My mother was born in 1914, my father in 1907. They were thoroughly engulfed in the sex/gender roles they were handed. Ours was a picture-perfect 1950's household...on the surface. I was born late into this family, 1954, and I did not like what I was being handed at all. Enough that I ran away from home when I was 17.
My mother had been a WPA artist with a degree of national recognition and a talented pianist. She was of course expected to give all that up to be "moms." Many years later when she was in a nursing home and the topic of my running away came up, she said this:
Even middle class households could have "hired help".
I don't believe my grandparents were rich in the way we understand it today, but they had a Black woman come in and "do for them" after my grandmother had surgery of some kind. My mom was about 12, so it was the early-mid 60s.
(They fired her for some reason, probably made-up, and then those household duties fell on my mom — middle child and only daughter. I only learned this history recently.)
I wonder why these articles about how awful women had it in the 1950s never assume that the woman's job isn't going to be the equivalent to what your father had? This article waxes poetic about the fulfilling work these women could have been doing instead of being at home when the reality for most of them would be some daily drudge of doing meaningless shit for an asshole boss. We know this because the vast majority of men at this time never once walked into the office, sat down to a cigar and a glass of whiskey, and made important decisions about the course of humanity that fulfilled their sense of worth. No, they went to the rail yard, coal mines, factory floors, etc and broke thier back for some asshole boss because that's what paid well enough to have a decent house and feed thier family. None of these men did "meaningful and fulfilling work", they gained meaning and fulfillment in providing for thier family in spite of the shit they had to do from 9-5.
Powerful article. I didn’t read that book Feminine Mystique or even heard of it till now. But as a young girl I saw my mom depressed and had always questioned the gender roles. I couldn’t put it in words as I was too young. I was getting ready to move from brownie to Girl Scout and my cousin showed me his Boy Scouts book. I was so angry. He was learning very helpful life survival skills. I left Girl Scouts and I suppose that started my distrust of social constructs for women. I went to college got a technical degree in power transmission and became a regional sales manager. No kids. I’m in my 2nd marriage and retired at 58. Enjoying my choices!!
Phenomenal debunking. I'm old enough to remember when homosexuality was in the DSM and women couldn't have a credit card or mortgage of their own. It wasn't a golden age and the 'Tradwives' are just currently in the Fuck Around phase of their journey. Have no doubt the next phase is coming.
If being a stay at home mom and housewife was really so fulfilling for women and so highly valued by society they wouldn’t have to try to shove it down women’s throats. I greatly appreciate your writing.
I often comment on tradwives, because I have 1st person experience. My mom and her friends were those depressed, unhappy tradwives. They felt very unfulfilled. They knew their status was low and options limited. Many got dumped at 50 for a younger model and at best got alimony. They were thrilled and also jealous when their daughters pursued careers. My mother was sadly very jealous of mine. For all its negatives, I would never trade my difficult balance of work and family for tradwifing. Tradwifing is just boring domestic servitude - underpaid, tedious and underappreciated.
Thank you for giving a daughter's perspective. I too am the daughter of one of those women. She was brilliant, went to an experimental high school attached to a major university in the late thirties, where she met my dad when she was assigned by her college paper to interview him. Fast forward to his first real job, contract signed before the ink was dry on his diploma. He swept her off her feet at twenty, away to the registry office and marriage a year before her diploma would have been issued. Five kids and ten houses later (he was a corporate executive who was often transferred) she was so very sad and unfulfilled. She read, she made beautiful clothes for all of us, she did volunteer work and church work her life long. It was not enough, just not enough. In my father's world, at his level, wives were expected not to work outside the home. When I read Greer and de Beauvoir and Friedan as a young woman, it was easy to see what they were talking about, because I lived with it and swore not to be that myself.
I hear you, and don’t doubt a single word you’ve written.
Is it your understanding that your mother would have been happy/fulfilled/satisfied if she were being paid? Had a job / career?
And had the security that comes from making money?
I ask only because it sounds like she did have experiences outside of homemaking.
I know women who do have stimulating careers, but often still feel unfulfilled.
