Housewife

A housewife (also known as a homemaker or a stay-at-home mother/mom/mum) is a woman whose role is running or managing her family's home—housekeeping, which includes caring for her children; cleaning and maintaining the home; making, buying and/or mending clothes for the family; buying, cooking, and storing food for the family; buying goods that the family needs for everyday life; partially or solely managing the family budget—and who is not employed outside the home (i.e., a career woman). The male equivalent is the househusband. Webster's Dictionary defines a housewife as a married woman who is in charge of her household. The British Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (1901) defines a housewife as "the mistress of a household; a female domestic manager [...]". In British English, a small sewing kit is also sometimes called a huswif, housewife or hussif. In the Western world, stereotypical gender roles, particularly for women, were challenged by the feminist movement in the latter 20th century to allow women to choose whether to be housewives or to have a career. Changing economics also increased the prevalence of two-income households. Some feminists and non-feminist economists (particularly proponents of historical materialism, the methodological approach of Marxist historiography) note that the value of housewives' work is ignored in standard formulations of economic output, such as GDP or employment figures. A housewife typically works many unpaid hours a week and often depends on income from her husband's work for financial support. In societies of hunters and gatherers, like the traditional society of the Australian aboriginal people, the men often hunted animals for meat while the women gather other foods such as grain, fruit and vegetables. One of the reasons for this division of labor is that it is much easier to look after a baby while gathering food than while hunting a fast-moving animal. Even when homes were very simple, and there were few possessions to maintain, men and women did different jobs.