“What do you do all day?” is a question Anne Marie Davis, 34, says she gets a lot.
Stay-at-home wives represent a growing niche, according to the author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women.”
Davis, who lives in Lewisville, Texas, isn’t a mother, nor does she telecommute. She is a stay-at-home wife, which makes her something of a pioneer in the post-feminist world.
Ten years ago, she was an “overwhelmed” high school English teacher. “I didn’t have time for my husband, ” she says, “and I didn’t have a life.”
She presented the idea of staying home to her husband, a Web engineer. “I told him it was something I wanted to do, and he supported it. It was a great relief.”
Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” says stay-at-home wives constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years, many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home,” he says. While his research is ongoing, he estimates that more than 10 percent of the 650 women he’s interviewed who choose to stay home are childless.Daniel Buccino, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine clinical social worker and psychotherapist, says stay-at-home wives are the latest “status symbols.”
“It says, ‘We make enough money that we both don’t need to work outside the home,'” he says. “And especially with the recent economic pressures, a stay-at-home spouse is often an extreme and visible luxury.”
Congratulations, geniuses, you figured out what millions of smart men and women have known for years – working sucks. You get dinged a few points for feeling guilty though.
> We make enough money
> that we both don’t need
> to work outside the home
So, why is it that the wife gets to stay home and do nothing? My wife and I do not have kids. For a while, she stayed at home and drove me nuts from afar. She quickly discovered that buying superfluous knick knacks was easier to justify when it was done with money she earned.
IMHO, if you don’t have kids, both people should be doing something that requires some degree of responsibility with the majority of their day even if it does not make money.
I agree with you thomas. I think if a man this day and age agrees with his wife staying home, just because, he is probably an insecure man that feels more in control and has less fear of the woman losing if she just stays home all day and does nothing as opposed to going out, making her own money and doing her own thing.
I will probably always work. Even when I had my first and only child I worked. I worked all thru my pregnancy, and for a portion of it her father was unemployed! and I was still pregnant and working! I think getting outside the house is healthy for women anyway, doign things hat stimulate the brain and meeting people. if money is no concern, then just giving yourself something to do that you enjoy is healthy. i dont see this becoming a trend, and if it does I think it just means some women are lazy.
Feminism took a wrong turn when some feminists demeaned traditional roles for women.
I don’t hear that much from younger feminists.
The young feminists tend to LIKE men and they believe feminism is fundamentally about equal opportunity, respect and pay.
“Homemaker” is one of those opportunities and should be respected.
#2 said: “I worked all thru my pregnancy, and for a portion of it her father was unemployed! and I was still pregnant and working! I think getting outside the house is healthy for women anyway…”
No you don’t. You’re just jealous because they can sit at home and relax and meanwhile you had to work pregnant while your husband sat on his ass at home.
Which is where you really want to be…right? Right! Why? Because working sucks. Want to stimulate your brain? Take a course on physics at Stanford. Since when did your cubicle job tax your brain any way?
There’s no one size fits all in this AND people’s attitudes and wishes change over their lives.
I worked every day from age 14 or so on. Got married and told my wife: “I don’t care if you work or don’t work as long as you are happy doing what you do.” Of course, she wasn’t, but that is a different long story.
Jobs can be very psychologically rewarding or dreadful==as can kiddies, parents, spouses, the arts, self study, and a life of quiet contemplation. My father told me once: “Boredom is the product of a dull mind.” I think he meant go read a book, but he was never direct.
One friend of my wife stopped talking to me when she complained she had to do all the housework as hubby wouldn’t do any. She was a stay at home wife and I told her she was a self centered over privileged dumbshit. My wife lost a lot of friends that way.
Pissed off feminists==thats what makes my life so fulfilled.
They just NOW figured out the ‘housewife’ gig is bliss? Although, I give mothers credit for the heavy lifting part of creating a human being.
Here in Canada the taxation levels are so absurdly high that most families cannot afford a home unless both are working. One entire income covers the taxation of both incomes and the other pays life’s expenses. Women must work in most average income families.
Working Sucks?! All these years I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but, that’s it. Anything they have to pay you to do has to suck.
I have talked to a few women who do say “Why work if I don’t have to?”. That is the mentality. No wonder so many women are into getting married as soon as they can lol. Sure they are for equality unless they can get a free ride. Honestly most people are like that no matter the gender.
#7
Canadian tax rates are 15-29% with highest tax bracket of 29% at $120,000. In the US the tax rates are 15-35% with the higher brackets at 28% at $79,000, 33% at $165,000 and 35% at $358,000.
