Occupation: Housewife
A discussion paper published by the NSW Women’s Advisory Council to the Premier
Position Vacant: HOUSEWIFE
Applications are invited for the position of manager of a lively team of four demanding individuals of differing needs and personalities. The successful applicant will be required to perform and co-ordinate the following functions: companion, counsellor, financial manager, buying officer, teacher, nurse, chef, nutritionist, decorator, cleaner, driver, child care supervisor, social secretary and recreation officer.
Qualifications: Applicants must have unlimited drive and the strongest sense of responsibility if they are to succeed in this job. They must be independent and self-motivated, and be able to work in isolation and without supervision. They must be skilled in the management of people of all ages. They must be able to work under stress, for long periods of time if necessary. They must have flexibility to perform a number of conflicting tasks at the one time without tiring. They must have the adaptability to handle all new developments in the life of the team, including emergencies and serious crises. They must be able to communicate on a range of issues with people of all ages, including public servants, school teachers, doctors, dentists, tradespeople, businesspeople, teenagers and children. They must be competent in the practical skills listed above. They must be healthy, creative, active and outgoing, to encourage the physical and social development of the team members. They must have imagination, sensitivity, warmth, love and understanding, since they are responsible for the mental and emotional well-being of the team.
Hours of work: All waking hours and a 24-hour shift when necessary.
Pay: No salary or wage. Allowances by arrangement, from time to time, with the income-earning member of the team. The successful applicant may be required to hold a second job, in addition to the one advertised here.
Benefits: No guaranteed holidays. No guaranteed sick leave, maternity leave or long service leave. No guaranteed life or accident insurance. No worker’s compensation. No superannuation.
The Work of Housewives
... The work involved in “being a housewife” can be divided into three separate jobs, all done in the family home. The first job is being a housekeeper and doing the housework. The second job is being a mother and looking after the needs of children. The third job is being a wife and looking after the needs of a partner. As every housewife knows, these jobs are mostly done in combination with each other.
The three jobs do not, of course, represent the whole picture of a housewife’s life. The love, warmth, affection, caring, fun and security which are shared between a housewife and her family cannot be measured or analysed. But the work of housewives has been studied and written about in Australia, Canada, England and the United States.
Housewives are not paid, and this makes it hard to value their work, since society too often values only work that is paid.
The Value of Your Work
Housewives, especially full-time housewives, have always had difficulty in trying to work out what their work is worth. On the one hand, society has always put a high value on women who stay home to devote their lives to serving their families. These women are sometimes called “better” women than housewives who also go out to work. On the other hand, society puts a low value on all the work that women do, especially the unpaid work that housewives do. So you end up with society telling housewives they are doing an important job, but that they are actually doing a job that is not worth very much! No wonder many women get very angry about this hypocritical and unfair way of thinking. Other housewives, however, get caught in the trap, and decide that their work at home, in comparison with work in the “real” world of money and power, has no value at all – they are “just a housewife.”
It is hard to put a money value on your work, because there have never been any written conditions or duty statements for housewives’ work. However, the studies of housewives have shown that women require a greater number of skills for their daily responsibilities than most people in the paid workforce. The advertisement on Page 1 describes these skills.
The Pressure of Your Work
The studies of housewives and their work have also revealed that the occupation has many stressful aspects. This is not surprising when one looks at the job description given in the advertisement! In occupational terms, these might be called the hazards of housework. They indicate the pressures that go with the job.
“How Much Should I Do?”
Unlike all jobs in the paid workforce, housewives’ work has no conditions of service, no fixed hours, no duty statements, no supervision and no pay. This makes a housewife’s work very difficult indeed and allows her little real freedom. Despite the fact that most housewives have household appliances and buy the most products rather than make them, they still work as hard, if not harder, than women of the past, who had no electricity, no shopping centres or convenience foods, and much larger families. Today women strive for higher and higher standards of perfection in their work. Many feel guilty if they take time off work, and many live in a state of mental tension and physical exhaustion.
“How About Money?”
