‘Just a Housewife’ : Far From ‘Downplaying the Housewife Bit,’ Author Glenna Matthews Explores the Injustice of the ‘Just’ in the History of Homemakers

Before she was 19, Laguna Beach High School graduate Glenna Matthews had already earned the two titles typical young women of the 1950s valued above all others: Mrs. and Mom.

Still, she wasn’t quite satisfied. However inexplicable it may have been to her friends and to the academic world, she was determined to add something else to her name: a Ph.D.

Not that she didn’t enjoy her role as a housewife. “I loved what I was doing raising my children,” she says. “I thought of it as socially valuable work.”

And whenever anyone referred to her as “just a housewife,” she took offense, for herself and all the other housewives she knew and respected.

Meanwhile, she kept up her studies by correspondence as she followed her Air Force husband from base to base, waiting until her son and daughter started school before she returned to the classroom herself.

In the mid-’70s, when Matthews, then working on a doctorate in American history, complained that her professors and fellow students weren’t taking her as seriously as she’d hoped, a friend offered her some advice. “She said, ‘For God’s sake, downplay the housewife bit. Distance yourself from that identity as much as possible.’ Well, that struck me as obnoxious then and it still does. I had had all these valuable experiences. I thought my fellow housewives were so dedicated and admirable. And I was being asked to repudiate all that identity? It really rankled.”

It was no coincidence, then, that years later when Glenna Matthews, Ph.D., sat through a dinner party listening to her friends from academia argue over whether women’s contribution to American culture had been negative or positive, she decided to speak up with the combined authority of a veteran housewife and a trained historian.

The result, published last fall by Oxford University Press, is “Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America.”

The book, a feminist study of the history of housewifery, is something neither side of the women’s movement could have anticipated just a few years ago, when feminists and housewives largely turned their backs on one another.

For Matthews, now back in her native Orange County as a visiting history professor at UC Irvine, the project was an attempt to heal not only that rift but her own. “I’d had almost these two distinct lives,” she says. “I think in a sense it was not only that I wanted to write for women who’d had similar experiences, but it was a kind of act of resolution of those disparate strands of my own life, a way to bring them together.”

Instead of downplaying “the housewife bit,” Matthews steeped herself in it. She visited 200-year-old kitchens with hearths so enormous she could stand in them and imagine herself a Colonial wife tending a one-pot supper over an open fire. She got special permission to handle household utensils from bygone days stored in a back room at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, lifting old soup ladles and heavy iron skillets to gain a perspective on the early American housewife that words alone couldn’t give her.

She found accounts of women on the Overland Trail who baked pies on hot rocks along the way, “in order to maintain a sense of home. That’s my idea of heroism,” she says.

She sorted through old recipe books, household hint booklets and advertising, and perused “potboiler” novels of the 1850s. She reread the works of classic American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sinclair Lewis, all the while noting references to housewives and domesticity.

Matthews herself was somewhat surprised at the lost history she uncovered. She discovered that the designation “housewife” didn’t always include the apologetic qualifier, “just a . . . “

On the contrary, Matthews found, during the American revolution, housewives played an active political role, boycotting British goods and rearranging their own households as a result. After the war, the “Republican Mother” was respected as the educator of the young citizens upon whom the future of the fledgling nation would depend.

Even in her cooking, the early American housewife was revolutionary, favoring native ingredients and patriotically baking such dishes as “Independence Cake,” for which Matthews discovered a recipe in a cookbook from 1800.

Guided by the writings of political philosophers such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, American men and women both placed an increasingly higher value on the role of nurturer. Authoritarian parenting was replaced by a more affectionate, flexible approach, and marriage became more compassionate and egalitarian, according to Matthews, even though women had few rights under the law.

By the mid-1800s, what Matthews calls the “Golden Age of Domesticity” was in full flower, with the housewife revered as the central figure and moral arbiter of society. “In 1850 a housewife knew she was essential not only to her family but also to her society,” Matthews states in “Just a Housewife.”

She sees it as no coincidence that Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” inflamed the nation against slavery, was a housewife.

“Her powerful emotions in themselves would have been insufficient for this transformation had it not been for the status of domesticity at the time she began to write,” Matthews contends.

“The home was in its glory days as an institution then,” she says, “not just as a place for a family, but a place where escaping slaves were welcome.”

Later, housewives took the cause of the home into the streets, marching and speaking out for prohibition and women’s suffrage.

But by the late 19th Century, the backlash had begun. “If Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and their kindred chafed so memorably against the tyranny of the domestic ideal in the world of fiction, they must surely have influenced their counterparts in the real world--who were probably already feeling resentment about the same thing,” Matthews says in the book.

