Yea, well, if you put up some wallpaper in the bathroom in 2005 and canned some pickles last summer, all I can say is that the wallpaper job was a $200 project that some man would have done in three hours and pickles are a dollar a jar at Krogers.
It isn’t at all about the money. But anyone who has lived in the suburbs knows that the average housewife these days is anything but productively engaged.
OK, there are still some pioneer women out in the country somewhere doing the 19th Century life. But, if you produce more than you eat, you have a job. You’re a farmer not a housewife. If you produce less than you eat, you are a piddler and need to just go to the grocery.
Taking care of young children is a full-time job. There's a reason that when a successful woman goes to work and has to hire a nanny to actually take care of her kids, she has to pay that nanny plenty--and the nanny will earn her money. If she has to hire someone to cook two or three meals a day, clean, do laundry, and run errands, she'll pay for a second person to do that. And she'll pay another to do the yardwork. These are the jobs that one housewife will do in the course of the average week. And trust me, the nanny, housekeeper, and yard man are not going to be wiping up kids' vomit at 3 a.m, spending hours with the pediatrician, making Halloween costumes, going to PTA meetings, volunteering in the church or classroom, or teaching their children to read.
Sure, there are some lazy housewives. They'd be lazy in the workplace, too. That's not the job, it's the individual.
Try being a housewife and mommy for young kids for a few months. If you do the job properly, you will find it's rewarding, but also tiring, and it's certainly more than forty hours a week.