Are Any of Them Really Housewives?
Are the Desperate Housewives truly desperate?
Who is the show’s title referring to? What’s the definition of a housewife? These questions popped into my head at 3:30 am this morning after a crazy fun party we had.
Anyway back to my late night train of thoughts…
Answers.com defines a housewife as:
a wife who manages a household while her husband earns the family income
This would truly only describe Lynette and Bree from last season and the dead woman Brenda Strong (Mary Alice)…this season Lynette is working and Bree is a widow..Eva Longoria’s character is the only other married “Wisteria Laner”, yet I think she’s far too dainty to do any housework…we never see her performing domestic duties, and her husband is in jail and when he isn’t, he’s not really working, he’s stealing. So he doesn’t earn the family income. Gabrielle even tried working as a mattress model for a while to earn money.
So it seems there are no real desperate housewives on the show. Someone better get married quickly or the show will be a lie (Bree to George?)!
Yet, some might still think of Lynette as a desperate housewife despite the fact that she works because it seems as if she does a lot of the housework herself. She gets home from work to starts her “second shift” taking care of the kids and cleaning the house. We talked about this a lot in a FMST class I took a year ago. Women, even when they’re working do more housework than their husbands. Even though things have supposedly changed dramatically with regards to women’s rights, statistically speaking there hasn’t been much change in the division of household labor over the last 30 years.
So maybe the idea of a desperate housewife is in all us women who are married or were married at one time. Society expects women to do the majority of housework regardless of their earnings. Therefore we can save the show title by looking at it this way. All the women in the show are definitely desperate and all have the potential to be housewives in future episodes.
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POSTED IN: Brenda Strong, Eva Longoria, Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross, Pictures, Teri Hatcher, Uncategorized
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