I have seen the joke more than a few times about how women would also love to have a wife to take care of the home and everything mentioned in the article, but unfortunately they are straight and so they would have to be the wife.
I went on a date with a guy who told me he is looking for a housewife with everything that you would expect and actually lean more into the 1950's version. Later in the date he let out that he also expected me to continue working my full time job and pay half of the expenses.
I had the opposite problem, my ex wanted to be taken care of and not have to work (traditional housespouse); but they expected me to do half of the housework (or more, in the case of the dogs they wanted).
I would work 8-10hrs a day, then spend another 1.5ish walking dogs and .5-1ish doing house chores. After I was done, I would have to listen to them complain about how exhausted they were mopping the floors.
When I would mention to friends of the opposite gender that I felt taken advantage of and that they should contribute the majority of housework for their "free ride" (or get a job and contribute to expenses), the entire conversation would be warped into me being a sexist or abuser. It was a weird societal gaslight, for sure.
I pay for everything. I also do ~50% if the housework and childcare, as I’m mostly retired.
Some people will think that’s unfair (my income is mostly sourced from investments, sure, but I’m still bringing the income). Some will think it’s fair as it’s about doing the work.
Your situation, on the other hand, seems categorically unfair to you.
I'm not sure why you thought it would be any different.
What the original article misunderstands is that there is no incentive for the stay-at-home partner to contribute. They don't have to do housework, because at the level of your own disgust threshold, you'll do it for them. They don't have to raise the children, there's Youtube for that. And you can't leave, because you'll lose half of your assets and be on the hook for spousal and child support.
"Housewife" is a fun idea, but the incentive structures are so perverse that it's invariably a bad deal for the earning partner. Most of us end up working from sunup to sundown while the housespouse scrolls on social media all day.
That said, sounds like you hit the jackpot with someone who mopped the floors. That's better than most.
I just have to ask, did you expect your ex to work 24/7 for you? When did the job of being the traditional housespouse get off? 6pm? 8pm? never? When were they simply allowed to be your partner and get to stop taking care of you? Having to walk your dog (it is your dog no matter whom wanted it) and sounds like helping to clean up dinner sure sounds like a really hard life.
After you divorced did you hire a maid, etc? How is it going looking for a future spouse when you tell them you want to never do any house work at all?
He is delusional, but there are plenty of guys, me included, that would like to have housewife, and will provide everything and anything she needs to be happy and comfortable in that role.
Recognizing the legitimate concerns about the article tone, it’s worth mentioning another point not mentioned in the article: when kids get older, my experience is that public schools in “fancy” neighborhoods often have unpaid additional staffing from stay at home parents. Not so much teaching, but auxiliary roles. This is an unrenumerated public good that benefits many children. A underreported correlate of school quality seems to be the available fraction of non-working parents for these roles.)
(Families at the fancy private schools just pay extra for that stuff. They also seem to typically have one stay at home parent, but also nannies, maids, etc.)
Does this surprise anyone this has been the way households have been structured for millennia, even among the elite aristocrats of ancient Rome, or Egyptian dynastys there would always the woman was primarily responsible for the running of the home, which despite what it sounds like could be quite a daunting affair, similar on the level of running a small business.
I couldn't do what I do without my wife, she is just as critical to running the household as I am. Honestly how did we convince half of society that it was liberating and freedom to be able to slave away for a corporate wage day in and day out?
> Honestly how did we convince half of society that it was liberating and freedom to be able to slave away for a corporate wage day in and day out?
I think because until recently, housewives had a very poor standard of living (e.g. women couldn't reliably get credit cards til the 70s, very traditional views of a role of a woman in a family). It's not a surprise that the subsequent generations (Gen X and Millennials) were raised with distaste for the housewife lifestyle.
In the US during WWII women took over a lot of traditionally male jobs and got to run their own lives as men were often away. After the war there was a full court press to force women back into the home and traditional roles. And by 1960 women were in open revolt.
