Some time ago, I came across a condescending ad from the 1950s about how cleaning the house is physically strenuous work that most men wouldn’t be prepared—equipped—for. That the repetitive and agile movements required to really clean as a housewife weren’t meant for out-of-shape, office-bound men (it tracks since gym memberships weren’t even a thing until the early 1980s, when the commodification of fitness blew up). I rewatch this ad (or “PSA”) often, usually when I’ve trailed off/lost steam about looking for a “real” job. It makes me envious of a time when, although women were still demeaned and treated like shit, at least the work they did was appreciated. Considered “useful.” Even if it was like pulling teeth to get husbands to actually say it. But they didn’t have to, the advertisers did. 

Oh yes, all the ads for cleaning supplies and accoutrements and appliances of every creed and color were enough to indicate that plenty of men cared about what women—housewives—were doing. And that they cared so much they wanted them to keep doing it…forever. And they would have; corporations could have kept churning out all the new and oh so necessary tools for the very purpose of “women’s work” were it not for bitches like Betty Friedan getting all up in arms about wanting, no, needing to have a “real” “purpose.” As if any of us on this Earth have one. Ha! That’s the kind of delusion that only religious people have. And rich ones, too. Even though the rich tend to be pretty fucking godless. But yeah, they can cite scripture for their purpose. Just like feminists started citing The Feminine Mystique for theirs. Which, apparently, was to “free” themselves from the “prison” (a.k.a. palatial abode) of being a housewife. And if a woman didn’t feel shitty about being a housewife in the first place, Friedan was certain to make sure they did with descriptions like, “​​As she made the beds, shopped for groceries… she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?” (or, as Peggy Lee once said, “Is that all there is?”).

For fuck’s sake. Yes! This is all. No matter what gender you are. No matter what “job” you have that you try to use to convince yourself that your life is meaningful, “filled with purpose.” It’s not. It’s just an endless barrage of grinning and bearing it, housewife-style, even though you’re dying inside. On the plus side for the housewives though (before their roles were ripped away from them), they could die inside in comfort and luxury. But noooo, fucking Betty had to insist that comfort was synonymous with death…as in: “comfortable concentration camp.” How’s any housewife supposed to recover from that kind of mass-trumpeted bad publicity, huh?

My God, if I had been a housewife living a cush life at home around that time when Betty decided women were wasting their lives and potential, I would have been positively livid with her. I might have even tried to carry out an assassination attempt. After all, I do share a name with a famous female assassin (would-be assassin, rather): Sara. Spelled just the same way as Sara Jane Moore, the second woman who tried to kill Gerald Ford and failed. Maybe, somewhere deep down, she tried to kill him to take her rage out on someone for the changes foisted upon women once they were summarily “kicked out of the domestic sphere” and told they could “do more,” “be more”—for less money than men, and at even less satisfying jobs.

At least with housework, there was always the satisfaction in knowing your toil was going to be enjoyed by someone you theoretically loved (whether your husband and/or children). Sara was, in fact, a housewife (five times over, having married every kind of man from military to sound engineer to doctor). Who suddenly felt she needed to off a president to incite a revolution. Wonder what could’ve put such an extreme idea into her head, huh? Leftist mumbo-jumbo. That’s what. I won’t get into her move to San Francisco being an influence, but let’s just say “big city ideas” were also the downfall of most women’s housewife Golden Age. 

Naturally, I can’t help but notice that many so-called modern women are starting to realize how stupid it was to “rebel” against their “concentration camp” (typical white ladies, always being so melodramatic with hyperbolic terms like that). Hence, the current “trends” of “tradwife” and “stay-at-home girlfriend.” And Friedan herself was critical of the kinds of women who took feminism to the extreme that made them despise homemakers, deeming them contemptible and useless. But even if such women were “useless,” I am of the belief that being a thing of beauty in an otherwise drab space is not useless at all. Here, of course, the “feminists” would take issue with me referring to women as “things,” but, Christ, I don’t mean it literally. I mean it poetically, that women lend aesthetic joy (even when they’re not “trying” with makeup or clothes and all that shit) to the spaces they grace their presence with.

Their essence alone is what can make a cold house a home (whether it’s actually a house or just some tenement of an apartment). Isn’t that worth being “paid for” by the men who serve as the “breadwinners” (continuing to reign supreme over that category even today) in this forever lopsided dynamic? In short, women were once paid to be their beautiful selves, along with some cleaning and cooking (ah yes, and the expectation of “sex stuff” whenever the man wanted it). In exchange, they got a roof over their heads and an allowance for “extras” like the beauty parlor. To me, “backward” Sara Garmand, it sounds like a fucking paid vacation that never has to end compared to trying to work a “real” job. 

But I will never say this out loud to anyone, least of all another woman (and probably not another man either—they would likely just wield it as more cannon fodder for their misogyny). I’ll simply keep scouring the internet for a job that can barely afford me the things that most women once had as a given before the goddamn second wave of feminism.