Suburban Housewives Short Post 1/24/11

I completely agree with Michelle about how shocking the reading was about the housewife’s in the 50s and 60s described by Betty Frieden.  The statistics dealing with college attendance left me in awes.  Frieden reported by the mid-fifties 60% of women were dropping out of college to get married.  60 percent is a huge number of women.  The unfortunate truth was that in the previous century women had been fighting for higher education and had attained their goal.  Women were allowed to attend higher education institutes.  In the 1950s, the average marriage age for women dropped to twenty years old.  Women were giving up their childhood dreams for a new dream: motherhood.  During the 1950s and 1960s, an excessive amount of women dreamt and succeeded at being a housewife.  Frieden describes the suburban housewife as being healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children and her home.  This image was what young girls were modeling themselves after.  The suburban housewife was portrayed as the ideal career.  Frieden further discusses suburban housewives and the unspoken problem they all face.  The problem is the lack of self-fulfillment and daily routines of taking care of the house, the children and the husband.  Frieden says, “the only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own” (Frieden 280).  I believe this statement Frieden makes is accurate and holds up respectively.  The “emptiness” these housewives feel is the problem of being a housewife.  This whole passage was very interesting and led to me to ponder upon my aspirations career wise as well as family wise.  Similar I suppose to the housewives depicted by Frieden, raising my children is something I want to do with my husband as oppose to having outside help.  I think it is really important for kids to grow up with their parents as oppose to having two parents working full-time and full-time help.  However, I believe in this day and age my husband would not just assume me to the duties of staying at home.  It is more common for men to be seen taking care of the children during the day.  This link shows a good video of a stay at home Dad. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/23903260/ns/today-parenting/

I believe that housewives and stay at home Dad’s can be able to raise their children and have creative work that satisfies and fulfills and emptiness inside them.