My mother mentioned being a housewife with small kids as. You spend all day at home with children and no adults to talk to. Then your husband comes home and now you have an adult to talk to. But he's been talking adult stuff all day and just wants some downtime.
It's liberating to give yourself entirely to another person, to make a supreme act of trust and faith and love, to say to that person that he is everything in your life now, and you forsake all others, because he is worthy of your trust and faith and love. It is liberating to be protected, to be cherished, to be placed on a pedestal. It is liberating to have someone who will lay down his life for you and your children. It is liberating to promise to each other that you will stay together, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer; that is liberation from worry, from doubt, from fear. It is liberation from want or need or desolation, because no matter what happens in the family's life, you will have each other. It is liberating to come together in complementarity, to each take half of the duties and rights and responsibilities of a marriage, and to be able to complete one another in terms of household responsibilities, child rearing, earning income, social activities.
I've seen some rather un-liberated comments above, such as "oh no! we could never make it as a family on a single income! both spouses need to work... or else!" "who can afford children in this economy? we're DINKs for life; we barely get by!" so it's rather apparent to me who is enslaved.
I highly recommend watching the Indian movie: The great Indian kitchen. It does really offer a different perspective to anyone who believes that a housewife's job is better than a corporate drone's :)
Has this been the way households have been organized for centuries, or is this just the way a particular upper-middle class or aristocratic families have organized?
I would absolutely give up my career to be a househusband, but increasingly, one income isn’t sufficient to support a family. I work in tech and even my salary (or my wife’s) cannot support the two of us + children. Yes we’d save some childcare costs, but that’s about it. If anything, your other expenses on an average remain the same but your standard of living drops because there’s less income.
Turns out that "women can work" quickly devolved into "women must work". The curious part is that if you go further back in history, to when most of the population were peasant farmers, it was more the case of "everyone must work" (children too), and house work was nothing like today's. The average 1950's housewife did not have to kill chickens to make soup.
Couple this with the fact that nowadays couples have less children in average and you start to get the picture. If now two people work (vs 1) to have one child (vs 5) that will get the same (vs better) quality of life than their parents then you have on average become poorer.
A lot of it is about lifestyle. The lifestyle you could have with one income in the 1950s would be a house that was tiny by today's standards, built shabbily, no HVAC, etc etc
Anecdotally I know a family of five that survived on one income that is half of a common tech salary, while in a fairly high cost of living area.
You know how they did it? Frugality, and sacrifice, of anything unnecessary. The mother keeps up the home and homeschools the kids. The dad learned to maintain cars by watching YouTube every time their old car broke down.
Mom could've gotten a job, but they made a choice to sacrifice a more luxurious lifestyle for the ability to keep the kids out of public schools. It is a choice. It's just a choice most people don't want to make. They want the lifestyle that comes with two incomes, and the benefits of being a stay at home spouse, and it's just not realistic.
I'd just like to point out that killing chickens for food is a very recent development. Chickens are usually egg factories. Only the (evil) modern industrial practices made chicken meat an viable food source.
Where are you living that it is that hard? I am the sole breadwinner for our family, have been our whole marriage, and we have 4 little kids and live a fairly comfortable middle class lifestyle.
Although if food keeps going this way we may need to cut back on some things.
Pretty much anywhere. I know individual data points can be tricky to argue, but I was talking about an average person. BLS data supports the thesis on how going from 2 earners to 1 can significantly reduce the net household income, but the expenses don’t go down significantly.
> Housewifing bears a different kind of opportunity cost than breadwinning
Yes. The opportunity cost of housewifing is breadwinning. The opportunity cost of breadwinning is housewifing. Guess which one pays the rent/mortgage (keywords not found in the text.)
