Where Have All The Housewives Gone?
Newcastle Herald
Saturday March 13, 2004
YOU might recall the scene in Mary Poppins when Winifred Banks returns home to find her children having a whale of a time with their nanny and the chimneysweep.
She joins the romp wearing a sash proclaiming Votes for Women, having just left a protest with her suffragette sisters.
Such subtlety bypassed me as a tot. After all, most of us saw the Walt Disney classic before we moved into double figures.
It was only when watching the movie again under juvenile guidance that I appreciated the sly political message.
Set in London in 1910, the scene was most certainly intended to impact at a time when women were finding their voice, led by pioneer suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women's Social and Political Union.
Significant also was the year the movie was made 1964 as Swinging London and the women's movement were drawing attention. Television, the Pill, education and more women in the workforce were radically altering society.
These reflections were prompted with the celebration this week of International Women's Day when women were urged once again to maintain their fight for equal pay and political representation.
The Winifred Banks of this world might be screens removed from real life, but it's easy to think women haven't gained much at all when the same slogans and platitudes of almost a century ago are still being deployed.
In my country town there was an International Women's Day breakfast where people were invited to a free nosh to share their stories, or those told by their mother.
The event was staged as an exercise in sorority, for guests to celebrate the achievements of the significant women in your life.
The 7am start accommodated those women with paid day jobs, but what of the others who returned home?
Did they return to home duties? To being a housewife?
I cannot remember the last time I heard a woman describe herself as the same.
The term housewife has become almost shameful, its bearer the object of pity and derision. It implies servility and humbleness.
Barry Humphries has made the role an art form. The housewife has been lampooned by any comedian who knows how to wring an easy laugh from his audience.
There are legions of women, particularly in regional Australia where employment is limited, who could be described as housewives, but refrain because of the social stigma.
Their reasons for not working may be many and varied no available jobs, taxation rates that discourage a second income, prohibitive child-care costs or they have simply chosen to be a full-time parent.
But somewhere during the past 30 years, the housewife has vanished. She has been replaced by volunteer community worker, full-time parent or primary care-giver.
Paid work has become almost a status symbol. A career and paid work became the must have social accessory in the 1990s. Commentators wrote that women considered these two things as essential to their happiness.
These sort of assertions lead to feelings of inadequacy and even embarrassment at a woman's decision to stay at home.
How to be A Good Wife is the title of an excerpt from a 1950s New Zealand high school home economics textbook, which has been doing the rounds recently.
It gives plenty of handy hints such as, ``have dinner ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking of him and are concerned about his needs.
``Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so that you will be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair. Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
``Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first remember his topics of conversation are more important than yours."
Finally the student is instructed not to greet her beloved with complaints. ``Do not complain if he is late home for dinner, or even if he stays out all night. Count this is as minor compared with what he might have gone through that day. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question."
These so-called tips on being a good wife might cause great mirth when read half-a-century after publication, but they serve to measure the change in attitudes towards the role of women.
While women were exhorted to secure a job or career for their own sanity and happiness 20 years ago, the debate now has swung around.
The importance and advantages of having a stay-at-home parent with an emphasis on role models for boys is again the focus of discussion among politicians and social analysts.
While the intrinsic value of a parent at home is now recognised and even lauded, rest assured they will never be known again as a housewife (or househusband).
No more will there be a crowd of captive housewives as there was at a 1911 women's rally in Germany to press for political rights. Nor will there be women proud to be part of the New Housewives' Association, as was Newcastle's Vera Deacon who became the national International Women's Day secretary in 1951.
A woman wouldn't dream of listing her occupation as home duties as was once considered acceptable. In short, the term has become derogatory.
As some wit wrote at the bottom of the good wife tips: ``I think I know where I went wrong I forgot to put the ribbon in my hair."
© 2004 Newcastle Herald