Economics and Homemakers
10th December 2024
As some of my readers know, I have been working for the past two years on a book about homemakers. The working title is No One at Home: What America Lost When Her Homemakers Went to Work, but I’m sure a real editor who wants to sell books would hate it.
Right now, I’m working on a chapter about how homemaking lost its social value in the second half of the twentieth century. Post-war America essentially stopped valuing the work of the home. Even in the 1950s, when the craft of homemaking seemed to reach a peak, I would argue that it was not valued per se, but turned into a status symbol instead. Thus, you got scenarios where a husband took the train to Manhattan, attended a three martini lunch, thereafter “worked”1 in a comfortable office, and came home to a wife who had spent the day raising their five kids, and yet was expect to serve him another cocktail, because he had been working, and she had not. No wonder we got second wave feminism. I’d have revolted also.