- many more meals must be ordered in or eaten out instead of prepared from scratch
- transportation cost increases, more vehicles needed which means more gas more insurance more repairs or more transit fare and now both people sacrifice possibly hours of their day to commuting
- childcare services must be paid for and transportation arranged for them
- the choice of housing now has the additional constraint of being within commute distance for the second job (along with other resources that must be obtained outside the home now e.g. childcare) often meaning less choice and higher cost
- with both partners sharing household duties evenly, neither can take on additional work as needed whether that's taking work home, staying late or working a second job. Dividing the labor so one person manages the household and the other devotes their energies to earning money allows both to be more effective at what they do. Division of labor is the cornerstone of an advanced industrial society that makes everything possible.
> If both partners work then [...] more vehicles needed
I was thinking about the logistics of this the other day since one of our cars is down, I'm WFH with a SAHM and I hate the expense of having to maintain two cars. Maybe this is the time to downgrade to one (which will be followed by mandatory RTO, knowing my luck).
Being a housewife is Work. It's a full-time unpaid job that frequently involves bringing things to the home from outside of it. She's not my dog; if I took our only car to work, my wife doesn't just sit around awaiting my return or stop needing to go places. The kids still need to be brought to/from school (in California, this is at irregular times on irregular days for maximum exclusion). Sometimes they need to go to the doctor. Sometimes she needs to go to the doctor. Groceries need procurement.
She could take the bus, maybe. Then it's a discussion of which partner's role is critical enough to necessitate exclusive use of the car. Both sides are valid. Being a trailblazer doesn't mean shit if nobody's maintaining your path.
In past instances, I've left the car to her and just taken Uber to ad-hoc onsite work, but this is very unreliable (and expensive for short hops).
If you live in an American suburb, you need multiple vehicles regardless of employment status.
and your second income is taxed at your marginal rate, to pay for a $1 of child care you need around $1.33 to $1.50 in income. Put another way, avoiding $1 in expenses is like earning up to $1.5 at work.
But the real issue is what the article points out, that this often leaves the stay at home parent “trapped” and dependent on the working spouse. What do you do when you’ve been out of the workforce 20+ years, kids out of the house (no child support), and you need to support yourself now?
Everyone's situation is different. I got 1 kid. I pay around $110/mo for childcare. No car. I pay around $100/mo for transport. I assume the kid's mum pays the same for transport. We're separated now, but she has a career because her CV isn't just housewifery.
I really can't get behind the money-saving arguments about food etc. (mostly in other comments even though my post is here.)
I mean, I buy meals during the day because I'm rich and lazy. Nothing's stopping me from storing leftover dinner in the fridge and taking it into work the next day.
But if I wanted unrealistic comparisons between food costs and employment, why not child care too: I save so much money and time by having my kid fed at daycare instead of having to feed him myself.
> Division of labor is the cornerstone of an advanced industrial society that makes everything possible.
I agree.
It would be absolutely crazy to split the workforce down the middle (housewife vs. everything else). It would be like if half the workforce was bakers or dentists.
I would point out that for many people the cost of paying for childcare during work hours is comparable to the income generated from said work. Those people have essentially no incentive to work unless they want to avoid their kids.
Even if you were actually at a pure breakeven for the stay-at-home partner for the first year:
* Childcare costs decrease with age, and decrease substantially when your child reaches school age. Full-time childcare costs are typically only for the first 3-4 years of a child's life.
* Even if you break even in terms of take-home pay, a stay-at-home parent that was previously working might be missing out on things like 401K/retirement contributions.
* The opportunity costs to your career of taking 3-4 years off is enormous, and it's frequently difficult at best to return to work with similar pay/seniority as when you left after taking several years off (and might be effectively impossible if you've taken 10+ years off).
For working professionals, it's incredibly short-sighted to look at short term childcare costs vs take-home pay solely in terms of dollars, and it's silly to to say there is 'no incentive except avoiding your kids.' The incentive in terms of dollars and job prospects over the course of your career can be huge.
Even if it's a wash dollar wise, staying employed often means you get healthcare and retirement benefits AND the career progression that ideally comes with long term stable employment. Trying to hop back on the treadmill after a 5-10 year absence often has a huge opportunity cost on your lifetime earnings.
