Posted on 08/05/2008 7:17:25 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
(LifeWire) -- "What do you do all day?" is a question Anne Marie Davis, 34, says she gets a lot.
Davis, who lives in Louisville, 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I guess that’s what I am now. My kids are grown and I’m not currently working.
susie
FreeRiderLoader Ping.
Then count on the left to demand that the government do something to stop it.
She's not freeloading if she's doing the housework and such.
OTOH, if you take kids out of the picture, it's a pretty soft spot to be the one who stays home and does the housework and gets an equal cut of someone's white-collar paycheck.
I have one of those luxuries, I call mine a homemaker.
But the question: are you currently eating bon-bons? If not, you apparently haven’t yet arrived...
Also known as early retirement.
My “luxury” is called “Mommy” by a couple of angels.
It’s all up to the pool guy, right?
Maybe they'll invite the mailman in for tea?
This is what I am right now although I have a baby on the way.
I worked for years and by the end of the day, both my husband and I were exhausted and had little time for anything but take-out dinner and falling asleep, only to start another day the same. We were both stressed and weekends found us running errands, cleaning the house, etc...things that I now take care of during the week so that our evenings and weekends are relaxing and stress-free.
Wow, a housewife. That’s certainly a new invention...
Nice, well-balanced article. Mr. OTTB and I did this when we were first married and it made us both happy.
It used to be that men took pride in being able to support a wife, but of course that has changed as the result of poor behavior on the part of both some husbands and some wives.
In some ways I wish it were still 1957.
We’ve lost this important person in society and we’ve all been poorer for that loss. I get steamed when I see men post that such women are freeloaders. There’s a lot of work to do at home and countless work that needs to be done in the community that is not a paid job. I’d like to see more women do this. Yes, it’s true that most stay-at-home women have children at home, but that’s up to them and their husbands.
I guess it depends on the family’s situation. If the wife’s income, after taxes, is so marginal (when factoring in communting costs, hiring a maid service to clean the house, work clothes etc.) then it makes sense for her to stay home and take care of the house.
But it wouldn’t make sense for our family- my wife, like me, is a lawyer and brings in a very good paycheck. It makes much more sense for her to work, and for us to pay for a cleaning service, home delivery of groceries by peapod and so on.
After we have kids, she will most likely go back to work, and we will either hire a nanny or pay for daycare. Her salary is simply too high to give up.
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