I just wonder if it isn’t JUST not working for money or having a career . . .
In 2025, our human experience and everyday life is so vastly different than it has been for most of human history; I sometimes think our minds have not caught up / evolved to our current technological based lives.
Put another way, for most of human history, our everyday lives were consumed by activities related to survival, and now? So much freedom has manifested in an unsettling mental state and so many of us asking that question “What am I doing here? Is this what ‘this’ is about?”
I think she would have felt like an equal in the marriage, and it would have been a much healthier situation for her and for us, her kids who watched her submerge her own identity, and even for my dad, who married a sprightly go-getter and ended up with his own personal yes-woman, had she had some paying outlet all her own. She needed something that would call on her whole skill set, really engage that good mind, and be there for her when we were grown and gone.
This is such a good article! It’s always been shocking to me how many people honestly believe that the 1950's-housewife model is some ancient traditional paradigm, when in reality women have always worked. And it's not like the standards for being a SAHM have gotten any chiller over the years- now they're expected to attend to their children literally 24 hours a day, including homeschooling.
My mother was born in the 1920s. In the 1950s by the time I was born she and millions like her had had enough. From time to time she would go and get a job to be out of the house but the combination of work even part time and 3 children and her own disabled mother to look after ground her down until she gave it up each time. She watched me grow during the time of women’s liberation, going to university despite being working class family, then my own home and a world of choices. ‘Dont tie yourself down with a load of screaming kids’ was her mantra to me when I was young. I remember how kind she was though this was happening to her, how shrewd she could be, how funny and original. I remember the tablets she used to take that she relied on. Her visits to the bingo hall with her friends - one of the very few places married women could go out and meet up together without attracting nasty attention or comment. When she had more space when we all got older she didn’t know what to do with it after a lifetime of that cage.
My mom, born in 1945, converted to mormonism in the late 70s after she married my dad, inactive at the time but from mormon pioneer stock. She clung to the seemingly stable paradigm there after a tumultuous first marriage. Since we were affluent, her SAHMhood looked like pursuing homemaking skills she excelled at, hosting, decorating, needlework, professional volunteering, organizing art auctions for my private school. My abusive and unfaithful father upheld the "patriarchal order" as an emotional weapon, then divorced her, lost his money recklessly, and has since passed away. She lives on social security and the kindness of friends and relatives as this does not afford her enough to both pay rent/utilities and buy food/medicine.
Having left the church after a complicated and painful deconstruction, and while I've always worked freelance as a teaching artist, I just finished a masters degree to get a job with a retirement plan, because that is not going to be me.
I'd love to see Tiktok accounts featuring women who were 1950s stay-home suburban moms telling it like it actually was. I know they're all about 85-95 now, but it could be a powerful antidote to the constant romanticizing of what for many was an unbearable existence.
And why was Harrison ButtTurd even asked to give a commencement speech? He received an honorary degree from Benedictine College simply because he contributed to Super Bowl victories? What the F happened to actual education? Actual well-rounded Studia Humanitatis which teaches critical thinking?
I agree that the key is “chosen motherhood.” I’m afraid neither a career nor being a “stay-at-home mom” is the key to happiness or fulfillment. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, and sometimes we can’t just choose one or the other. I also feel there’s terribly harsh criticism from other women, whatever the choice. I’ve read some horrible articles about both sides.
One part that stood out to me was the fact that most of these "relaxing drugs" used widely were created for these women who felt incomplete. Because, how can you be depressed if you're asleep?
I also related hard with women who have to be disciplinarians while their husbands skirted around as the favorite. I remember really not like Phil from Modern Family because of this. Claire was always the bad guy while he was obviously attracted to Gloria, was literally a grown child and sometimes added to the issue by even calling Claire the bad cop. I get that maybe he was a character to contrast Jay, but damn I always ended up feeling for Claire.
It tells you everything you need to know that 95% of the people writing articles, making speeches, putting out memes, and making tweets about how women were so much happier in their "traditional roles" and how they're all now going to die miserable and alone with their cats, are from men. The other 5% are women who are being paid or making $$ from their content (which is mostly consumed by males).
