I shudder with outrage when I see the shit some radfems say about housewives, or what MRA's say about stay-at-home dad's.
We lived in a fairly big, nice house when I was a kid. My dad inherited half, and bought out my uncle's share of it, or we'd never have been able to afford such a nice place. My mom graduated from Duke with a degree in sociology, minor in education. She taught 1st and 2nd grade, then had my two brothers and stayed home with them until they were preschool age, then went back to teaching for 6 years, had me, then we moved into my late grandma's big house when I was 4.
There was no way she and my dad could keep that house decent as a team if they both worked, which is what they'd done up until then. The nostalgia stereotype of 1950's-1960's dad's being unwilling to help do housework is bullshit from Hollywood, BTW, unless they we're at least upper middle class and had a part time house keeper come in. I remember Mom got up at 6, started breakfast, got my bros off to school, and did housework and etc. all fucking day long, the only breaks she took were to sit down and eat the meals she cooked. She coached us all with any homework problems, Dad would get home two hours or more late half the time, because he worked OT to make up for Mom's lost teacher salary. She'd go reheat his dinner while he showered. She then did the bill paying and household book keeping, tax prep, setting appointments, etc. in the evenings. By the time Dad got home on Fridays, he took over the house work after sleeping in late Saturday morning. He would do the heavy duty stuff like stripping the wax off the kitchen floor and re-waxing it, cleaning the oven, bleaching the big metal garbage cans out back, washing the dog, etc. They both had all us kids do chores in the meanwhile, mostly the yard and garden work and window cleaning. We never went to church but for Easter or Xmas - Sunday we did stuff as a family for fun.
Once I was in grade school, Mom got back into tennis, which she played at Duke on their tennis team, taking lessons to sharpen her skills, then she became a tennis coach at the public park courts 2 blocks away. That income meant Dad could ease off a bit, and they could afford to hire a professional house keeper to come once a week, and Mom would work right along with the house keeper, and they'd bust out all the heavy duty chores together. That was a major milestone for them. They finally got to have their evenings free most of the time. It took them 15 years to attain that.