Housewives who have no paid job are dependent on their husband’s income for survival, as are their children. Many are also totally dependent on their husband to manage things like house and car insurance, house mortgage payments, car payments, health insurance and other vital money matters. If the husband dies or leaves the family home, a housewife’s life maybe thrown in to total chaos. Total economic dependence is acknowledged to be a very risky business.
“Those Ads Will Be the Death of Me”
Advertisers in magazines and television spend millions of dollars each year telling women how to be good, if not perfect housekeepers, mothers and wives. Women spend a lot of time, energy and money trying to reach the standards of perfection shown in advertisements. It’s all too easy to forget that the model in the advertisement spent the whole day just dressing up for the picture! But have you ever thought how impossible it is to be a good mother and a good housekeeper at the same time? A “good” housekeeper keeps a house clean, shining, neat and attractive. A “good” mother lets her children enjoy their young lives to the full, which almost certainly means a much-used, untidy house, where clean walls and spotless rugs don’t matter much. Trying to be a good mother and a good housekeeper at the same time can easily lead a housewife into a state of depression. Who wouldn’t despair, faced with two such contradictory jobs to perform at once?
“It’s Hard Working Alone”
Housewives work in isolation from each other and from the outside world. We do our work alone in the very private world of the family home. It is very lonely work. Like all men and women who work alone in their jobs, housewives may become vulnerable to their own feelings and to the feelings of other people. They may suffer deep depression (their work seems endless and repetitive), or lose their self-confidence (no-one is around to help them feel good), or feel guilty all the time (the job is never finished). They may fear criticism from their family and friends, and drive themselves in a way that seems senseless to everyone but themselves. Some seek relief in drugs of various kinds. Some get a job in the paid workforce or do voluntary work, in order to be among other people. Being around people is, after all, one of the most basic human needs.
“When Do I Clock Off?”
Most people think of life in terms of work and home, and work and leisure. Home is a place you go to when you stop work. Leisure is what you enjoy when you stop work. Unions have fought constantly for working conditions which give paid workers the right to stop work, go home and enjoy leisure. No-one has done this for housewives. Housewives cannot stop work, down tools and go home. For other members of the family, home is a place to escape to at the end of the working day. For many housewives whose work at home allows their families to have leisure at home, home may become a place where she herself cannot relax, since the working day never seems to end.
“I’ve Forgotten Who I Am”
A housewife serves her family seven days a week, 24 hours a day, when necessary. Some housewives give so much of themselves that they forget to ask for anything themselves, even something simple like an undisturbed day at the beach or not cooking the dinner every second Monday. Some housewives even feel that they have no right to ask for anything. Other housewives have so lost the ability to make a personal demand that they think that any woman who makes a demand is selfish. Housewives who put no value on their needs as a person come dangerously close to losing all self-esteem. Loss of self-esteem is a kind of inner death which affects the person who suffers it and the people she loves, as well.
“I Worry Too Much About the Children”
Raising children is a far more demanding business this century than ever before. Mothers used to be the authority on child raising, and their main concern was disease and illness. Their knowledge and skills were passed on to each new generation. This century, child raising has become a business for professional workers, who have been greatly concerned with the child’s mind and emotions as well as with its physical health. Frequently the favourite theory of one decade has been discredited in the next. Advice is available in hundreds of books and in most women’s magazines. Some of it is thoughtful, practical and helpful. A lot of it, however, contains invented “problems”, like “Does your son’s long hair mean you don’t love him?” and “Ten ways to fail your teenage daughter”. Many conscientious women read the opinions of the “experts” and get the feeling that they are to blame for everything that happens to children, from bedwetting to violent crime. They may feel worry and guilt about raising their children which takes away from their joy and pleasure in watching the children grow up. This is an intolerable burden for housewives, and one of the worst aspects of family life.
It is unfair to blame only mothers when things go wrong. Raising children is a responsibility which should be shared, in the best interests of all family members and the community. If you were in the paid workforce and were blamed for everything that went wrong in the whole place, you would surely get up and say, “That’s not my fault!” But many housewives feel they have no right to say, “I’m doing a good job---stop putting me down all the time!”