It may be the case that part of why 2025 seems to be the time that these ideas are percolating again is because the previous round of housewives from the 50s and 60s are dying out, or not involved with the discourse so no one hears from them.
Utah does help that, because you still have existing and recent housewives. You can just talk to them, the women in their 50s here, who have grown children. Every single one wants their own daughters and granddaughters to get an education and have a career. The vast majority of them, when asked for life advice, or talking to their own daughters, tell them to slow down and not jump into marriage too fast, how they wish they'd taken more time before settling down, how they wished they'd been able to develop more of a career.
It's actually such a freaking joke. A hundred thousand men every day online pushing their ideas about what makes women happy (which amazingly just so coincidentally perfectly matches what would make THEM happy). And basically NO older women who agree or push the same message, unless she's a paid influencer/pundit with an audience of men. Who cares what they think, right?
I think I'll take life advice from actual older women, not some dude who is just hoping to advance his goal of making it easier for him to lock down a nubile 18 year old and get her to do his laundry and cook him dinner, before she has the assets or life experience to know better.
I read The Feminine Mystique a long time ago (70s or 80s, can't be 100% sure, but at least 40 years). I credit it with a lot of my growing awareness of feminism.
My mom was one of those housewives. She took to drink to bury her feelings, which I don’t believe she thought she had a right to feel. She taught me the same skills, but I just didn’t like that kind of work. So maybe once a year I really clean some corner of my place, then never look at it again for another year. My cat Steve has managed to shake things up and force me to go under furniture looking for catnip mice he shoots there. My place must have 30 mice in various places I can’t reach or find. I’m not rushing to find them. Bad me.
Truth is, I never cared that much in the past and I sure as hell don’t care now. Dust is my friend.
My mother was born in 1914, my father in 1907. They were thoroughly engulfed in the sex/gender roles they were handed. Ours was a picture-perfect 1950's household...on the surface. I was born late into this family, 1954, and I did not like what I was being handed at all. Enough that I ran away from home when I was 17.
My mother had been a WPA artist with a degree of national recognition and a talented pianist. She was of course expected to give all that up to be "moms." Many years later when she was in a nursing home and the topic of my running away came up, she said this:
"Why didn't you take me with you?"
Wow
This will never leave my heart.
I ran away at 16. Similar scenario. Dad was king of the castle and mom was the housekeeper.
plenty of those home makers in nice dresses were rich and had Black women to do all the real work including wiping snotty little beaks or runny arses
So true.
Even middle class households could have "hired help".
I don't believe my grandparents were rich in the way we understand it today, but they had a Black woman come in and "do for them" after my grandmother had surgery of some kind. My mom was about 12, so it was the early-mid 60s.
(They fired her for some reason, probably made-up, and then those household duties fell on my mom — middle child and only daughter. I only learned this history recently.)
I wonder why these articles about how awful women had it in the 1950s never assume that the woman's job isn't going to be the equivalent to what your father had? This article waxes poetic about the fulfilling work these women could have been doing instead of being at home when the reality for most of them would be some daily drudge of doing meaningless shit for an asshole boss. We know this because the vast majority of men at this time never once walked into the office, sat down to a cigar and a glass of whiskey, and made important decisions about the course of humanity that fulfilled their sense of worth. No, they went to the rail yard, coal mines, factory floors, etc and broke thier back for some asshole boss because that's what paid well enough to have a decent house and feed thier family. None of these men did "meaningful and fulfilling work", they gained meaning and fulfillment in providing for thier family in spite of the shit they had to do from 9-5.
Powerful article. I didn’t read that book Feminine Mystique or even heard of it till now. But as a young girl I saw my mom depressed and had always questioned the gender roles. I couldn’t put it in words as I was too young. I was getting ready to move from brownie to Girl Scout and my cousin showed me his Boy Scouts book. I was so angry. He was learning very helpful life survival skills. I left Girl Scouts and I suppose that started my distrust of social constructs for women. I went to college got a technical degree in power transmission and became a regional sales manager. No kids. I’m in my 2nd marriage and retired at 58. Enjoying my choices!!
