A Middle-Class Wife

After World War II, the nation was blooming. Everything was growing, people were going to college, and wealth grew. The idea of the perfect American life was developed, this included a husband that worked and a wife that stayed home and took care of the house and children. To look at how women are affected by this perfect life I am analyzing “Governor Adlai Stevenson Tells College Women about Their Place in Life, 1955” and “Good Housekeeping: Every Executive Needs a Perfect Wife, 1956”.

In Judy Brady’s essay, “I Want a Wife,” she examines why she would like to have a wife. Brady believes that a wife performs all house chores and the husband does nothing, but to expect the wife to do everything for him. Brady tries to persuade the reader to look at a husband viewpoint of what a wife should be. The essay was written during the early 1960’s, during the second wave of the feminist movement in America. Brady is pushed by certain reasons to write, “I Want a Wife” to show the humanist humor.

In the 1970’s the average family had a wife that would take care of all of the cooking, the cleaning, everything concerning their kids, and even caring for her husband too. They did all of this without complaining, while their husband was at work. In those times nothing less was expected from them. In the article “Why I Want a Wife” Brady uses ethos, logos, and pathos to illustrate her opinion of what a wife do in a marriage, in which she infers that wives do too much for their families.

In this satirical article, Brady expresses the difference between the roles of women and men in the 1970’s by stating men’s point of view on women and women’s roles in society. Throughout her article, Brady emphasizes the roles of women. For example, women could now “work and...takes care of the children when they are sick”. Comparing the 1880’s to the 1970’s, there has been a big improvement. Many women had jobs outside their home, but still were responsible for most housework and childcare while their husband’s only responsibility in a marriage was to go to work and earn money to support the family. Society’s expectations allowed women to work outside the home to support college education for husbands; however,women had to know how to balance their time between their children and their jobs, making sure that their husbands “cannot miss classes at school.” During the 1970’s, women were still oppressed in many ways and had to follow society's expectations in order to live up to the men’s view of women’s roles in society. Even though society’s expectations of women had improved since The Awakening, most of women’s roles had stayed the same. In the article, Brady specifies how once a husband is “through with school and has a job, [he expects the] wife to quit working and remain at home so that [she] can more fully and completely take

In “I Want a Wife” by Judy Brady, the author argues that the roles of a wife are unfair and more demanding than a husband's, thereby they are treated as lesser than a man. Brady supports her claim by first, introducing herself as a wife, showing her empirical knowledge; secondly, cataloging the unreasonable expectations of a wife; finally ending the essay with an emotional and thought-provoking statement, “My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?” Brady’s purpose is to expose the inequality between the roles of a husband and of a wife in order to show that women do not belong to men and to persuade women to take action and stand up for themselves. Based on when this essay was written and since it is about the impossible expectations of a wife, Brady was writing to feminists in the 1960s in order to rally them to create a change in the way people thought.

Prior to describing what a man will expect from a wife, Judy Brady establishes her credibility within the first couple sentences of her essay. Brady states “I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother” (1). This quote is significant since Brady makes it clear in the beginning of her article that she has firsthand experience of being a wife and a mother. Her experience allows her to have a vast amount of knowledge on the

Subsequently, women inherently participated in this patriarchal society. A residual effect was women were often subjected to emotion, physical, and/or mental abuse. Morally, divorce was not an option as “a good wife acts not for herself only…and not for her own gratification.” Errington argues “publicly being a wife and sustaining the marriage was women’s work.” (52). Under these circumstances, how successful a women was in fulfilling her role as a wife would prepare her for arguably the most important role for women; being a

In the article "The Parent Trap" by Judith Warner, it can be seen that, although a women 's life should inevitably change when she becomes a mother, there are still some similarities to a mother nowadays and a mother from the 1950s. Mothers everywhere are changing their whole life around just for the simple reason of becoming a mother. Society should not force women to think that this way of living is acceptable, but unfortunately, society has forced us to believe that these lifestyles are acceptable to throw upon many mothers. These situations are causing mothers to drop their jobs and their dreams. It forces mothers to see life as something that it truly is not. This form of lifestyle is shaping mothers to become people that society sees as normal. Even if this style of life is not truthfully normal. Some of the things that are considered to be normal are the different tasks that women are expected to do every day.

