I found this week’s readings very interesting. The reading “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan was one that I enjoyed reading and learning about.  In this reading, the author gave the reader an insight into what 15 years after WWII looked like for women and women’s roles. Throughout history, we have seen how the term housewife has evolved and with this reading, we are able to see the first definition of being a housewife. 

In this week’s reading, readers were able to have a better interpretation of what it meant to be a housewife back in the 1950s and how these women really felt. Being a housewife meant you had to stay home, take the kids to school, cook, clean, do laundry and make sure you keep your husband. This meant being submissive to your husband and doing whatever kept him happy. In this era, happiness was subjective, where happiness meant you were being the best housewife you could possibly be. The only dream was to be the perfect housewife and mother. These women were also not able to make major decisions for the house or for themselves. Women with other ambitions other than being a perfect housewife were frowned upon and women were taught to feel pity towards these ambitious women. While reading this I couldn’t think of anything else other than forced misogyny. These women were bringing other women down and wanted to stay submissive to their husbands forever. Fast forward to modern-day, a housewife now is a lot more optional, where they chose to stay at home as their husbands/partners provide for the family but they are able to have some say in decision making and are able to fend for themselves without it being an issue. Now, ambitions have somewhat changed and they vary by case, they still want to be the perfect wife and mother to the kids but they don’t do it out of fear from their husbands, they do it for themselves and personal goals. As women still compete with one another, especially housewives on who plays the role better, we have grown a lot out of bashing other women for wanting to go out and have careers and bring something else to the table. 

As we know, a housewife’s duties back in the mid to late 1900s were to cook and clean, and watch over the kids while the husband was at work. For this week, I added a snapshot of a meme of a woman saying “there are other rooms in the house?” I found this sad but funny. It is said that women were practically prohibited from doing anything else other than feeding their kids and husbands and making sure all chores were done. It saddens me that it took so long for women to realize their worth and realize that this was not the ‘happiness’ they thought they needed. Another post that caught my eye was one made by Sadira. In this post, there’s a woman saying “I don’t need rights – I have a kitchen”. This caught my attention because women really thought they had it all and were living lavishly while living into this pushed misogynistic idea of only obeying their male superiors – in this case, their husbands. I am so glad for the brave group of women who took a leap of faith and decided to go out and fight for women to have basic human rights again.