The Advantages of Your Work
Women who are full-time housewives feel that there are some advantages in not having a paid occupation. The greatest advantage is seen as “being your own boss” – being able to organise our work as you want to, and being able to work at your own speed, Having time to be with your children and teaching them. Watching them grow. Being free to have friends drop in at anytime – open house. Being loved and needed – doing this in a practical way.
But there are some things the same women liked least:
Never being finished – monotony. Having just completed a chore, to see it undone again. Not able to be yourself – always in demand. Expectations by others for a ‘performance level’ of housekeeping, regardless of other outside factors interrupting. The never-ending housework – which seems to reappear as soon as you do it. Not enough communication with a variety of people. Not having a little money that is entirely your own. When ill, we must go on. Being unable to hold a meaningful and informative conversation with people apart from my husband and children. Feeling as though I miss out sometimes in life. The drudgery of constantly repetitive work.
... Housewives may protest putting a dollar value on their work, saying that work done with love is priceless. It’s true that the best reward for some work is a loving smile or a delighted laugh. But there is a widespread myth in our culture that an important job is always highly paid. By this thinking, an unpaid job is not important at all, right? If people insist on thinking this way, a housewife can show the dollar value of her work, calculated under “The “Market Cost” Value”, “The Replacement Cost” Value, and The ”Opportunity Cost” Value, without denying the rewards of a “labour or love”.
The Humanity Value of Your Work
Most housewives spend much of their working lives giving emotional support – love, understanding, care and kindness – to their husband and children. If the actual time were added up, it would probably amount to several years over a lifetime of marriage. The value of this aspect of a housewife’s work cannot be calculated in dollars and cents. It is wrong that most of the outside world believes that any work which cannot be calculated in dollars is worth nothing. Women are justified in getting angry when employers think that women think nothing, learn nothing and do nothing while raising children. Men should have the chance to experience more fully the intense emotional effort which goes into rearing children and helping other adults in trouble. Without this experience, it is hard to understand how much energy is consumed in this part of a housewife’s work.
Negotiating a New Work Contract
In thinking about your work, you may decide that your working conditions need improvement. The list below shows some conditions that other women and their families have agreed on.
§ Housework is shared by all members of the family.
§ Decisions about family life are made jointly.
§ Family accounts are handled jointly, so that wife and husband both know what payments are being made, and how to make them.
§ Wife and husband make provision, e.g. by insurance policy, for the husband’s death, accident or unemployment while the wife is out of the paid workforce or earning lower wages.
§ All property and assets acquired during the marriage are owned jointly.
§ Each partner agrees to the other having a certain amount of free time each week.
§ Each partner has the right to enter the paid workforce or to seek further education.
§ ... sharing the child care is a responsibility for the household...the housewife who stays at home to look after young children receives money for her personal use, to save or spend as she pleases.
A full-time housewife might feel that she cannot make any of these claims on her partner, since it appears that husband and wife play complementary roles in their partnership – his role is to go out to work and be paid, while her role is to stay home and look after the house and children. However, there are two things to be said about this view of the roles of husband and wife. The first is that both partners of a marriage have a responsibility towards their children and an interest in the upkeep of their house. Both should rightly share the work that goes with this responsibility. The second is that the analysis of a housewife’s work shows that is too much for one person to do all the time.
A wife and husband who have a fair working contract for their marriage partnership are likely to be people with a strong respect for each other and also a strong self-respect. True respect and understanding will be achieved when all family responsibilities are shared between husband and wife. Women have always proved themselves willing to share family financial responsibilities. There are hundreds of thousands of women in the paid workforce with dependent children, working mainly for the well-being of their children. There is no reason why men should not share family household responsibilities with the same willingness and dedication to family life. Helping children to grow into responsible, caring, independent adults is demanding work, both physically and mentally. If we believe that family life is important, we must also believe that the challenging task of caring for children is the responsibility of both parents.
... An assessment of the work of the housewife is a part of the analysis of every woman’s lifestyle... and it is clearly legitimate for housewives to look to the community for support and services...
--------------------Caregiving isn’t a women’s problem or a man’s problem—it’s an organizational challenge, especially when nearly 70% of working caregivers experience work-related challenges as a result of their dual working-caregiver roles (AARP).
--------------------A look at what is involved.
And from the Male perspective...