State and provincial income taxes vary, as do sales tax which tend to be higher in Canada. I’ve worked and paid taxes in both countries and honestly I found I had about the same after tax income. I pay less income tax in Canada but more sales tax. Of course, I had corporate health care coverage in the US which cost my employer ~$8000/year.
The place I would really feel it worse in Canada is Capital Gains.
Yeah…. This only works if the husband makes ass loads of money.
Nice work if you can get it. Most people can’t survive on one salary, and this is not anything new. My parents, both professionals with university degrees, both had to work to maintain a slightly upper middle class standard of living back in the 1960s and 70s. Mom took a couple of years off after the birth of each child, but then back to work.
And if they were starting out today, even with both working they would never, never have been able to afford the house they now own free and clear.
For the most part, stay at home wives are things from the world of soap operas where people wear business suits around the house and even the men rarely seem to have any sort of employment.
It is all leftovers from the counter-industrial movement.
Woman ALWAYS worked outside of the home.
Fields, dairies, seamstresses, washing women, etc.
When the mills of the revolution came they worked there as well. Read about the end of the 19th century and you will see the exact same things we deal with today.
Both parents working, children running amok and idiot spinsters you have more time to complain than anything else saying its all wrong!
Hundred years later and no change!
Cursor_
Sounds like lazy people getting away with it to me. Doesn’t sound like she’s staying home to do anything useful, constructive or creative…
#11, ass loads of money isn’t necessary. Living within your means (and income bracket) is necessary though.
How dare people judge that a woman is lazy if she wants to be a housewife. If they aren’t swimming in debt so that I have to finance their bankruptcy, I don’t give a shit if the wife or husband works for that matter. Why do you haters spend so much energy judging other people for their lifestyle choices? This is supposed to be America. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Pick your battles wisely.
I thought feminism was merely the radical idea that women have brains.
Well if you are staying home (man or woman) then you better be running the estate with all of your servants, or else you better be cleaning the house.
How many of the women staying home, without children, also have a housekeeper clean their house?
If that is the case they better be hitting 4 hours at the gym every day. LOL.
Everyone’s situation is different, however if one spouse makes a high salary and the second makes a low salary, the amount of net income the lower income person actually takes home may not even cover transportation/day care type expenses. Here in NY state you would lose over 42% of the lower income worker’s salary to Federal Income/State Income/Social Security/Medicare taxes. Places like NY City with a city income tax are even worse.
“I thought feminism was merely the radical idea that women have brains.”
Nope. Everyone knows that women are good for one thing. Baking pies.
WHY ARE WOMEN’S FEET SHORTER THAN MENS?
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SO THEY CAN STAND CLOSER TO THE SINK
What do you tell a battered women with two black eyes? Nuthin’ you already told her twice!
That’s the most sexist joke I can think of…
Why do women get married in white?
So they match the kitchen appliances!
Why did the woman cross the road?
Wait, better question, why is she out of the kitchen!?
Let’s see, one person makes enough money to take care of two. What does the other person do, keep working so that they can have more savings and perhaps both retire early or quit so that the person still working is under more pressure to provide for both and will have to work more years before retiring?
There’s a problem. If women leave the labor force, the feminists will still be suing companies for discrimination, because there are too many men. Recently they are talking about applying Title 9 to science faculties.
Personally, I think if the woman wants to stay at home and the man thinks it’s ok, power to them. My wife was a SAHM for years before we started our own company (and she is a degreed geologist so she isn’t looking for a meal ticket, she’s smarter than I am). However, now that she’s been working again for several years, she’s ready to get back to the house.
It isn’t that women _should_ stay at the house — their genes dictate they belong there. It’s a caveman thing! (sorry, inside joke with the wife)
However, I think that you should be able to deduct the money she could have made as a housekeeper from your taxes as a loss.
I wonder . . . could I pay my wife a salary as “homemaker,” deduct the pay from my income as an expense, pay her taxes, and end up in a lower tax bracket? We could file separately and both be in much lower tax brackets. I need to call my accountant . . .
On the superfuture forums we found out that there are quite a few men on the forum that are married to wives that happen to be rocket scientists. All of the men are stay at home husbands or dads. They all happen to share an expensive taste for designer men clothing too as it is a fashion forum. Go figure.
I make the money and my wife figures out how to keep the banks, insurance companies, taxing districts, rebate scams, car companies and mechanics, shoddy product manufacturers, greedy doctors and other parasites from cheating us out of what I brought home after the IRS pre-cheats us. She earns her keep, plus she’s great in bed.
That sounds like the definitive answer to me.
If a man speaks in the forest and there’s no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?