Phenomenal debunking. I'm old enough to remember when homosexuality was in the DSM and women couldn't have a credit card or mortgage of their own. It wasn't a golden age and the 'Tradwives' are just currently in the Fuck Around phase of their journey. Have no doubt the next phase is coming.
Yep. Me too!
Refrigerators and washing machines killed homemaking.
If being a stay at home mom and housewife was really so fulfilling for women and so highly valued by society they wouldn’t have to try to shove it down women’s throats. I greatly appreciate your writing.
I often comment on tradwives, because I have 1st person experience. My mom and her friends were those depressed, unhappy tradwives. They felt very unfulfilled. They knew their status was low and options limited. Many got dumped at 50 for a younger model and at best got alimony. They were thrilled and also jealous when their daughters pursued careers. My mother was sadly very jealous of mine. For all its negatives, I would never trade my difficult balance of work and family for tradwifing. Tradwifing is just boring domestic servitude - underpaid, tedious and underappreciated.
Thank you for giving a daughter's perspective. I too am the daughter of one of those women. She was brilliant, went to an experimental high school attached to a major university in the late thirties, where she met my dad when she was assigned by her college paper to interview him. Fast forward to his first real job, contract signed before the ink was dry on his diploma. He swept her off her feet at twenty, away to the registry office and marriage a year before her diploma would have been issued. Five kids and ten houses later (he was a corporate executive who was often transferred) she was so very sad and unfulfilled. She read, she made beautiful clothes for all of us, she did volunteer work and church work her life long. It was not enough, just not enough. In my father's world, at his level, wives were expected not to work outside the home. When I read Greer and de Beauvoir and Friedan as a young woman, it was easy to see what they were talking about, because I lived with it and swore not to be that myself.
I hear you, and don’t doubt a single word you’ve written.
Is it your understanding that your mother would have been happy/fulfilled/satisfied if she were being paid? Had a job / career?
And had the security that comes from making money?
I ask only because it sounds like she did have experiences outside of homemaking.
I know women who do have stimulating careers, but often still feel unfulfilled.
I just wonder if it isn’t JUST not working for money or having a career . . .
In 2025, our human experience and everyday life is so vastly different than it has been for most of human history; I sometimes think our minds have not caught up / evolved to our current technological based lives.
Put another way, for most of human history, our everyday lives were consumed by activities related to survival, and now? So much freedom has manifested in an unsettling mental state and so many of us asking that question “What am I doing here? Is this what ‘this’ is about?”
I think she would have felt like an equal in the marriage, and it would have been a much healthier situation for her and for us, her kids who watched her submerge her own identity, and even for my dad, who married a sprightly go-getter and ended up with his own personal yes-woman, had she had some paying outlet all her own. She needed something that would call on her whole skill set, really engage that good mind, and be there for her when we were grown and gone.
Servitude ye.
Yes!
This is such a good article! It’s always been shocking to me how many people honestly believe that the 1950's-housewife model is some ancient traditional paradigm, when in reality women have always worked. And it's not like the standards for being a SAHM have gotten any chiller over the years- now they're expected to attend to their children literally 24 hours a day, including homeschooling.
My mother was born in the 1920s. In the 1950s by the time I was born she and millions like her had had enough. From time to time she would go and get a job to be out of the house but the combination of work even part time and 3 children and her own disabled mother to look after ground her down until she gave it up each time. She watched me grow during the time of women’s liberation, going to university despite being working class family, then my own home and a world of choices. ‘Dont tie yourself down with a load of screaming kids’ was her mantra to me when I was young. I remember how kind she was though this was happening to her, how shrewd she could be, how funny and original. I remember the tablets she used to take that she relied on. Her visits to the bingo hall with her friends - one of the very few places married women could go out and meet up together without attracting nasty attention or comment. When she had more space when we all got older she didn’t know what to do with it after a lifetime of that cage.