You are splitting the cost though. Greater the time you spend on bread winning, and it always increases as work/fam responsibilities & fam size increase with time, less time you have on the home front. It makes a big diff(a real relief infact) if SO is full time manning that front.
This requires tremendous trust in the breadwinnner, though. Sexual competition is a reality, which is why infidelity happens. If the housewife/husband is deemed replaceable, then there is an implicit power differential between the breadwinner and house spouse, which opens the "lesser" half to abuse (physical, emotional, financial etc.). My recommendation to anyone considering house spousing is to have a contingency plan.
This is much more interesting than I expected it to be from the headline, and I don't think it should be flagged. (I wonder if people flagged it on auto-pilot based on the headline.)
Since it's clear from the top-level comments that most people aren't reading this far: This article is using "housewife" to mean one member of a two-adult household focusing mostly on home-related work rather than typical money-earning work, and the article (eventually) takes pains to point out that this could be a man (though usually isn't).
Personally, I think she's right that having at least one person in a household not work full time for pay would be a much better setup if it actually worked the way I would want it to, especially (but not exclusively) in households with children. However, I don't see any path to it working the way I would want it to, and for most people I know, the way it would actually work is less desirable than the status quo.
Here's how I wish this could work:
- Both people work part time and share the "homemaking" responsibilities. This is covered in the article along with the reasons this doesn't work for most people in our current society. But this is what I'd like to do if we were financially independent.
- People take turns working at home or for pay. I would love to switch back and forth. I get tired of both kinds of work and it would be rejuvenating to do one for awhile and then the other. But again, this doesn't work for most people, because it's not what employers want (it is just a different version of part-time work after all).
- No gender-based stereotyping of who "should" be doing which kind of work. This one is possible to overcome on an individual basis by communicating really well about the expectations for both people involved and by conscientiously not caring what other people think. But still, enculturation is hard to overcome, and I know both sides of the "non-traditional" way of doing this often face different kinds of struggles with it.
But if those things aren't plausibly achievable in a widespread way, then I think the status quo where most people try to do both work for pay and work at home (and do kind of a bad job of both) is preferable to the "traditional" setup of having strictly a woman do all the work at home indefinitely. Very few of the women I know would thrive with that lifestyle, and few of the men I know would actually prefer their partner live that lifestyle.
For reducing workload - robot vacuums/mops, a decent dishwasher that cleans things up the first time, eating out a few times a week, and not having/coddling a pet if you can't handle it are all options to reduce the housework load. Most stores offer really good order pickup. Target is a star, you can just sit in your car and they load it for you.
One of the things I find annoying in American life is how so many bureaucratic things are only open 9-5ish. DMV, Doctor, Banks, Dry Cleaners, any government office etc. Having to shove these things into a lunch break or take time off really adds to stress levels. We did a great job 15-20 years of getting things moved online and out of "business hours" then we seemed to stall into whatever we're at now.
Readit News
I went on a date with a guy who told me he is looking for a housewife with everything that you would expect and actually lean more into the 1950's version. Later in the date he let out that he also expected me to continue working my full time job and pay half of the expenses.
I would work 8-10hrs a day, then spend another 1.5ish walking dogs and .5-1ish doing house chores. After I was done, I would have to listen to them complain about how exhausted they were mopping the floors.
When I would mention to friends of the opposite gender that I felt taken advantage of and that they should contribute the majority of housework for their "free ride" (or get a job and contribute to expenses), the entire conversation would be warped into me being a sexist or abuser. It was a weird societal gaslight, for sure.
Some people will think that’s unfair (my income is mostly sourced from investments, sure, but I’m still bringing the income). Some will think it’s fair as it’s about doing the work.
Your situation, on the other hand, seems categorically unfair to you.
What the original article misunderstands is that there is no incentive for the stay-at-home partner to contribute. They don't have to do housework, because at the level of your own disgust threshold, you'll do it for them. They don't have to raise the children, there's Youtube for that. And you can't leave, because you'll lose half of your assets and be on the hook for spousal and child support.
