Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead

by Lisa Selin Davis

Overview

Amazon's Best Nonfiction Book of the Month for March 2024

Discover the complete social history of the housewife archetype, from colonial America to the 20th century, and re-examine common myths about the “modern woman.”
 
The notion of “housewife” evokes strong reactions. For some, it’s nostalgia for a bygone era, simpler and better times when men were breadwinners and women remained home with the kids. For others, it’s a sexist, oppressive stereotype of women’s work. Either way, housewife is a long outdated concept—or is it?
  
Lisa Selin Davis, known for her smart, viral, feminist, cultural takes, argues that the “breadwinner vs. homemaker” divide is a myth. She charts examples from prehistoric female hunters to working class housewives in the 1930s, from First Ladies to 21st century stay-at-home moms, on a search for answers to the problems of what is referred to as women’s work and motherhood. Davis discovers that women have been sold a lie about what families should be. Housewife unveils a truth: interdependence, rather than independence, is the American way.  
 
The book is a clarion call for all women—married or single, mothers or childless—and for men, too, to push for liberation.  In Housewife, Davis builds a case for systemic, cultural, and personal change, to encourage women to have the power to choose the best path for themselves.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538722886
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	369,309
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Lisa Selin Davis is a critically-acclaimed essayist and journalist whose work has appeared in major publications, include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time, The Free Press, and many others. She is the author of Tomboy, as well as two novels. She lives in New York City with her family.

Editorial Reviews

Davis unearths the historical origins of the housewife and waxes philosophical about modern-day motherhood. Housewife provides both vindication and comfort for women tired of doing it all.”—Booklist

“A passionate call for societal support for mothers… A cogent sociological analysis.”—Kirkus

“Housewife is a deeply researched, passionately-argued pro-choice book—for women's work. Davis entertainingly looks beneath the hood of housewifery and finds all kinds of surprises: Paleolithic huntresses; radical working class housewives accosting men with sausages (really!); the exploited labor of the First Lady; and ‘tradwives,’ reinventing a ‘tradition’ that was actually an anomaly. Her quest: to figure out how women and mothers can choose the life they want, and how society needs to shift to make that happen.”—Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex

"In Housewife, Lisa Selin Davis masterfully dismantles the myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions associated with a term that so many of us use but so few of us truly understand. Through compelling research and engaging narrative, she underscores the extent to which women through history have been oppressed, undervalued, and degraded, and how the remnants of what we might think of as long forgotten societal norms and mores continue to reverberate and shape so much—from our economies to our identities and beyond. A deeply insightful and educational—but also witty and fast-paced—book that provides a profoundly important perspective on women, the labor market, and where things have gone terribly awry."—Josie Cox, author of Women Money Power

"In this involving, broad-spectrum, cheerfully impertinent book, Lisa Selin Davis investigates one of the most vexed and contradictory figures to persist in the American imagination: The housewife. Part cultural history and part cri de coeur, Davis shows, through dozens of examples, that the housewife, no matter what form she assumes (sequined backbiter, aproned hearth sweeper, even smiling First Lady) always seems to get the short end of the mop. Only through a combination of system-wide and individual commitments to change will it ever be otherwise."—Jennifer Senior, New York Times bestselling author of All Joy and No Fun

From the Publisher

Narrator Lyssa Browne guides listeners through this audiobook on the history and myths that surround the concept of the housewife in the U.S. From the idealized idea of the 1950s housewife to the contemporary woman who is expected to do it all with no help, this audiobook explores how expectations of women have changed and what can be done to create a more egalitarian society. Browne delivers an informative, sarcastic, and enjoyable performance of this audiobook. She puts forth the facts and figures about parenting and homemaking in the United States in a way that keeps one's attention, even when the information makes one furious to hear. V.B. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2024 - AudioFile

2023-12-13
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.

Kirkus Reviews