Hwife and mother – this job title sounds old-fashioned, a little stuffy, outdated. Anyone who is satisfied with this as a woman is opposed to what appears to be a loss of reputation across society and has to reckon with pressure to justify it. An antiquated understanding of the role of marriage is assumed, the man as the breadwinner, the woman as the housewife at the stove – anyone who “just” wants to be a housewife probably longs back to the 1950s. Modern concepts associated with work – self-realization, meaning, equality and so on – seem to be absent from the home. Anyone who does it anyway, for example because they feel overwhelmed with raising children or caring for relatives, can apparently not do it voluntarily. This applies to both sexes: If a man leaves the world of work, this role change can at best be legitimized temporarily, for example as a father on parental leave. But as a house husband permanently withdrawn from the world of work, this model of male self-optimization still bears traits of caricature to this day. Society considers criticism of the double burden, especially of women as mothers and working people, to be legitimate, but only allows one solution: somehow it has to be made compatible, even if it is clearly at the expense of women.
The housewife is financially dependent on her husband.
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Bild: picture-alliance
There are also astonishing research gaps in sociology: for a long time, the social standing of housewives based on a quantitative survey in Germany had not been recorded. Katrin Stache, Christian Ebner and Daniela Rohrbach-Schmidt are now asking whether this reputation is actually the same across the population. Should age, level of education, gender and marital status really have no effect on the appreciation or disdain of the role of housewife? The data for this is now available from a survey by the Federal Institute for Vocational Training (BIBB) from 2018. The most striking finding of the study: the reputation of housewives varies with age. But not as expected: the fact that older birth cohorts – here those born in the 1950s – assess the role of the housewife more positively than the younger ones could be explained by more conservative characteristics in their own family of origin and the zeitgeist of the time. However, the study shows that the prestige of the housewife shows an almost U-shaped curve depending on the age of the respondents. Respect peaks among the oldest respondents, then falls to its lowest level among those in their 40s and 50s, and then rises again. Those born after 2000 even had almost identical values to those born before 1950. That is indeed surprising.
The reputation of the housewife decreases with the level of education
On the other hand, it is not surprising that the reputation of the housewife decreases as the level of education increases. Housewives have little sympathy for those who practice a highly qualified profession or at least could practice according to their training. It may come as a surprise to some that women judge the role of housewife much worse than men. Maybe because women are more aware of how little society appreciates this activity? Among men, it is the low-skilled and the unemployed who value the role of housewife the most. According to the authors, they perceive housewives as less of a threat to their already precarious access to the male-dominated world of work. This can be understood from the perspective of traditional role expectations, but why should younger people, regardless of gender, tend to value the role of housewife more than, say, their own parents?
The “tendency to reassess the housewife prestige” of twenty-year-olds could simply be due to the fact that they have not yet experienced the challenges of “reconciling work and family” firsthand. So it could be naivety that will dissolve in favor of a more realistic insight into the incompatibility of these two value spheres at the latest when entering the rough world of gainful employment. Or, and that would actually be a much more interesting explanation, it is an expression of experiences from one’s own childhood. Anyone in their early twenties today probably has parents who both worked during their childhood. So one could concede to these young people that they know what it means for a child when the mother also works. Or if she – or her dad – just wasn’t working. Could the greater appreciation of the role of housewife even be based on the desire not to do things like your parents did?