The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the unpaid labor of housewives and compares it to low-wage employees who trade job security for fair pay.
Germaine Greer's quote sheds light on the often-overlooked role of housewives as unpaid workers, drawing a parallel between their situation and that of employees who accept lower wages for job security. While housewives contribute significantly to the household, their lack of compensation and job security mirrors the precarious existence of the lowest paid workers, highlighting issues of economic dependence and the stigma attached to both groups when they find themselves without support.
In practice
In a discussion about gender roles in modern society.
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
The majority of small-holder farmers in Africa are women and, in urban areas, you're primarily looking at women-led households. So we can't solve hunger if we don't have gender-sensitive programming that addresses access to opportunities for women, whether it's through education or tools for cooking, like solar-powered stoves.
The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
No industry or country can reach its full potential until women reach their full potential. This is especially true of science and technology, where women with a surplus of talent still face a deficit of opportunity.
When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.
In the '50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.
Women share this planet 50/50 and they are underrepresented, their potential astonishingly untapped.
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