"Housewife" is a fun idea, but the incentive structures are so perverse that it's invariably a bad deal for the earning partner. Most of us end up working from sunup to sundown while the housespouse scrolls on social media all day.
That said, sounds like you hit the jackpot with someone who mopped the floors. That's better than most.
After you divorced did you hire a maid, etc? How is it going looking for a future spouse when you tell them you want to never do any house work at all?
I hope he understands you're still laughing at him.
(Families at the fancy private schools just pay extra for that stuff. They also seem to typically have one stay at home parent, but also nannies, maids, etc.)
It's a whole seperate beast from public schooling when I was growing up nowadays.
I couldn't do what I do without my wife, she is just as critical to running the household as I am. Honestly how did we convince half of society that it was liberating and freedom to be able to slave away for a corporate wage day in and day out?
I think because until recently, housewives had a very poor standard of living (e.g. women couldn't reliably get credit cards til the 70s, very traditional views of a role of a woman in a family). It's not a surprise that the subsequent generations (Gen X and Millennials) were raised with distaste for the housewife lifestyle.
In the US during WWII women took over a lot of traditionally male jobs and got to run their own lives as men were often away. After the war there was a full court press to force women back into the home and traditional roles. And by 1960 women were in open revolt.
My mother mentioned being a housewife with small kids as. You spend all day at home with children and no adults to talk to. Then your husband comes home and now you have an adult to talk to. But he's been talking adult stuff all day and just wants some downtime.
I've seen some rather un-liberated comments above, such as "oh no! we could never make it as a family on a single income! both spouses need to work... or else!" "who can afford children in this economy? we're DINKs for life; we barely get by!" so it's rather apparent to me who is enslaved.
Actually, being able to depend on someone you trust is the real liberation.
Dead Comment
It's a good point. Let's put it in the same box as slavery and arranged marriage.
Couple this with the fact that nowadays couples have less children in average and you start to get the picture. If now two people work (vs 1) to have one child (vs 5) that will get the same (vs better) quality of life than their parents then you have on average become poorer.
I can't help but feel we have been duped.
Anecdotally I know a family of five that survived on one income that is half of a common tech salary, while in a fairly high cost of living area.
You know how they did it? Frugality, and sacrifice, of anything unnecessary. The mother keeps up the home and homeschools the kids. The dad learned to maintain cars by watching YouTube every time their old car broke down.
Mom could've gotten a job, but they made a choice to sacrifice a more luxurious lifestyle for the ability to keep the kids out of public schools. It is a choice. It's just a choice most people don't want to make. They want the lifestyle that comes with two incomes, and the benefits of being a stay at home spouse, and it's just not realistic.
Although if food keeps going this way we may need to cut back on some things.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...
Yes. The opportunity cost of housewifing is breadwinning. The opportunity cost of breadwinning is housewifing. Guess which one pays the rent/mortgage (keywords not found in the text.)
- many more meals must be ordered in or eaten out instead of prepared from scratch
- transportation cost increases, more vehicles needed which means more gas more insurance more repairs or more transit fare and now both people sacrifice possibly hours of their day to commuting
- childcare services must be paid for and transportation arranged for them
- the choice of housing now has the additional constraint of being within commute distance for the second job (along with other resources that must be obtained outside the home now e.g. childcare) often meaning less choice and higher cost
- with both partners sharing household duties evenly, neither can take on additional work as needed whether that's taking work home, staying late or working a second job. Dividing the labor so one person manages the household and the other devotes their energies to earning money allows both to be more effective at what they do. Division of labor is the cornerstone of an advanced industrial society that makes everything possible.
I was thinking about the logistics of this the other day since one of our cars is down, I'm WFH with a SAHM and I hate the expense of having to maintain two cars. Maybe this is the time to downgrade to one (which will be followed by mandatory RTO, knowing my luck).
Being a housewife is Work. It's a full-time unpaid job that frequently involves bringing things to the home from outside of it. She's not my dog; if I took our only car to work, my wife doesn't just sit around awaiting my return or stop needing to go places. The kids still need to be brought to/from school (in California, this is at irregular times on irregular days for maximum exclusion). Sometimes they need to go to the doctor. Sometimes she needs to go to the doctor. Groceries need procurement.
