The Metropolis

Retro Chick: the phenomenon of the 50s Housewife

Cila Warncke | Thursday 22 July, 2010 20:17

Reading the Daily Mail is a roller coaster ride: I know it’s going to make me queasy but the adrenaline kick is strangely addictive. Especially when it is dishing up atavistic propaganda like ‘The new feminist housewives: How the latest generation of graduates are choosing full time motherhood over high-flying careers’. Any DM use of the f-word—‘feminist’—is guaranteed to be richly entertaining and this article, penned by the bucolically-monikered Diane Appleyard (DM, 14 July 2010) is no exception.

As evidence that a “generation” of women is fleeing paid employment for the subtle joys of floral housedresses and cooing at toddlers, the Mail offers a handful of middle-class humanities graduates who collectively enjoy a very casual relationship with reality. “I could be earning a fortune” chirps stay-at-home mum Kate Wheatcroft—brave words for a history graduate in the current economic climate.

The article is, of course, really about economics. This seems to have escaped the attention of its pinny-wearing protagonists, whose fiscal analysis is limited to bragging about their wifely frugality.

“We have very little money,” says mum Ellen Fletcher. “We live on my husband’s salary… and there is nothing left over for any extras.”

What Ellen and the rest of them fail to see, is that living on their husband’s salary is a profoundly political act. Not in a ‘the personal is political’ sense, either. This is basic credit crunch economics and, frankly, the sort of thing a history graduate should pick up on.

Alas, Kate has been too busy procreating to take a hard look at why, in this particular place and moment in time, society is urgently dusting off anachronistic ideals of feminine behaviour and treating them to the tabloid hard sell. They are oblivious to the fact the Daily Mail feature is an explicit attempt to normalise female economic dependence and to reinforce to women that their primary social duty is to be good consumers.

The first hint is the use of the “latest generation” in the title, which deliberately evokes the Second World War-referencing “the greatest generation” appellation.

There is also direct reference made to being a “Fifties housewife”. Remember what happened in the aftermath of the Second World War? Soldiers came home to find women working happily and productively outside the home. This was a social nightmare. Work gave women autonomy and meant they were competing with men for scarce jobs, two heavy blows to fragile male egos. Something had to be done, and quick, so the media, government and corporations ganged up to invent the feminine mystique and sell women on dependence fantasies where they stayed at home doing the hoovering in high heels, and making cookies for little Jimmy and Suzie, while their men went out to bring home the bacon. The cult of maternal devotion was a tough sell though. Women who enjoyed jobs and freedom were mostly forced out of the workplace with the aid of overt employment discrimination.

Sixty years on and the economy is in crisis. Women are once again a significant threat to male social and economic hegemony. The difference is that it is now marginally more difficult to dismiss a female employee just for being a woman. So the media, led by the dutifully small-c conservative likes of the Daily Mail, has to work twice as hard to convince women that it’s in their best interest to be financially dependent, to stay at home and to function as consumers rather than producers. Appleyard makes this quite clear with the comment that Ellen, Kate, et al are living the “Cath Kidston dream”—that is to say, they are buying into a pre-packaged fantasy based on consumption and rearing more little consumers to feed the machine. Never has the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid” been more apropos.

cilwarncke.wordpress.com

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