My mom, born in 1945, converted to mormonism in the late 70s after she married my dad, inactive at the time but from mormon pioneer stock. She clung to the seemingly stable paradigm there after a tumultuous first marriage. Since we were affluent, her SAHMhood looked like pursuing homemaking skills she excelled at, hosting, decorating, needlework, professional volunteering, organizing art auctions for my private school. My abusive and unfaithful father upheld the "patriarchal order" as an emotional weapon, then divorced her, lost his money recklessly, and has since passed away. She lives on social security and the kindness of friends and relatives as this does not afford her enough to both pay rent/utilities and buy food/medicine.
Having left the church after a complicated and painful deconstruction, and while I've always worked freelance as a teaching artist, I just finished a masters degree to get a job with a retirement plan, because that is not going to be me.
I'd love to see Tiktok accounts featuring women who were 1950s stay-home suburban moms telling it like it actually was. I know they're all about 85-95 now, but it could be a powerful antidote to the constant romanticizing of what for many was an unbearable existence.
And why was Harrison ButtTurd even asked to give a commencement speech? He received an honorary degree from Benedictine College simply because he contributed to Super Bowl victories? What the F happened to actual education? Actual well-rounded Studia Humanitatis which teaches critical thinking?
I agree that the key is “chosen motherhood.” I’m afraid neither a career nor being a “stay-at-home mom” is the key to happiness or fulfillment. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, and sometimes we can’t just choose one or the other. I also feel there’s terribly harsh criticism from other women, whatever the choice. I’ve read some horrible articles about both sides.
One part that stood out to me was the fact that most of these "relaxing drugs" used widely were created for these women who felt incomplete. Because, how can you be depressed if you're asleep?
I also related hard with women who have to be disciplinarians while their husbands skirted around as the favorite. I remember really not like Phil from Modern Family because of this. Claire was always the bad guy while he was obviously attracted to Gloria, was literally a grown child and sometimes added to the issue by even calling Claire the bad cop. I get that maybe he was a character to contrast Jay, but damn I always ended up feeling for Claire.
It tells you everything you need to know that 95% of the people writing articles, making speeches, putting out memes, and making tweets about how women were so much happier in their "traditional roles" and how they're all now going to die miserable and alone with their cats, are from men. The other 5% are women who are being paid or making $$ from their content (which is mostly consumed by males).
It may be the case that part of why 2025 seems to be the time that these ideas are percolating again is because the previous round of housewives from the 50s and 60s are dying out, or not involved with the discourse so no one hears from them.
Utah does help that, because you still have existing and recent housewives. You can just talk to them, the women in their 50s here, who have grown children. Every single one wants their own daughters and granddaughters to get an education and have a career. The vast majority of them, when asked for life advice, or talking to their own daughters, tell them to slow down and not jump into marriage too fast, how they wish they'd taken more time before settling down, how they wished they'd been able to develop more of a career.
It's actually such a freaking joke. A hundred thousand men every day online pushing their ideas about what makes women happy (which amazingly just so coincidentally perfectly matches what would make THEM happy). And basically NO older women who agree or push the same message, unless she's a paid influencer/pundit with an audience of men. Who cares what they think, right?
I think I'll take life advice from actual older women, not some dude who is just hoping to advance his goal of making it easier for him to lock down a nubile 18 year old and get her to do his laundry and cook him dinner, before she has the assets or life experience to know better.
This. While we may have gone slightly overboard with our wokeness getting ahead of our medical science, the prior models had flaws.
I was born in 1952. Guessing most of the people romanticizing life in the fifties might find the reality less appealing.
I read The Feminine Mystique a long time ago (70s or 80s, can't be 100% sure, but at least 40 years). I credit it with a lot of my growing awareness of feminism.
My mom was one of those housewives. She took to drink to bury her feelings, which I don’t believe she thought she had a right to feel. She taught me the same skills, but I just didn’t like that kind of work. So maybe once a year I really clean some corner of my place, then never look at it again for another year. My cat Steve has managed to shake things up and force me to go under furniture looking for catnip mice he shoots there. My place must have 30 mice in various places I can’t reach or find. I’m not rushing to find them. Bad me.
Truth is, I never cared that much in the past and I sure as hell don’t care now. Dust is my friend.