She could take the bus, maybe. Then it's a discussion of which partner's role is critical enough to necessitate exclusive use of the car. Both sides are valid. Being a trailblazer doesn't mean shit if nobody's maintaining your path.
In past instances, I've left the car to her and just taken Uber to ad-hoc onsite work, but this is very unreliable (and expensive for short hops).
If you live in an American suburb, you need multiple vehicles regardless of employment status.
But the real issue is what the article points out, that this often leaves the stay at home parent “trapped” and dependent on the working spouse. What do you do when you’ve been out of the workforce 20+ years, kids out of the house (no child support), and you need to support yourself now?
I really can't get behind the money-saving arguments about food etc. (mostly in other comments even though my post is here.)
I mean, I buy meals during the day because I'm rich and lazy. Nothing's stopping me from storing leftover dinner in the fridge and taking it into work the next day.
But if I wanted unrealistic comparisons between food costs and employment, why not child care too: I save so much money and time by having my kid fed at daycare instead of having to feed him myself.
I agree.
It would be absolutely crazy to split the workforce down the middle (housewife vs. everything else). It would be like if half the workforce was bakers or dentists.
* Childcare costs decrease with age, and decrease substantially when your child reaches school age. Full-time childcare costs are typically only for the first 3-4 years of a child's life.
* Even if you break even in terms of take-home pay, a stay-at-home parent that was previously working might be missing out on things like 401K/retirement contributions.
* The opportunity costs to your career of taking 3-4 years off is enormous, and it's frequently difficult at best to return to work with similar pay/seniority as when you left after taking several years off (and might be effectively impossible if you've taken 10+ years off).
For working professionals, it's incredibly short-sighted to look at short term childcare costs vs take-home pay solely in terms of dollars, and it's silly to to say there is 'no incentive except avoiding your kids.' The incentive in terms of dollars and job prospects over the course of your career can be huge.
Since it's clear from the top-level comments that most people aren't reading this far: This article is using "housewife" to mean one member of a two-adult household focusing mostly on home-related work rather than typical money-earning work, and the article (eventually) takes pains to point out that this could be a man (though usually isn't).
Personally, I think she's right that having at least one person in a household not work full time for pay would be a much better setup if it actually worked the way I would want it to, especially (but not exclusively) in households with children. However, I don't see any path to it working the way I would want it to, and for most people I know, the way it would actually work is less desirable than the status quo.
Here's how I wish this could work:
- Both people work part time and share the "homemaking" responsibilities. This is covered in the article along with the reasons this doesn't work for most people in our current society. But this is what I'd like to do if we were financially independent.
- People take turns working at home or for pay. I would love to switch back and forth. I get tired of both kinds of work and it would be rejuvenating to do one for awhile and then the other. But again, this doesn't work for most people, because it's not what employers want (it is just a different version of part-time work after all).
- No gender-based stereotyping of who "should" be doing which kind of work. This one is possible to overcome on an individual basis by communicating really well about the expectations for both people involved and by conscientiously not caring what other people think. But still, enculturation is hard to overcome, and I know both sides of the "non-traditional" way of doing this often face different kinds of struggles with it.
But if those things aren't plausibly achievable in a widespread way, then I think the status quo where most people try to do both work for pay and work at home (and do kind of a bad job of both) is preferable to the "traditional" setup of having strictly a woman do all the work at home indefinitely. Very few of the women I know would thrive with that lifestyle, and few of the men I know would actually prefer their partner live that lifestyle.
One of the things I find annoying in American life is how so many bureaucratic things are only open 9-5ish. DMV, Doctor, Banks, Dry Cleaners, any government office etc. Having to shove these things into a lunch break or take time off really adds to stress levels. We did a great job 15-20 years of getting things moved online and out of "business hours" then we seemed to stall into whatever we're at now.