Gen X Side Note: The Housewife

Even the Women With Magic Had to Make Dinner

I grew up with a housewife.

That's what we called her.

Not a stay-at-home mom. Not a full-time parent. Not a domestic engineer.

My mother was a housewife.

I was the youngest of seven children, so before anybody gets nostalgic about a woman sitting around the house all day waiting for her husband to come home, let me assure you there wasn't a whole lot of sitting happening in ours.

There were children to feed. Clothes to wash. Groceries to buy. Meals to prepare. A house to clean. School schedules. Appointments. Illnesses. Arguments. Birthdays. Holidays. Emergencies. And all the other things required to keep a family of nine people moving through the world.

My mother worked.

She just didn't receive a paycheck for it.

And when I was little, Mom being home was simply part of the architecture of my life.

We went to school.

Dad went to work.

Mom took care of the house and the children.

That was the arrangement.

It wasn't something I questioned because the world around me kept telling me this was what a family looked like.

Television certainly did.

School did too.

And then, somewhere along the way, the world changed.

The Housewife on Television

Here's something interesting about growing up Gen X.

We didn't only watch television made for our generation.

We watched everything.

Syndication meant television from previous decades lived right alongside whatever was currently being broadcast. As children, we weren't sitting there thinking about when a particular program had originally aired or which generation had created it.

It was on television.

Therefore, to us, it was television.

And television had a lot to say about mothers.

We watched families with mothers at home. Mothers cooked. Mothers cleaned. Mothers raised children. Mothers managed households. Dad went off into the world and came home again.

Some of the women on television were considerably more powerful than Dad.

That didn't seem to matter.

Take Samantha Stephens from Bewitched.

Samantha was a witch.

Not metaphorically.

The woman could perform actual magic.

She could change reality with a twitch of her nose.

And somehow one of the great concerns of her marriage was that Darrin wanted her to stop using magic so they could live like a normal suburban couple.

Sir.

Your wife can alter reality. 😂

Then there was I Dream of Jeannie.

Jeannie was a magical being thousands of years old with extraordinary powers, and so much of her world still revolved around Major Tony Nelson and the domestic expectations surrounding their relationship.

Even the women with magic had to make dinner.

Now, looking backward, there's plenty of nuance in both shows. Samantha wasn't some powerless little woman, and the comedy frequently came from the absurdity of trying to contain her magic and her wonderfully uncontrollable family.

But I wasn't conducting media analysis when I was ten.

I was watching television.

And underneath all those funny stories was a picture of what a woman, a wife and a family were supposed to look like.

The strange thing was that by the time my generation was watching those shows in reruns, the real women around us were already changing the picture.

Including my mother.

And We Had a Class for This

We had Home Economics.

Let that sink in for a minute.

While girls were beginning to hear that the world was opening to us and that women could have careers and increasingly make different choices about their lives, school still had an educational tradition built around teaching the skills of managing a home.

We learned things like cooking and sewing and household skills.

And to be fair, a lot of those skills were useful.

Everybody should know how to feed themselves.

Knowing how to repair something instead of throwing it away isn't exactly a character flaw.

Understanding nutrition, budgeting and how to run a household is useful whether you're a woman, man, married, single, raising children or living alone.

The skills weren't the strange part.

The expectation underneath them was.

There had been a time when domestic education was connected directly to the future society expected many girls to have.

Marriage.

Children.

Home.

Housewife.

Except the daughters sitting in those classrooms weren't necessarily going to live the lives their mothers had lived.

We were growing up right in the middle of the transition.

I know because I watched it happen in my own house.

Then Mom Went to Work

By the time I entered junior high, something changed.

My mother went to work.

This wasn't some dramatic declaration of independence accompanied by swelling music and a slow-motion shot of Mom marching into the future.

It was life.

Women were working.

Families were changing.

And our family changed too.

For the first time in my childhood, the housewife mommy I had always known wasn't necessarily going to be waiting at home when I got there.

My mother hadn't disappeared.

The arrangement had.

And with that change came another figure that would eventually become so closely associated with Gen X that we now joke about it as one of the defining characteristics of our childhood.

The latchkey kid had arrived.

We Weren't Exactly Feral

Today, Gen X loves to joke that we were raised feral.

I get it.

It's funny.

And compared with the amount of supervision many children have today, some of what we were allowed to do probably sounds completely insane.

But when I think about my childhood, I don't remember being feral.

I remember having instructions.

Come straight home from school.

And when Mom said straight home, she meant straight home.

Not your friend's house.

Not the store.

Not wandering around somewhere because you lost track of time.

Home.

Then you changed out of your school clothes.

There's an entire Gen X Side Note hiding in that sentence.

We had school clothes and play clothes.

You did not go rolling around outside destroying the clothes your parents bought for school.

Change your clothes.

Do your homework.

Then?

Go outside.

That was the glorious part.

Once the responsibilities were handled, the neighborhood became ours.

We found friends.

We rode bikes.

We wandered around.

We invented things to do.

We settled arguments.

We got bored and then figured out how not to be bored.

There was no phone in our pocket.

Nobody was watching our location move around a map.

Nobody was texting:

Where are you?

What are you doing?

Who are you with?

Our parents generally knew the universe we occupied.

And there was one final instruction:

Be home for dinner.

You figured it out.

Maybe you knew what time it was.

Maybe somebody's mother yelled.

Maybe the neighborhood started changing as families called their children home.

Maybe the streetlights became your warning.

However you did it, when it was time to get your butt home, you got your butt home.

Because Mom may have gone to work.

