Interesant fragment despre tranziția de la „housewife” la stay-at-home *mom*: Back in the fifties, women felt great pressure to keep an impeccable house. The words “Occupation: Housewife,” which women wrote on census forms if they didn’t work outside the home, form a leitmotif in Friedan’s book. Women felt pressure to be fine mothers too, of course, but the symbol of it all, and the locus of their efforts, was the home. Dinners had to be splendid and punctual; beds had to be made; floors had to be buffed to a high shine. Never mind that single-minded devotion to these pursuits often left women feeling hollow and unfulfilled, an emptiness Friedan famously called “the problem that has no name.” The upkeep of a fine home was a woman’s work, and if she found it unrewarding, well, she simply had to turn the prism another thirty degrees to see that she’d been mistaken: it was an important job, and by no means beneath her. Madison Avenue was in the business of telling her so. One of the most revelatory parts of Friedan’s book was where she quotes from internal research documents she’d secretly obtained from a consultant: One of the ways that the housewife raises her own prestige as a cleaner of her home is through the use of specialized products for specialized tasks . . . when she uses one product for washing clothes, a second for dishes, a third for walls, a fourth for floors, a fifth for venetian blinds, etc., rather than an all-purpose cleaner, she feels less like an unskilled laborer, more like an engineer, an expert. This was Madison Avenue’s solution to the problem that had no name. If women felt restless, or like their jobs as housewives were beneath their educational attainments, the answer was to counter that their jobs most certainly did require educated people—women were domestic scientists. Today women have abandoned this form of domestic science, spending almost half as much time on housework as they did in Friedan’s day (17.5 hours per week, to be precise, versus nearly 32 hours per week in 1965). But they have become domestic scientists in another way: they’re now parenting experts, and they spend more time with their children than their mothers ever did. It was a woman in Minnesota who clarified this shift for me. She pointed out that her mother called herself a housewife. She, on the other hand, called herself a stay-at-home mom. The change in nomenclature reflects the shift in cultural emphasis: the pressures on women have gone from keeping an immaculate house to being an irreproachable mom. And the market today, still hoping to appeal to women’s professional instincts, offers the same differentiation in baby products for mothers that it offered in cleaning products for housewives sixty years ago. Back in the fifties, women were told to master the differences between oven cleaners and floor wax and special sprays for wood; today they’re told to master the differences between toys that hone problem-solving skills and those that encourage imaginative play. This subtle shift in language suggests that playing with one’s child is not really play but a job, just as keeping house once was. Buy Buy Baby is today’s equivalent of the 1950s supermarket product aisle, and those shelves of child-rearing guides at the bookstore are today’s equivalent of Good Housekeeping, offering women the possibility of earning a doctorate in mothering. The rebellious reactions to these different standards are tailored to their eras. In the late 1960s and ’70s, women rose up against perfect housewifery. Sue Kaufman wrote Diary of a Mad Housewife in 1967; in 1973, Erica Jong wrote Fear of Flying, which included a rant about the ideal woman: “She cooks, keeps house, runs the store, keeps the books, listens to everyone’s problems. . . . I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do.” Today, on the other hand, the typical rebellion story is not about being a bad wife. It’s about being a bad mother—which in fact is the title of a 2009 book of essays by Ayelet Waldman. Tales of maternal malfeasance capture our imaginations because the imperatives of “intensive mothering” still persist, driving mothers to seek moral reassurance in all sorts of ways. Hays, for instance, notices that whenever stay-at-home mothers confess to ambivalence about the choice they’ve made, they justify their decision by saying that staying home is best for their kids. But whenever working mothers confess to ambivalence about the choice they’ve made, they say the exact same thing: working is best for the kids. “The vast majority of these women do not respond,” Hays writes, “by arguing that kids are a pain in the neck and that paid work is more enjoyable.” Instead, she says, they argue that they are providing their children with added income for extracurricular pursuits. Or that they are modeling a work ethic. Or that work makes them more focused parents and improves the quality of the time they spend with their kids. They use the effect on the child, every time, to justify any answer.
Posted on: Sun, 11 May 2014 11:10:31 +0000
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