The (Un)happy Housewife Heroine

Abstract

When Cosmopolitan magazine announced in its June 2000 issue that young twenty-something women had become the new “housewife wannabes”, the relationship between domesticity and female/feminist emancipation seemed to have been turned on its head (Dutton). While for the last century women had fought to expose the oppression and subjugation inherent in their domestic subject positions and bring about a “click” moment,¹ now it appeared that they were eager to reembrace the title of “housewife” and rediscover the joys and crafts of a “new femininity”. Suddenly, “domesticity” became the buzzword of the new millennium, and housewives, fictional and real, were emerging in all areas, determined to regain entry into their doll’s house that, not 40 years ago, they seemed to have left for good.² From Nigella Lawson whipping up tasty treats on TV (and simultaneously managing to look infinitely glamorous) to Brenda Barnes famously giving up her job as president of Pepsi-Cola North America (and, with this, her $2 million annual salary) to spend more time with her three children,³ there was no denying that domesticity was experiencing a comeback, a twenty-first-century renaissance. Critics from all arenas were keen to comment on this cultural trend: while “new traditionalist” politicians and journalists were welcoming this reaffirmation of family values, feminist critics largely denounced this retro-boom as a backlash that returns women to the subordinate roles of a bygone, pre-feminist era (see Chapter 3).

Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present.

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Some of the ideas expressed in this chapter have appeared in Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture (2009).