|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Housewife by Any Other Name
| Article
# : |
13948 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
4,724 Words |
| Author
: |
Lucy Mazareski
Lucy Mazareski reviews frequently for Catholic publications. |
"JUST A HOUSEWIFE"
The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America
Glenn Matthews
New York, Oxford University Press, 1987
281 pp., $19.95
PERFECTION SALAD
Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century
Laura Shapiro
New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987
280 pp., $16.95
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
--William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
Nowadays, of course, many people would disagree with that wisdom. Advertising and public relations magnates expend vast sums in the belief that there's lots in a name. But the glib and glitzy twentieth century has yet to apprehend that the negative of the above is also true: a sour apple by any other name is still sour.
In the last decade, the word housewife, which has taken on increasingly negative connotations, has been largely dropped from usage and the higher-sounding homemaker adopted in its stead. Now that the new label has aged and begun to accrue the same sort of negative patina, the media abound and with talk of possible release into circulation of another new name, that of "domestic engineer."
No amount of novel labeling, however, will paper over the problem: In the late 1980s, a woman who works full time caring for her family and home rather than in the paid labor force is still "just a housewife." Advertising reinforces the negative stereotype with its caricatures of the housewife whose intelligence is challenged by little more than the ways and means to cleaner toilets, slicker floors, and the conquest of the invincible ring around the collar.
The point of Glenna Matthews' book, "Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America, is that in the first half of the last century, the domestic sphere--while it was assuredly the "woman's
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
