What is a "housewife"?

I have realized that we need to challenge the 2^nd wave feminist term “housewife”.   It was a way for the 2^nd wave feminists to try to claim that they still thought it was ok to be a “wife” while looking down on a “housewife” who stayed home and took care of the home.  To be a wife meant you could still conquer the world with your husband, but to be a mere “housewife” was to settle for mediocrity in life, anonymity to history, limited horizons and petty domestic concerns.  Trying to separate “wife” from “housewife” was part and parcel with the lie that a woman’s career was going to make her happy and that having a career would not detract in any way from the full experience and title of being wife and mom.

One of the more common mundane points of conflict in marriages that try to be egalitarian is that the career woman and career man both come home and have house work to do.  The woman, most often, has much higher standards of cleanliness and neatness.  If you are not living in denial of male and female nature, you understand that this is a nesting instinct that is normally part of a woman’s nature. When a woman operates on her nesting instinct but does not admit it in a marriage that is trying to be egalitarian, she ends up being frustrated that her husband is not pulling his weight cleaning the house, and that she is working the equivalent of a “second job” to do it.   The woman is frustrated that her man does not automatically comprehend her standards, and the man is frustrated that his masculinity is belittled as he is berated for not having her standards.  It is the way of the world, particularly in business, that the person who cares the most intensely about something being done in a certain ends up being the one doing it.

The need for the dual career family has a lot to do with a lifestyle choice that puts a premium on having a spacious place to live and living in the “right” neighborhood.  There is not a bigger lie that having a more spacious place to live makes anyone happier.  Frontier House was a show where families from the 21^st century lived for a few months like they were in 1860s’ frontier in Montana.  One family admitted that they were happier living together in the small cabin during their months on Frontier House than they were living in their large, lavish house in California.   

The related lie is that you need to have lots of money to pay for expensive education so that your kids can “get ahead”.  If you achieve peace, stability, love and mental stimulation in the home, the kids will carry that throughout their lives.  If you fail to achieve it at home, your kids won’t find it at an expensive school.

A married couple that cannot live happily on a single income often belies a quest for material pleasure and ego at the expense of lasting relational joy between husband and wife.  When the woman makes the home her first priority it allows for a complementarian distribution of labor between husband and wife that helps avoid the conflict caused by one gender's expectations projected onto the other.  And the family dollar will go farther with someone devoted to cooking and not eating as much convenience food. 

So we need to challenge the false housewife/wife dichotomy of 2^nd wave feminism.  I assert that if your woman does not have taking care of the home – the food, the upkeep, the children – as her first priority, then she is not your wife.  She may be your spouse, partner, significant other, your live-in lover, but she is not your wife. If your woman has a job that your family needs to pay the bills because you are out of temporarily out of work that she could quit tomorrow because her home is her priority then she is your wife.  If she has a career, then you are in a polyamorous relationship, and her career is her other lover and priority.