They'll never go home again

Why do women work? Many people seem to believe that women work because they have to. The economy is lousy, so it takes two incomes for a family to survive.

Other people seem to believe women work because our values are all screwed up. Our lust for material goods has driven Mom out into the workplace at the expense of a peaceful, balanced family life.

No wonder working women are filled with angst. They’re constantly told they’re supposed to feel guilty (for shortchanging their kids) or angry (at husbands who shirk their half of the housework). Every time they pick up a magazine they find yet another confessional tale by someone who’s ditched her glamorous, high-powered career to go back home and bake cookies for her neglected kids.

Contrary to the prevailing mythology, the real reasons women work have very little to do with need or greed. They work because they want to, and because they can.

Nearly every woman who works knows what she gets out of it: independence, self-esteem, a sense of competence. She gets the chance to choose her own life (and her own man, or no man). This is true whether she's a vice-president or a data-entry clerk, a sales manager or a telemarketer. Women have known forever that a pay cheque – a job of one's own – is the most powerful instrument of liberation there is.

The other liberating force is technology. It is controversial to say so, but technological advances have all but abolished housework. Women aren't needed at home any more because the job of housewife has ceased to exist.

As proof, I submit the household of my grandmother, circa 1935.

Grandma (who also had a job as a nurse) ran a typical house in a typical American town. Unlike many country people, her family had electricity, running water and indoor plumbing. They also had a modern stove, fuelled by gas rather than coal or wood. Even so, the house got dirty fast (no air filters) and was hard to clean (no vacuum cleaners.)

Running a house was full-time hard labour. Housewives made all the meals from scratch (no frozen food: no freezers). Grandma baked her own bread and cakes and, during the summer, fed the family from the vegetable garden. She got her eggs from the neighbour, who kept chickens. She kept the meat and milk in the icebox, which was serviced by a man in a horsedrawn cart. The food stayed as cold as the melting lump of ice.

In September, the family ate leftovers while Grandma spent a whole week preserving her peaches, tomatoes and beans. Back then, putting up food for the winter was not a lifestyle option.

Monday was washday. Grandma used a wringer washer and a washboard. Other families boiled their whites in a big tub in the back yard. (No detergent, no bleach. People used soapflakes.) After she wrang out the clothes, Grandma hung them on the line to dry. Plenty of families ate baked beans on Monday because the washing took all day.

Tuesday was ironing day. (Non-crease fabrics hadn’t been invented.) Some houses had a mangle for the sheets, but Grandma did them by hand. She took special care with Grandpa’s shirts. (He liked a clean, crisp, starched shirt every day.) Housewives without electricity did the job with flat irons heated on the stove. Women who did not wash on Monday and iron on Tuesday were thought to have something wrong with them.

Home was a dangerous place then. Beans, if not canned properly, gave your family ptomaine poisoning. Women got their arms caught in wringers and mangles. My mom was scalded once when a jar of boiling tomatoes exploded.

Grandma was an expert seamstress. She made all my mother's clothes and many of her own. She turned her husband’s shirt collars when they were frayed, and darned the family socks.

My mother tasted her first Birdseye frozen peas when she was eight. About that time, my grandmother acquired a Sunbeam Mixmaster. It was the beginning of the technological revolution that would sweep away the drudgery of a housewife’s life forever.

Processed food, refrigerators, microwave ovens and wash-and-wear fabrics have altered our world as profoundly as the automobile or the microchip. Today, any family can manage home-maintenance chores in an hour or two a day, and the only time it makes sense for a parent to stay home is when the kids are young. (Technology is not likely to abolish the need for parents.)

There are entire industries devoted to maintaining the illusion that homemaking is still a full-time job. Martha Stewart (the only individual who still keeps chickens) has turned it into an extravagant fantasy of pseudo-creative expression. And idle housewives can take their pick of dozens of made-up arts and crafts, from wreathmaking to decoupage. But it’s all pretend. The housewife’s job as we've known it for hundreds of years is gone for good – and good riddance.

That’s the real reason why women have gone out to work, and why they'll never go home again.

Dirk Comble. For a Change. 2001