Another Tirade for Housewives

Today I was in the dentist office reading an article about how second wave feminists would hate the women of the world today because they believed that if women had the same educational opportunities as men, they wouldn’t choose to stay home and raise their children like little house wives.  Unfortunately, they are discovering that nowadays highly educated women marry wealthy men and now that they have the pleasure of choosing which sort of life they want to lead, an astonishingly large number of them are choosing to stay home.  Don’t you just hate that?

Loads of you know I’m a housewife, and I’m not dismissing feminism.  I am all about equal opportunity.  I just think that the housewives who angsted about being stuck home with the kids in the 60s did not have the same luxuries the housewives of today. 

I remember my mother making pancakes – a rare treat when I was a child.  And she used to cook them two at a time on two frying pans.  It used to take forever.  In my home, I have a humongous electric hotplate that can cook eight pancakes at once.  I say I’m making pancakes and there are pancakes for everyone five minutes later (even if I make the batter from scratch).  Fancy new appliances aren’t even scratching the surface of today’s power for housewifery.

What about the internet?  I am standing in my kitchen looking around at what I can make, I pull out my phone, tell it what I have and milliseconds later, I’m looking at recipes for things I can make.  I can even watch a movie showing how to make it and if the first movie doesn’t do it for me; I can find another one in seconds. 

Not only is there all that glory, but since communication is easier these days, being home is a lot less lonely than it used to be.  Miss your ma down in Tennessee?  It has never been easier to get in touch with her.

And not to be too much of a pain in the bum, but The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963. That was 16 or 17 years before baby wipes were invented.  No wonder those mommies were crying.   Just as P.S. here, once I read an absolutely stunning column by Erma Bombeck (who naturally had cloth diapers for her babies since she was old enough to be my grandma) about how society should stop using disposable everything to save the environment – except diapers.  My favourite was when she said she’d rather have boiling coffee poured into her bare hands in order to give up the disposable cup than see another woman on her knees swirling a poopy diaper around in the toilet bowl. Ah, she kills me.

Yeah.  I don’t think motherhood is as oppressive as it used to be.  Anywhoo – I’m guessing it was a man who developed the Bosch mixer.  In which case, they’ve served their purpose.