Saturday 8 March 2014

The Gender Neutral Housewife



I came across this photo on the Humans of New York facebook page (which is a page I highly recommend liking).  In the caption it says "He loves to cook and clean. He's a great housewife."  While I’m sure she was teasing him, I also like to take it as a serious statement.  Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where ‘housewife’ is a gender neutral term?

Being good at cooking and cleaning doesn’t have to be feminine of course.  Nor do any of the other tasks that fall under the responsibility of the housewife role.  If you look at the rather extensive list of tasks that a housewife does on wikipedia, there is nothing that couldn’t be done just as easily by a person of any gender.  Yes, some people have a natural proclivity for housewife tasks but that tendency has nothing to do with your gender.  Personally I am a female and I believe I would make a terrible housewife and I know many men who far exceed me in this area.  I also imagine a lot of men would quite like to be housewives if they felt it was an option.

The more technically correct gender neutral term is ‘homemaker’ but I kind of like the idea of taking the gender out of the words instead of changing the words to be free of gender.  Maybe we can even change the meaning of the base word ‘wife’ in the long run to truly describe a role rather than a gender.  Changing the meaning of words seems to me to be a much more effective way of taking away their power than trying to stop their use, although I admit it’s a long and hard road to do so.

This also makes me wonder what other roles and words we should be pushing to make gender neutral...

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