American Mind:
The liberal caricature of the miserable housewife has created more misery than it cured.
Ask any young lady today what her idea of the “traditional” American woman is, and she will bring up, twisting her face in disdain, the mid-century suburban housewife.
It’s hard to say whether the woman in our heads was ever even real, let alone representative of some majority. Influentially documented (or perhaps, drawn up) by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, the American housewife has become a stock character for Hollywood myth-makers: isolated, vain, bored; drowning her resentment of her 2.5 kids and their cheating Don Draper of a father in wine and pills. Whatever the reality, this meme overpowered it.
Every meme doubles as a consumer identity and triples as an easily digestible political motif. The “repressed housewife” became a Girardian scapegoat around which the new liberal feminist order coalesced. By the ’70s, more than half of American women were working alongside men outside of the home. The “housewife” was as passée as the dresses she would have worn, the threat she posed now far more imaginary than real. But still, she was routinely resurrected on television and in movies, the ambivalent icon of women’s history in America for decades to follow—the superficial image of what not to be, of a regressive past always threatening to re-impose itself. She was to be relentlessly guarded against, her image in our world and in our own hearts stamped out, replaced instead by the sexually and economically “liberated” girl-boss feminist. more
It’s too easy to blame the advent of feminism, the blurring of gender roles, the militancy of gynocentrism, or the sledgehammer culture uses to bludgeon the male patriarcy. But I put the lion’s share of the blame on the self-loathing of “maleness”. This involves a thorough abdication of all those character traits which defined being a real man; honor, responsibility, duty, dedication to one’s profession, honesty, and understanding of the need within the nuclear family to be a strong role model, not only to provide and protect but to be the anchor in time of turbulence and chaos.
Men became lazy and complacent, and the radical men-hating gender ambiguous feminists filled the void.
I’ve been married 33 years and exclusively homemaker for 30+. Wouldn’t change it for anything. We have always had everything we need and lived below our means. Zero money towards daycare, did homemade haircuts, 2nd hand clothes, home cooked meals, used cars. Had some strong Mom’s groups for companionship and play dates. Raised 3 kids whom are well-adjusted, productive citizens and good people. My poor husband is still grinding away at high stress work while I barely have to housekeep in our empty nest and host our sweet grandbaby a couple days a week. God bless the good man!
Satan’s plan in action. Destroy everything good and instill chaos. All accomplished through deception.
I was a child of the 60’s, and remember the pressure to become a “working woman”.
One of the positive aspects of moving to Canada was the fact that I was not a citizen of the country and did not speak French.
This pretty much eliminated the types of jobs I was qualified for.
I was also wise/lucky enough to marry a man who wanted me to stay home and raise our children.
We struggled for years with less money than some of our peers, but I wouldn’t change a bit of the time I had with him and with our children doing all kinds of free activities with any of my contemporaries.
My children had the idyllic childhood of the 50’s that I had, and are productive happy adults.
From the Communist Manifesto:
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by
their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace
home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social
conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or
indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not
invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to
alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the
influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the
hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more
disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties
among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed
into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams
the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears
that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and,
naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common
to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away
with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
I’ve been widowed 25yrs..not a day passes, that I don’t think of my wife.
She nor I were perfect, but we were perfect for each other.
I am currently reading Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, as part of a church men’s retreat. Like a lot of books it is ‘stuff you already know’, but is a real eye-opener as to how I am currently living my life vs. how I should be. A lot of people need their eyes opened, or re-opened.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400225264
Amen Bongo, I too have been a widower for nearly 10 years, and I still miss her a lot. And neither of us was perfect either but we were also made for each other, funny how that works. Today Sept. 10 would’ve been her 66th birthday. And tomorrow would’ve been our 45th anniversary. I wish that she would’ve lived long enough to have met her 4 granddaughters and one grandson. She would’ve made a great and fun grandmother.
Destroy the family, destroy society.
Well, feminism did get rid of pay toilets. So there’s that.
so women are gullible. what else is new?