap opera characters today. I remember her wearing plaid blouses and skirts, and very little make-up. Everything in her kitchen was calm and orderly and she was never in a rush. During the course of the show, someone — a neighbor, friend or relative — would drop by to visit her. She always had the time to stop what she was doing and talk.

She would usually sit down at her table with the visitor and they would discuss some interpersonal drama, this being a soap opera. As they were talking, her face would register all the appropriate emotions, but mostly empathy and concern. I can’t recall who the actress was, but she was very good at it. This housewife was never angry or depressed or hysterical. Her tranquil empathy seemed a sort of filter through which the conflicts of this fictitious, television community beyond her kitchen passed. Nothing was truly solved in her kitchen, but worries and disappointments were cleansed by her attentive listening and wise suggestions.

The interesting thing about this character is that she was actually based in reality. There were middle class women like her. There were middle class women who, by today’s standards, had nothing to do. Of course, they had plenty to do running their homes and raising their children, but by the standards of today, they had nothing to do. And sometimes they did “nothing.”

I remember a neighbor’s mother who would sit down on a weekday afternoon at her kitchen table with a cigarette, a cup of tea, and a book. She would placidly read for an hour or so. In the middle of the day! Even though she and her husband had little in the way of possessions or money, she had for these few hours the leisure of an aristocrat. She was the mother who had the leisure to tell me at one point that I was not being nice to her daughter. She was right. I was not only not being nice, I was being cruel to her daughter by ganging up on her with another friend. I have often thought of the lesson she imparted so calmly and with wisdom, not accusing, but teaching. Only she had the time to participate in the morality tale of my life. Only she could see that this small soap opera that we were starring in was truly serious. She, after all, had nothing else to do.

On the day her daughter called me two years ago to tell me she had died, I could still see her calm and wise presence at the kitchen table and I remembered the lesson as if it were just yesterday. I remembered her wisdom and my own cruelty vividly. My life would have been different without her. She made it better. Her departure from this world caused me sadness that I knew would never entirely go away, partly because I saw in it the vanishing of not just a person but an entire way of life.

When feminists first attacked the worth of the housewife, it was the easiest thing to do. After all, almost everyone at that time knew imperfect, maybe deeply imperfect, housewives. Housewives were everywhere so that meant that there were, human nature being what it is, plenty of bad housewives everywhere too: housewives who were naggers or obsessive cleaners or messy or lazy or mean or hyper-critical or neurotic or vicious gossips. All these existed. Therapists offices were filled with people talking about how much their mothers had messed them up. And to some degree, they were perfectly right. Their mothers had messed them up. And then, of course, there were all the unhappy housewives. The press was filled with stories of former homemakers who found bliss by leaving their homes. How could anyone be a housewife day after day and not encounter unhappiness, periods of sadness or depression and feelings of a lack of fulfillment? That was never mentioned. Only the housewife’s work was held up to this impossible standard of personal satisfaction.

One could see everywhere the imperfect manifestations of a perfect institution: the institution of the homemaker.

Now if social revolutionaries had advised doing away with, say, soldiers because there are so many imperfect and unfulfilled soldiers, which is true, people would have resisted. Or if revolutionaries had said we should do away with doctors because there are so many overworked and unfulfilled doctors, people would have resisted. That’s because the need for soldiers and doctors lies in the material realm. They protect our physical existence. The housewife works not only in the most practical realm, filled with necessary survival tasks that to this day remain numerous and challenging, but in the immaterial universe. Materialists not only don’t value that, they positively can’t see it.

Our soap operas are so incredibly petty. And then again, they’re not. If the soul has no splendor, if the ‘Little Way’ to goodness doesn’t matter, if everyone gets to heaven no matter what the heck we do and God is just a jolly fellow or an impersonal force; if, in other words, the spiritual stakes are not high or are even non-existent, then the housewife’s work is not worth defending. She’s just a servant, a drudge, an inexpensive psychotherapist — and the institution should die.

The most significant thing about the woman in that television show, the woman at her kitchen table, was that she was not in a rush. It’s amazing when I think of it now, I truly marvel that those placid pools of domestic nothingness ever existed in the savagely competitive forest of modern capitalism. She was not in a rush, and because of that, she could participate in the soap operas of the people she knew with calm and wisdom. The very humility of her days was the secret to her wisdom.

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