The stigma of being a housewifeIn a world that counts women catching up with men in education and the labour market in terms of raising productivity and economic growth, stay-at-home moms are valued less than ever ... When Swedish journalist Peter Letmark tried to track down a housewife for a series on 21st-century parents in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter recently, he failed. "Housewives," he explained, "are a near-extinct species in Sweden. And the few who still do exist don't really dare to go public with it." Meanwhile, in neighbouring Norway, the Housewives' Association changed its name to the Women and Family Association as its membership plummeted to 5,000 from 60,000."The reference to housewife was embarrassing," said feminist economist Charlotte Koren of the Norwegian Institute of Social Research, a former member. When it is no longer acceptable to be a housewife - or homemaker - has feminism overshot its objective ? In the 1950s,women were expected to stay at home, and those who wanted to work were often stigmatised. Today it's the other way round, pitting women against one another along the fault lines of conviction, economic class and need, and, often, ethnicity. Across the developed world, women who stay home are increasingly seen as old-fashioned and an economic burden to society. If their husbands are rich, they are frequently berated for being lazy; if they are immigrants, for keeping children from learning the ways of their host country. Their daily chores of cleaning, cooking or raising their children have always been ignored by national accounts - if a man marries his housekeeper and stops paying her for her work, GDP goes down. If a woman stops nursing and buys formula for her baby, GDP goes up. In a debate that counts women catching up with men in education and the labour market in terms of raising productivity and economic growth, stay-at-home moms are valued less than ever. This is so despite the fact that from Norway to the US, economists put the value of their unpaid work ahead of that of the manufacturing sector. In countries where mothers still struggle to combine career with family and quit work less out of conviction than out of necessity, they are often doubly punished. In Germany, the biggest economy in Europe, most schools still finish at lunchtime, and full-time nurseries for children under three are scarce. Yet in this generation of young mothers you are more likely to find women saying they are on extended maternity leave or between jobs than admitting they are housewives. Only among the wealthy is it seen as class status when the highly educated mother takes children to Chinese or violin lessons. "It's hard to find a balance between not romanticising and not stigmatising housewives," said Nancy Folbre, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. "Even though a number of women still stay at home, a cultural shift has put them on the defensive." Bearing in mind that women now work both because they want to and because most families need two incomes, she said, In Sweden, the demise of the housewife is striking. Fathers share parental leave, kindergartens are heavily subsidised, and the universal breadwinner model is quite deeply entrenched - from the workplace to popular culture. Once the key market for advertisers on daytime television, happy homemakers touting cleaning products now rarely feature in TV ads. They are a "nonexistent segment," said Jonas Andersson, brand consultant at The Brand Union, a Swedish brand design company. From time to time international ads have to be re-dubbed to remove offensive mentions of a "housewife," he said. Nordic politicians have long focused on working mothers, giving them subsidies for elderly care and child care and, more recently, financial incentives to share parental leave. Over all, these policies have increased economic growth, raised tax revenue and given women who wanted to work more financial independence, more social benefits, more personal fulfilment - in short, what many would call more freedom. But social engineering is a blunt tool, and some worry that the freedom of working mothers has come at the expense of making outcasts of a minority who want to do things differently. Jorun Lindell, a mother of three and the wife of a Swedish entrepreneur, tried being a housewife and could not make it work. "Sneered at," she said, for her conviction that her children should have their mother at home, she learned she also could not put them into state day care a few hours every day because it was reserved for families where both parents are either working or studying. She ended up enrolling at a university without any interest in her course, "wasting resources to get something our taxes already pay for," she said. There is no easy way to right the unintended consequences of well-meaning policy. Some measures, like the home care allowance Sweden and Norway pay stay-at-home parents who opt out of the day care system, have often only reinforced the stigma attached to housewives: concerns that this allowance, popular with working-class and immigrant families, hampers social mobility by keeping children of poor and foreign backgrounds out of socialising day care have made it controversial. A cheaper and effective way might be to recognise the contribution housewives make to the economy. "It's not about being paid," she said, noting that the economic value housewives create remains within their home, "it's about being valued." If ever there was a time to include unpaid housework in GDP figures, it is now, she said. Working mothers have a stake in this, too: They still do most of the unpaid work in their homes - even in Sweden. (An article from Times of India) Nandakumar |
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