That resentment was only one of a diverse assortment of factors--from Darwinism to baking powder to new appliances--that eroded the status of the housewife as the 19th Century ended, Matthews says. The Industrial Revolution changed the nature of the home itself. Housewives who once had been producers of goods, manufacturing not only their own clothes but their own cloth, were reduced to mere consumers, a position with considerably less respect.

In his “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin not only put forth his theory of evolution but his belief that women had evolved with inherently lower intellectual capacities than had men.

(Matthews quotes Darwin from his journal as he ponders whether or not to marry, describing a wife as an “object to be beloved and played with--better than a dog anyhow. . . .”)

Baking powder, along with other chemical agents used in cooking, reduced the amount of skill needed in the kitchen. As cakes rose more easily, the status of the women who baked them was slowly falling, according to Matthews.

In the early 20th Century, the home economics movement formalized the trend that had already begun. The housewife, once respected as an authority in all household matters, was abruptly advised that she would have to be taught how to properly perform her duties. The home economics experts doing the teaching, Matthews says, were attempting to “establish a beachhead for women in science,” without realizing the adverse effects they had on the status of the housewife.

“If one could accurately pinpoint the exact time when the phrase ‘just a housewife’ made its first appearance, it seems likely that (the 1920s) might have been the time,” Matthews states in the book. “Certainly the likelihood that domesticity could be a fully adequate prop for female self-esteem had greatly diminished by 1930. The consumer culture, along with the hedonism it spawned, sounded the death knell both for housewifery as a skilled craft and for mother as a moral arbiter.”

During the 1940s, housewives were seen by some as worse than worthless. “Are American Moms a Menace?” asked one 1945 Ladies’ Home Journal article Matthews found. “The author . . . pointed out that ‘among abject failures we find a high proportion of mother’s sons’--like Adolf Hitler.”

Although 6 million American housewives joined the paid labor force during World War II, Matthews claims that effort earned them little respect. “Despite the pious proclamations that our boys were fighting to protect the American home, the American home was not deemed worthy of any genuine investment of societal resources. Both the scarcity of supplies for domestic purposes and the paucity of services for Rosie the Riveter conveyed this message,” she writes. “Given this, the woman who was ‘just a housewife’ could hardly have escaped wondering whether her contribution to her society was appreciated.”

By the time Matthews herself took on the role in the late 1950s, the job had been effectively de-skilled. The housewife was reduced to using cake mixes and canned soup and chauffeuring children from piano lessons to Little League games. Dr. Spock, not Mom, was the authority on raising children. And what Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” called “the problem that has no name” was widespread, according to Matthews.

“In no other country in the world was there such a contradiction between woman’s nominal freedom to do anything and the actual contempt for female capabilities, especially those manifested in the housewife, as in the United States in 1963,” Matthews writes.

Friedan’s book, published in 1963, helped give birth to the women’s movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, a movement that in many ways bypassed the housewife and her “problem that has no name.”

”. . . Modern feminism might be said to have been born out of the repudiation of women’s traditional roles and not out of the desire both to glorify and to expand those roles as in the 19th Century,” Matthews states.

Matthews isn’t suggesting for a moment that we return to the days when housewives had to make their own soap before they could do the wash, even if that’s when the role was most appreciated. But like any historian, she believes we have to learn from the past in order to make a better future.

“I don’t think we can come up with intelligent social policy if we don’t understand what we’re asking for,” Matthews says. “Feminists have been so removed from this history. In the early days, how could we ask for social policy regarding the domestic environment when all we could think of was getting out?”

But feminists must pay attention to both the housewife and the home, Matthews insists in the book. “It is too valuable an institution to leave to Phyllis Schlafly and others who take a negative view of feminism.” In conversation, she takes it a step further. “The right is pro-home in the same way Ronald Reagan is a religious man. It’s just lip service, no substance. It just makes my blood boil that these people have claimed the issue as their own.” So far, Matthews says, “Just a Housewife” has received no reaction from the right.

“The home truly does have important social functions that have been undervalued for several generations. Children need not only to be nurtured but also to be trained to be caring and socially responsible adults. Adults of both sexes need to receive emotional refreshment--as well as give it--in order to be effective as citizens and workers,” Matthews writes.

“Every worker in America is also a member of a household,” Matthews says. “But there is precious little in the workplace that goes on that facilitates that responsibility. Careers are designed for men with wives. The peak demands on a person’s career are also the peak of the reproductive cycle. It’s an agonizing problem for both men and women.

“Even if you’re lucky and have someone to share your life with, the institutions have to change.”

And the role of the housewife, Matthews says, is one institution that may have to go, even as its component duties become more respected once again.

“In the utopian future of which I dream,” she says, “all adults would perform a fair share of the work involved in maintaining the domestic environment.”