A Long Tradition of Housewives’ Guilt

I came to realize that the Great American Housewife might be but a figment of our national imagination, a legend, even a ghost come to haunt us.

--Annagret Ogden in her book, “The Great American Housewife” (Greenwood Press, 1986)

Annagret Ogden tells a story about a generation of women who felt guilty because they were not providing for their families the way their more traditional mothers did. They felt that their homes were not as well kept. They had resorted to store-bought things instead of making the items their mothers had made for them. Not only did women of this period feel guilty, these wives and mothers felt that they were overburdened with work for which they received little respect.

Ogden was not talking about the guilts of the contemporary career woman/mother. She was, by way of exploding some myths, talking about the 19th-Century writer Harriet Beecher Stowe who, while passionately writing against slavery (and able to write because her sister came to run the house), glorified the housewife and worshipped her own mother who “did it all herself--even made her own oilcloth and linoleum.”

In fact, it was Stowe and her sister Catherine Beecher who helped promote the myth of the sainted housewife with Stowe’s book, “The American Woman’s Home,” and Beecher’s book, “A Treatise on Domestic Economy,” both works on how to be the skilled and perfect homemaker and lady wife.

Women at that time “already felt that they couldn’t live up to the 18th-Century Colonial standards (of housewifery),” Ogden said. “They were buying things in shops and feeling guilty. They looked with nostalgia to a time when women could do their own spinning the way today’s women look back to how their mothers always baked cookies.”

Ogden, a researcher at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, spent 10 years on her project to trace the history of the American homemaker for her book. Among her conclusions was that American women in their roles as homemakers and mothers have always labored under impossibly high standards, often based on glorification of the wives and mothers of previous generations and also on the ideal of the middle-class home that Americans idealize and aspire to.

The pioneer women who went West in the 19th Century have in particular been the subject of “a lot of myth-making,” Ogden said. The popular image of the revered pioneer woman who braved hardship and danger and stood side by side with her husband to bring civilization to the West was largely written by daughters “who reminisced about their mothers and grandmothers and glamorized the West,” Ogden said.

Ogden said in the introduction to her book that she had become fascinated by the subject when she went back to work full-time after staying at home while her children were young. While she was “still experiencing the shock” of going back to work, she wrote, a collection of 19th-Century American books on housekeeping landed on her desk at the Bancroft. “I leafed through the well-used pages and saw there, time and again, my own mother’s words: ‘Catch the dust before it falls.’ ” Ogden had thought that her “guilty domestic conscience” was the result of the lessons of her German immigrant mother, a devoted homemaker. She found, she said, the feeling of inadequacy on the home front was an old American tradition--and that the perfect devoted and appreciated homemaker existed in “our guilt-ridden imaginations.”

Ogden decided “to trace my roots as a housewife.” She found a dearth of material. Early housewives worked too hard to have much time for putting their thoughts and feelings on paper. Only recently, she said, when she was well into her project, has much research been done on homemakers. Much research on women and the first feminist research has focused on the lives of women who achieved outside the home.

“Our household standards were set in a time when work and home were separate,” she said. “The way the whole Western world has been structured is to separate the two, leave your family concerns at home.” When men were the majority of the workers, they could do this because they had someone at home, she pointed out. “More women are trying to be open. Why can’t they bring that (family concerns) into the workplace?” At Berkeley, she said, when she suggested a day-care center for university staff and faculty, women “didn’t want to bring it up. They said it ‘would look as if we can’t handle the problems.’

“Why is it that in these huge workplaces it has taken so long to get child care?” Ogden asks and answers, “because child care is thought not to have anything to do with the workplace.”

A part of the reason these attitudes don’t change is that men have not had to change as much as women. By working, “women have gained understanding of their husbands’ work, how tired a person is after an eight-hour day. But men still don’t understand what it takes to run a household.” Women should be much more adamant and forceful about getting their husbands and children to help in the house, Ogden said. “It’s because we feel guilty that women aren’t pushing for it more. We feel deep down, ‘This is my job.’ ”

Despite a trend toward more research on the value of parenting and homemaking and increasing attention on the part of the women’s movement toward homemaking as a legitimate choice for women, Ogden doesn’t think that the profession is gaining respect or prestige. “More and more our society gives respect to the wage-earner,” she said. “Men have always been judged by what they earned. Women are increasingly being judged the same way. Women who choose homemaking realize they are not getting the same kind of respect.”