Traditional Wives verses Stay at Home Wives

Times have changed significantly from the 70’s when I was a child. My mother was a stay at home wife for the first 10 years of my life. She cooked, cleaned, and made sure my brother and I were off to school daily. Although she didn’t have an outside job, she as well as many women believed a stay at home mom was a full time job.

I remember my father handing my mother money regularly to put toward the utility bills while she would scrub the kitchen floor. By the end of the day, my mom was usually too tired to cater to my father because of the attention she gave to her home duties during the day. At the end of the day, my father didn’t understand why my mom didn’t have energy to fulfill his needs.

Many traditional women faced those same challenges of balancing the care of their children and household obligations while successfully satisfying their working husbands. “They took pride in a clean, comfortable home and satisfaction in serving a good meal because no one had explained to them that the only work worth doing is that for which you get paid”. (Hekker 277.)

More traditional marriages survived longer than today’s modern marriages; however, the traditional marriages that ended years later left many housewives feeling discarded. These wives who were used to staying at home with no careers were left trying to figure out survival while their husbands moved on to younger, beautiful career oriented women. The women they started to become attracted too were women with less stress who could devote more attention to them at the end of the day.

“Like most wives of our generation, we’d contemplated eventual widowhood but never thought we’d end up divorced” (Hekker 278). Traditional wives married for love and to follow th...

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...r the better in marriages.

I agree 100% with the author’s and enjoyed reading how one was able to rebound from a broken marriage that she relied on financially and one who was able to convince her husband to compromise and make the marriage work with equal parenting. I plan to incorporate these facts and opinions into my own relationship.

Works Cited

Edelman, Hope “The Myth of Co-Parenting” Writing and Reading across the Curriculum.

Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen, Boston: Pearson 2011. 283-290

Hekker, Terry Martin (The Satisfaction of Housewiferey and Motherhood/Paradise Lost)

Writing and Reading across the Curriculum. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen, Boston: Pearson 2011. 274-279

Tannen, Deborah “Understanding Mom” Writing and Reading across the Curriculum.

Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen, Boston: Pearson 2011. 281-282