But Mom was coming back. 😂

And you were going to have to explain yourself eventually.

The Difference Was Trust

I think this is the piece that sometimes gets lost when we tell the funny stories about Gen X childhood.

The difference wasn't that nobody expected anything from us.

Quite the opposite.

A lot was expected from us.

We were trusted to come home.

Trusted to lock the door.

Trusted to change our clothes.

Trusted to do our homework.

Trusted to know what we were allowed to eat.

Trusted to follow the household rules when nobody was standing there enforcing them.

Trusted to go outside.

Trusted to navigate our neighborhoods.

Trusted to recognize trouble.

Trusted to come home again.

That freedom came with responsibility.

Were all children ready for that responsibility?

Probably not.

Did every child experience latchkey life the same way?

Absolutely not.

Some children were lonely. Some were frightened. Some were carrying responsibilities that, looking back, were probably too large for them. And plenty of children didn't live this experience at all.

Memory gets dangerous when we turn “this is how I grew up” into “this is how everybody grew up.”

But for many of us, there was something distinctive about that childhood.

Adults gave us instructions.

Then they expected us to follow them when the adults weren't there.

But the Television Was There

And this is the part I find fascinating now.

We may have been alone in the house.

But there was often another presence waiting for us.

The television.

Afternoon television was its own strange little universe.

There was educational programming on PBS.

There were syndicated shows from years and sometimes decades before.

There were cartoons.

There were programs designed to teach us things.

And then there were the Afterschool Specials.

Oh, Lord.

The Afterschool Special. 😂

Apparently somebody somewhere decided:

These children are home alone. This seems like an excellent opportunity to TERRIFY THEM ABOUT LIFE.

Drugs.

Alcohol.

Bullying.

Divorce.

Peer pressure.

Runaways.

Sex.

Family problems.

Danger.

Whatever terrible decision some fictional teenager was about to make, we were going to watch that sucker unfold.

And underneath the melodrama was something quite serious.

Adults were using television to speak directly to young people about things they believed young people needed to understand.

PBS was teaching us.

Afterschool Specials were warning us.

Saturday morning television was slipping education between the cartoons.

Which brings me to Schoolhouse Rock!

Oh, we're coming back to that one.

That sucker is getting its own article.

Because an entire generation cannot involuntarily respond to the words “Conjunction Junction what's your fnction” forty-something years later without somebody investigating what the hell happened to us.

😂

But even entertainment was teaching us something.

The syndicated family shows were still presenting versions of home, marriage, mothers and fathers that came from an earlier period.

And that's where the whole thing gets fascinating to me.

Mom Was at Work. Television Mom Was Still Home.

Think about that.

I could come home from school to a house where my mother was no longer waiting for me because she had entered the paid workforce...

turn on the television...

and watch a rerun from an earlier era in which Mom was right there in the house.

The real American household was changing faster than some of the images we were consuming.

Women were entering and remaining in the workforce in growing numbers.

Families were changing.

Divorce was changing households.

Children were spending portions of the day without a parent physically present.

The culture was wrestling with changing expectations around women, work, marriage and motherhood.

Meanwhile, television reruns preserved yesterday indefinitely.

Samantha was still trying not to use magic.

Jeannie was still worrying about Tony.

The television mother was still home.

Mine wasn't.

And neither reality was necessarily wrong.

That's important.

I Don't Look Down on the Housewife

I can't.

I was raised by one.

My mother raised seven children.

Seven.

There was nothing small about that work.

There is nothing inherently lesser about choosing to devote your life to caring for a home or raising children. There were women who loved that life. There were women who chose it. There were women who were proud of it.

There were also women who felt trapped by it.

Women who never had a meaningful choice.

Women who always worked outside the home because their families needed the income.

Women whose race, class and economic circumstances meant the idyllic television version of the American housewife never represented their lives in the first place.

There was never one universal American woman.

And that's why I don't want to look backward and put an entire generation of women on trial.

I'm much more interested in the change.

Because when many women went to work outside the home, the work inside the home didn't magically disappear.

Dinner still needed to happen.

Laundry still existed.

Children still needed care.

Groceries still had to be purchased.

The housewife didn't simply vanish and become the working woman.

For many women, paid employment became another responsibility added to the ones already waiting at home.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this were their daughters.

Watching.

Learning.

Trying to figure out what womanhood was going to mean for us.

We Grew Up During the Handoff

Maybe that's what I find most interesting looking backward.

Gen X girls were growing up while the map was being redrawn.

We inherited one vision of womanhood while another was emerging.

Our mothers showed us one thing.

Sometimes they changed right before our eyes and showed us another.

Our schools taught us domestic skills while the larger culture increasingly told us we could build careers.

Television showed us women who could perform magic but still worried about pleasing their husbands.

Then we watched real women put on work clothes and walk out the front door.

And when they did, the children didn't disappear.

We got keys.

That's what that little house key represented.

It wasn't merely a way to open the front door.

It meant:

Mom won't necessarily be there.

You know what you're supposed to do.

Come straight home.

Lock the door.

Change your clothes.

Do your homework.

Follow the rules.

Then go be a kid.

We'll see you at dinner.

The latchkey wasn't just something we carried.

It was evidence that the American household was changing.

I didn't know any of that when I was standing there with mine.

I was a kid.

My mother had gone to work.

I had instructions.

And somewhere on television, Samantha Stephens was still trying not to twitch her nose.

The world was changing.

We were just the kids who happened to be home when it did.

Thanks for taking this trip back with me.

What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.

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Until next time...

Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.

— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)

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