February 15, 2024
In her newest book (following Tomboy, 2020), Davis unearths the historical origins of the housewife and waxes philosophical about modern-day motherhood. The author looks at evolution, marketing campaigns, and social movements to investigate how America got to the place where women do a majority of the homemaking and child-rearing and why myths about the ideal wife and mother make it hard to change. Interspersed throughout are women addressing the typical and atypical ways they are raising families today, including a Libertarian mom; ""tradwives,"" or women who submit to traditional gender roles, a somewhat controversial social media trend; and women striving for egalitarian households with a more equal division of labor. While the author touches on familiar solutions such as universal childcare and compensation for stay-at-home caretakers, she concludes that the biggest catalyst for change will come when traditional women's issues become men's issues, or, as she says, "the way to have fairer heterosexual marriage in America is for men to do way the hell more. Of everything." Housewife provides both vindication and comfort for women tired of doing it all.
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Starred review from January 15, 2024
A passionate call for societal support for mothers. Melding reportage and memoir, journalist, novelist, and essayist Davis examines the "powerful and persistent myth and archetype" of a housewife: a "stay-at-home mom" living among suburban "tract houses and sodded lawns." To the author, that image seemed inaccurate when she became a mother hoping to combine her writing career with caring for her child. How, she wondered, could those "seemingly opposing trajectories...peacefully coexist"? Her search for an answer proved both illuminating and troubling. The role of the housewife, she discovered, has evolved dramatically throughout history. In Paleolithic times, the model of "man-the-hunter, woman-the-gatherer" was caused less by biological difference than changing ecological conditions; gender roles were fluid, depending on a community's needs. Davis underscores the importance of interdependence: From colonial America through the 19th century, women relegated to the domestic sphere were supported by grandmothers and aunts, friends, and neighbors. In the 1930s, many working-class housewives banded together in strikes and boycotts. The 1950s housewife, isolated from family and a supportive community, "was an anomaly, an aberration, constructed and crafted by multiple economic, political, ideological, and infrastructural forces: appliance manufacturers, mortgage subsidies, governmental agencies, and housing developers among them." Davis addresses the concerns of Black mothers, single and married, as well as same-sex couples and trans women, to make a case for overarching needs. For the past 50 years, meeting those needs has been a continuing, controversial policy issue. As the only developed country without national paid parental leave, the U.S. shortchanges both women and men. Rather than insist that women "personally, individually solve problems that should rightly be addressed societally, structurally," legislators must acknowledge the long history of interdependence that has served families and "to enact policies that both allow women to be housewives yet build a society in which no woman has to be one." A cogent sociological analysis.
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