I just found this interesting commentary on Alertnet taking about the "Housewife theory on History," and looks at some of the political moves women have made, using the label housewife to strategically get places and say things that would not otherwise have been heard.
One of the examples is the Women's Strike for Peace during the Cold War fighting nuclear proliferation. Solnit says...
I think of Women Strike for Peace, who faced down anticommunist authorities at the height of the Cold War to protest the nuclear arms race, nuclear weapons, and the nuclear testing that was causing catastrophic damage to the environment and human health--particularly that of infants and children.
The members of WSP subversively used their gender and their genteel, housewifely image to suggest that being against what the government was doing wasn't radical but sensible, motherly, and kindhearted.
I think that the monikker of housewife/mother has been a cover for strategic activism in many global liberation movements. I think of Palestine, Algeria, India among others...
This might be the secret of the housewife theory of history: These women take the qualities that are supposed to render them irrelevant and use them defiantly as well as strategically. Starting with what they love, they cut straight through the quicksand of motives and purposes to point out that harm has been done and should be stopped. In some sense, they depoliticize politics, which is what makes them so politically potent.
What do we think about this? Is mother/housewife activism just something that is a "women's" version of men's politics of the given time (you know like lady's who lunch that want to help the blind; or Laura Bush pushing GW's agenda under the guise of "women's issues.")? Does this perpetuate the belief that caring is "natural" for a women?
Or is this a moment of activism that has totally gone under the radar? Taking into consideration as well all that women are differently affected based on issues of race, class and geographical/cultural location.
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Rebecca Solnit, in a May/June article in Orion Magazine, shows how "history is changed again and again by people who are supposedly powerless, including the women veiled by the dismissive moniker housewife." She contends that the model of housewife-tur... Read More
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Another person who has analyzed something like this is Nina Eliasoph. She writes about what she calls "close to home" knowledge and "momism" exhibited by activist women that she observed for her dissertation/ book "Avoiding Politics."
I think it may be a little of both: on the one hand, we have these women (who might be ignored otherwise) subverting through the rhetoric commonly used against them; on the other, as Eliasoph shows, often the media and society force women into speaking this way. Activist women and men were portrayed (and quoted) differently by the media when Eliasoph was observing, even if they also said other things too.
There was a time when it was common for housewives to be involved in volunteer work, advocacy, and such. I think a part of the reason for that is simply that they had more time to devote to it because they did not have to work a 40-hour job. Now that so many couples find it necesssary to have both partners work outside the home, regardless of whether they both really want to, fewer people have the time and energy for activist work.
I think college students have become the new housewife, meaning that they are at the forefront of a lot of activism because they are the ones who have the time to do it.