Don't we have to imagine the housewife as a happy person? For who was like the ancient hero who was condemned by the gods to incessantly rolling a boulder up the mountain, which, as often as he reached the highest point, tumbled down again, more than those who were beaten with housework and care work resumes the never-ending drudgery every day? And for him, Albert Camus postulates in the final sentence of his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” that he should be thought of as happy. Only the penultimate sentence in Camus' “Attempt at the Absurd”: “The fight against summits can fill a human heart” casts doubt on the validity of the comparison, since household chores are the proverbial efforts of the level: unspectacular, unnoticed, all too often ungrateful,unpaid anyway.
So gray existential philosophy theory or just too brutally trivialized symbol?
In any case, there was and will be objections to the housework, which is experienced more as a punishment than as an exhilarating experience.
Unmatched and drastically formulated in the title of the Ullstein special edition published by Erna Meyer in 1930: “Get free at last - from household slavery!” The large-format double booklet continues in the same tone: “Running a household - for many this still means something like: Wage war. "
Manager with financial sovereignty
While Meyer was "only" interested in the Tayloristic rationalization of housework with the aim of easing the yoke of women, contemporary women's rights activists had long been aiming at the causes of the misery, the life model of the closed family with the sheltering domesticity and exclusively for their domestic recognition frozen housewife. Feminist performance art of the 1970s was still working on this construct. In Martha Rosler's video “Semiotics of the Kitchen”, for example, the housewife tied into her apron and demonstrating kitchen utensils alphabetically in disgust herself appears as part of the inventory. And in “Hey, Chicky !!!” Nina Sobell exercises the housewife routines and role ascriptions on a raw chicken: the cook, the nourishing, the “kitchen-ready” sexual object.
In her book, Evke Rulffes explores where the topos of the "good" mother, loyal housewife and loving wife comes from in personal union and how it was able to develop its effectiveness. She locates a decisive change in the image of women and mothers in an offshoot of the so-called “house fathers literature”, Christian Friedrich Germershausen's from 1778 to 1781 in five volumes of around nine hundred pages each compendium “The house mother in all her business”. This guide to practical knowledge about running an estate was not directed, as is customary in the genre, to the married couple in charge of the estate, but explicitly to the woman of the house. She runs the domestic business, is a manager with financial sovereignty, commands a more or less large servant, supervises the work of the servants and is able torunning the estate without her husband.