ELEANOR writes:

You write that feminism is anti-housewife, and I, as a feminist who was raised by a stay-at-home mother, would like to clarify something: feminists are not against women staying at home and raising children. Part of the feminist movement is the tenet that we need to place more value on what used to be called “women’s work” like cooking, cleaning, raising children. The feminist movement is about giving women options, so that women who are interested in being housewives can be housewives.

Personally, I would, if given my druthers, be a stay-at-home mother someday, raise tiny feminist children, plant an awesome vegetable garden, be a volunteer doula (labor coach) in my spare time. However, in this economy, that is simply impossible. You do not address economy in your posts, the fact that many women work out of necessity, because their husbands’ salaries cannot pay the bills. Are these women inherently wrong?

Now I happen to disagree with just about every word of your website, which I’m sure doesn’t surprise you, but what I find most disturbing is that you talk about the fall of women in our society and yet never once address how women are being denied basic healthcare all across the country (I am not talking about abortions here, or even birth control, but things like Pap smears and mammograms).

I sincerely hope that one day you come to your senses and realize how completely wrong you are about feminism and women’s rights, though I suspect you are far too brainwashed.

Laura writes:

Before the awesome tasks of raising a family and sustaining a home you would be wise to adopt some humility. When you have handled these jobs successfully for 24 years as I have done, then we can talk about brainwashing.

I have written about economics many times at this site, which includes a number of posts on the history of women in the workforce. One of my first entries called for reinstituting customary, informal job discrimination in favor of men so that they can more easily support families and so that fewer women might consider it necessary to work. The decline of the male breadwinner and the globalization of our economy are the most important economic issues facing women. Both issues have been discussed here.

The idea that feminism has been supportive of homemaking is false and ridiculous. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Gilbert and a host of contemporary journalists who constantly lament the fact that women do not earn as much as men and trumpet the paid achievements of women no matter how minor they may be, feminists have disparaged marriage and homemaking and looked upon these as inferior choices. At best, motherhood is a beautiful hobby; feminists will do nothing to make full-time motherhood a possibility for middle class or poor women. The housewife, in fact, is a threat to the feminist because she helps men succeed in the workplace.

In interviews, Michelle Obama, who clearly enjoys being First Lady, has said that when her husband is no longer president it will be “her turn.” In other words, then she will work and have a career of her own, as if she is giving up something in the meantime. The home is just one possible path of self-fulfillment, and always an inferior one. The idea that women have moral obligations to society as mothers and wives, and that it is wrong to choose career over one’s husband and children, is adamantly rejected.

The founding statement of the National Organization of Women in 1966 called for the end of the traditional family and for men and women to equally share economic support of the family. It is not possible for mothers to equally share in supporting the family and also do their jobs as mothers and wives. In arguing for sexual freedom, abortion, day care, affirmative action, flex time, no-fault divorce and “equal pay,” feminists have denigrated femininity and the value of women’s work. One cannot call for universally accessible day care and also logically assert that a mother is indispensable in the home. One cannot glorify career and assert that home and family are primary. To demonize men, portraying the average home as a hell of domestic abuse, will encourage women to choose marriage and homemaking only with trepidation and insecurity.

Women’s organizations of the nineteenth and early twentieth century worked hard to prevent large numbers of women from entering the workforce. This was their burning goal. Their achievements in this sphere were considerable and they were destroyed by the feminist movement. In his book Forced Labor, Brian Robertson writes:

One by one, the pillars that supported the family-wage economy have been knocked down. They had been designed to enable the single-earner family to subsist comfortably and to allow the family to raise children within the home. The pillars had been three: protective legislation, enacted after concerted effort on the part of the vast network of women’s organizations wishing to protect mothers from the necessity of paid employment and children from neglect; wage discrimination in favor of male heads of families, procured by labor unions at the height of their prestige and power; and gender segregation of the workforce, a product of both cultural habit and aforementioned protective legislation. By the late 1970s, each of the supports had been destroyed – by conscious effort on the part of a feminist and business elite and neglect on the part of a comfortable society that had ceased to see any need to shield the home and the family from destructive market and state pressures. (pp 122-123)

You say it is “simply impossible” for women to stay home full-time today. Then why are many women doing it, even women who are not rich? Women were full-time mothers and wives before there was any notion of universal health care. And they were much poorer than today.

But being a housewife – and doing it well – is not for the faint of heart or for conformists. It takes courage and sacrifice. The feminist rejects these virtues and idealizes aggression and self-assertion.

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