In the reading, “From the Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home”, Hochschild explains her experience conducting a case study with a series of different women to get their perceptions of their lives as mothers, but also working women. Moreover, she provides good information to start her study. She reports that in 1950, 30 percent of American women were in the labor force, 28 percent of married women with children worked out of home. Today, those numbers have dramatically increased. During her findings, she saw that women felt a responsibility to be able to balance work and life at home, focused more on children, and expressing how overworked or tired they felt. Whereas men in this study expressed that women did most of the work around the house and childcare. In addition, what stood out to me in this reading was that some men felt pleased that their wives received more income than them. For instance, in an interview a man expressed, “was more pleased than threatened by her

This reading greatly ties into our discussion on the politics of housework between parents. During the early years of being married, some couples do not feel the burden of caring for a family because they chose not to have children at that point in time. As Alix Shulman describes in her passage, she and her husband were very content during that time, often shopping, cooking, and spending long walks together on the weekends in Central Park. They wouldn’t need to worry about cleaning too often because their apartment was modest and not too large for a family of two. She notes that during that period of their life, their domestic was beautifully uncomplicated. Suddenly down the road, a couple years later, the couple found themselves distressed when they had their son and daughter. Life became more complicated and at times, “impossible” according to Alix. The reason was that both Alix and her husband automatically accepted the traditional sex roles set in place by society. Alix left her job and became a stay-at-home mom, while her husband was working all day in the office. Alix was used to interacting with people during the day and having a life outside the office as well as the home, but now she was confined to the company of her children, who were preschoolers at the time. Alix was upset because she felt as though her husband’s life changed little when the children were born while her life became 1000x more complicated. She was working more than a 9-5 day job, and she didn’t get compensated for the work either. Preparing six meals a day for different people, spending several hours cleaning a mess that would remain unclean within the next couple hours, due to her children playing, and laundry that was originally done a couple times a month, now is due on a daily basis. Alix never got a break. She once enjoyed reading, but now she can’t even have a private mental life without the constant

The title “wife” was the inevitable fate that defined the female gender. It meant to be taken advantage of through household duties and sexual pleasures. It meant to be positioned where one’s own desires were insignificant. It meant to be erased and brushed away when a more alluring woman walked by. Unequivocally, Judy Brady mockingly berates both society’s impractical expectation of women, and their unappreciative partners.

When Brady classifies herself as “a wife and mother” she is automatically labeled with the responsibilities that were enforced by societal beliefs of that era (Brady 229). Women were considered inferior to men and struggled to gain equality. Husband's required too much of their wives as to their physical needs; “I want a wife to keep my house clean.” Their social needs, “When I meet people at school that I like and want to entertain, I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal, serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt when I talk about things that interest me and my friends.” In addition, their sexual needs, “I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied.” (Brady 229-230). Women did all these things everyday to please their husbands, although they received no fringe benefit in return. The cultural values that were viewed at this time emphasized the discrimination and equality that Brady desperately wants her audience to

In the essays “I Want A Wife” and “Not All Men Are Sly Foxes,” both Brott and Brady talk about the fact that women are usually seen as the main caregivers at home. Brady focuses primarily on the fact that women do most of the work in the home. By being a wife, she must tend to the children, take care of her husband, entertain the guests, cook, clean, shop, prepare the meals, work, and many other tasks, all while her husband goes to school and relaxes. In Brotts essay, he refers to the fact that men do not get enough acknowledgement in a child’s life. He shows much frustration with the fact that many different books back up his theory.

The true feminine, in contrast, was putting the husband and the family first. All a woman needed to do was cleaning the house, preparing foods, taking care of kids, and loving her husband. It seemed like being charming housewives was everything that a woman can ever dreamed of. However, countless women experienced emptiness and incompleteness, or “the housewife’s syndrome,” during the time. The absence of sense of

In the etiquette manual, Woman in Her Social and Domestic Character, by Elizabeth Poole Sanford, women were suppose to draw their happiness from their duties of being a housewife, (Sanford, Woman in Her Social and Domestic Character, page 708), “Domestic life is the chief source if her influence; and the greatest debt society can owe to her is domestic comfort; for happiness is almost an element of virtue; and nothing conduces more to improve the character of men than domestic peace.” Women were expected to be happy with staying at home and creating a pleasant environment for their husbands to come home to and to be happy taking care of their children. The roles women were expected to perform and where women found their happiness were interconnected. Women were expected to nurture the