Housewife and homemaker are interchangable terms for a woman who manages her household intentionally, like it's her job - because it is.
Homemaking is a noble, God-given task. We can agree with proposition intellectually, but then when the daily work of it starts adding up, we falter. The work often feels both mundane and monumental - at the same time. Then we lose sight of not only the meaning but even our own purpose.
The homemaker is a maker of homes, but respect for the position was about to plummet even as the term was introduced. The first recorded use of the word homemaker is in 1867.
In the 1900s, the feminists actually made it the preferred replacement term for housewife, because it was less gendered. They claimed it was also more respectful.
Fast forward to the 1990s and even homemaker was deemed disrespectful and phrases like "domestic engineer" began to be used - hopefully tongue-in-cheek.
Many now are claiming the title homemaker with pride, acknowledging the value and effort of building a God-honoring home and family. Should we go all the way? Should we also reclaim the word housewife?
Being a wife first
Why was there no word for homemaker before the modern period?
Because there was already the word wife. These days we think of marriage as primarily about the interpersonal relationship of a man and a wife. It's about romantic feelings and choosing to spend a lifetime together as best friends.
Whether or not there were romantic feelings, for most of human history the marriage contract has been a business arrangement. In our current rom-com world, that strikes us as cold, but losing that sense of economic partnership is one way marriage has been weakened.
Marriage creates a new household, a joint venture in the world. Now, we just see a house as a shelter for individuals who happen to live there, and we scramble to use decorating tactics to make it feel like a home.
As homes are thought of as merely a place to relax after each individual returns from doing their "real work" out on the world - parents at a job and kids at school and sports - homemaker has been weakened to refer to women who spend their time decorating and doing domesticky arts and crafts.
Before the industrial revolution, however, the home was itself an economic powerhouse. It wasn't just the place people eat (sometimes) and sleep. It was where the real work was done, and thus marriage was a working partnership and not just a comforting relationship to come home to.
To be a man's wife, then, was truly a helpmeet position. Whatever kind of help her husband needed in his economic pursuits, she was there as his partner. She managed the household, which was much more managerial and logistical than it is now that we have outsourced so much of our production.
The house was much more significant, not only the family, but also to the community, culture, and economy. Therefore, to be a housewife was to have a legitimate, respectable position in the world.
Housewife is not a profession
When I was researching the history of the words housewife and homemaker, I read this assessment: "The term 'homemaker' is at risk of disappearing from popular discourse. American society no longer considers homemaking to be a profession."
Oh, well, if it's not a profession, that's what makes it not respectable, right?
This hints that even the term homemaker was taken up to make it sound more like a profession, to give the housewife legitimacy that a post-industrial economy had stripped away. Today, to be a full-time homemaker or a housewife is to eschew the office job and paycheck, which is where most moderns take their identity and receive their validation.
To use the name housewife instead hints at where we should look for our validation: the productivity of our house and the satisfaction of our husbands.
Jobs come not only with paychecks but with external affirmation of a job well done. Schools give the same through grades and prizes. Landing at home, by herself, after twenty-some years of living a grades-and-paycheck lifestyle, it's no wonder the housewife feels lost and adrift.
So she goes hunting for the checklist, the system, that will give her the validation she's accustomed to. She looks to Pinterest, Instagram, and her friends to figure out if she's doing ok or not.
To figure out if she's making a home, to figure out how to make a home, she looks for pictures of homes and tries to make those happen in her life.
What if, instead, she took on the role of housewife and asked her husband what matters to him. Instead of taking cues from the advertisers on the internet and the unreality of social media, she could set out to make her home a place her husband is pleased by.
She might start off thinking that the proper chore chart, consistently executed will make her husband happy. What she will find, however, as she embraces her role as wife, is that her husband is happy when she is happy in her house.
She works for him, but receives joy back double - she works with joy, her joy is contagious to her husband, then she receives the validation and affirmation of the one person on earth whose opinion matters most to her.
This is the pattern we should expect in a healthy marriage: we start off doing something to make someone else happy, but wind up being surprisingly blessed in it ourselves. After all, marriage is a picture of Christ and His bride. The bride of Christ obeys, but in her obedience she thrives such that it doesn't look anything at all like the world's slanderous definition of obedience.
Thus, our marriages and our productive homes are testimonies to the world of gospel reality.
The mission of a full-time housewife
We can't (and shouldn't) roll back the clock and try to relive a past era. Instead, we should learn from the past, appreciate where we are, and move forward with purpose.
It is wonderful that few families now - as opposed to most in the past - are subsistence farming. We should be grateful for the overall luxury we enjoy because of modern industrialization and economies of scale. However, benefits don't come without costs.
Progress comes by iteration: taking where we are at, assessing how it's going, and taking the next step appropriately.
We don't have to be subsistence homesteaders in order to reclaim the productive Christian household or economic contribution as a housewives.
When we steward the household resources so as to stretch them and turn a profit on them, we are fulfilling our role.
When our homes are full of thriving people, we are fulfilling our role.
When our husbands are proud of their households, we are operating as good housewives.
Our standard doesn't come from Martha Stewart or HGTV or Instagram reels. Our standard isn't our imagined ideal or our fear of being judged. Our standard is God's Word.
God's Word tells us that a wife should seek to bring up children, manage her household, show hospitality, serve fellow believers, care for the afflicted, and devote herself to good work (1 Tim 5:9-14). Titus 2 tells us women should be learning to be self-controlled, pure, workers at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands.
Yes, there is room for women to do more than what is included on these lists - we see the Proverbs 31 woman has many endeavors both in and out of her home. However, we should not seek to do less. We also should seek to start with the clear and obvious as our base.
The opposite of the godly wife as described above is called out in 1 Timothy as "busybodies, idlers, gossips" who are continually "going about from house to house." From this we should take warning. We should care less about what our friends think and more about what our husbands think.
Does your husband not care about the clutter as long as dinner is hot and ready? Then you should care more about dinner than the clutter. Start there.
Does your husband wish the house was cleaner? Instead of imagining he has an oppressive standard of sanitation that he wants effective immediately, ask him which area bugs him most and start there. Make a good faith effort and be teachable by your husband rather than the internet gurus and girlfriends.
Ask him what he thinks you're doing well and what he'd like you to work on next. Believe the literal words of your husband and do not read into them. Don't twist his answer into a personal attack in your head. Take it graciously, assuming not only that he loves you, but also that you are on mission together.
It is the sense of a shared mission of a husband and wife that we have lost. The family should be a joint effort both are working out together. Neither can do it without the other, so it's no surprise that if both husband and wife go off to different workplaces all day, they come back together only to relax and receive comfort rather than work together at building a cohesive, productive, healthy family.
Families and effective households do not happen by accident or as a side note after our best selves are given elsewhere. To consider ourselves housewives is to remember that we are helpmeets, managing the joint venture of a godly household.
Whether you prefer the term housewife or homemaker, sometime this next week ask your husband what matters most to him about the running of the household. Spin his response positively and productively in your head and move that ball forward. That is what it means to be a housewife - and it can be a joy and glory.
Get your husband's opinion on your homemaking -
One of the assignments inside my course Streamline Your Homemaking is to talk to your husband about how he thinks things are going in your home. In this episode of Simplified Organization I chat with Gemma about her reluctance to do so as well as the relief and surprise she had when she finally tried it.
Tell yourself a true story about your life.
Take the first step to organize your attitude.
Get Module 1 from my signature course, Organize Your Attitude, as a FREE printable pdf!
Related posts
Written by
