Couch and bon-bons
Feb. 17th, 2006 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyI first encountered the image of the pampered, lazy housewife, chatting mindlessly on the phone while she lies on the sofa eating candy, in soc.men. Big surprise there. Really, that must be the first time I noticed the image. I just came across it again, in Will Worthington's 1959 post-apocalyptic short story Plenitude:
"Sue waves from the door. She has worked like a squaw [sic] since dawn, and she smiles and waves. I can remember when women would exhaust themselves talking over the phone and eating bon-bons all day and then fear to smile when their beat husbands came home from their respective nothing-foundries lest they crack the layers of phony 'youthful glow' on their faces. Not like Sue. Here is Sue with smudges of charcoal on her face and fish-scales on her leather pants. Her scent is of woodsmoke and of sweat... There was a time when the odor of perspiration would have been more of a social disaster for a woman than the gummata of tertiary pox."
This contains valuable historical information. In 1959, all women were surburban middle class. There were no women gutting chickens, cleaning toilets, tending bar, or otherwise making themselves odorous with honest labour.
All right, let's be fair: the story is a satire of suburbia, so when he says "women" he means "middle class homemakers". So the actual , in 1959, housewives did no work. They did not clean, shop, sew, nor cook; they did not tend the young, elderly, or sick. They certainly didn't discuss any of these tasks with other housewives. (Sue carries on a "lively conversation" with a non-English speaking neighbour: "Someday I will listen to them, but I doubt that I will ever learn how they communicate... or what. Women.".) If one reads between the lines, these women were too lazy even to put out for their husbands. All told, this would have drained the US economy of billions of dollars' worth of effort. In fact, without sex or food, it's remarkable that society managed to survive until today.
Now there have always been layabout wives and husbands, but it seems that in those days at least some men really believed that stay-at-home wives did no work at all, and they despised and envied them - and at least some men still do. I wonder where the precise couch-phone-and-bon-bons image originated? (My guess is it was cartoonists' shorthand.)
"Sue waves from the door. She has worked like a squaw [sic] since dawn, and she smiles and waves. I can remember when women would exhaust themselves talking over the phone and eating bon-bons all day and then fear to smile when their beat husbands came home from their respective nothing-foundries lest they crack the layers of phony 'youthful glow' on their faces. Not like Sue. Here is Sue with smudges of charcoal on her face and fish-scales on her leather pants. Her scent is of woodsmoke and of sweat... There was a time when the odor of perspiration would have been more of a social disaster for a woman than the gummata of tertiary pox."
This contains valuable historical information. In 1959, all women were surburban middle class. There were no women gutting chickens, cleaning toilets, tending bar, or otherwise making themselves odorous with honest labour.
All right, let's be fair: the story is a satire of suburbia, so when he says "women" he means "middle class homemakers". So the actual , in 1959, housewives did no work. They did not clean, shop, sew, nor cook; they did not tend the young, elderly, or sick. They certainly didn't discuss any of these tasks with other housewives. (Sue carries on a "lively conversation" with a non-English speaking neighbour: "Someday I will listen to them, but I doubt that I will ever learn how they communicate... or what. Women.".) If one reads between the lines, these women were too lazy even to put out for their husbands. All told, this would have drained the US economy of billions of dollars' worth of effort. In fact, without sex or food, it's remarkable that society managed to survive until today.
Now there have always been layabout wives and husbands, but it seems that in those days at least some men really believed that stay-at-home wives did no work at all, and they despised and envied them - and at least some men still do. I wonder where the precise couch-phone-and-bon-bons image originated? (My guess is it was cartoonists' shorthand.)
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Date: 2006-02-17 01:16 pm (UTC)By "women" the author - or the narrator - presumably means "women in my experience", which - if he was a middle-class suburbanite - was likely middle-class suburbanite women. The subject of the satire, as you say. Rather than the women in employment, the carers, and those for whom managing a household was not a hobby.
The attitude of middle-class surbanite men is, I think, in large part due to (1) a lack of real communication between men and women and a lack of interest in same and (2) envy for what is perceived as a better deal. Probably on both sides - women envying men the respect and choice they attain by working, and men envying women their role as homemaker - or, as some evidently saw it and some perhaps still do - home-occupier, slothing about until hubby gets home. There were no doubt some women who actually fit that caricature, as there are no doubt some men today who still believe the caricature to be reality.