The Sexes: The New Housewife Blues

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surprised by its pleasures, and by the unexpected amount of freedom to read or work at hobbies and local causes. But a second surprise is likely to be loneliness and the depressing reaction of other women to their new experience of housewifery. Valerie Kraus, 34, quit her job as an Illinois teacher last fall when she saw her two children "were losing me and the attention and love that only a mother can give. Soon afterward," she recalls, "at a pot-luck dinner at church, we each had to tell about the nicest thing that had happened to us recently. Other women talked about their jobs. When my turn came, I said, 'This is the first time I've stayed home and I thoroughly enjoy it!' People just said, 'Oh.'"

Today, when housewives are asked what they do, they tend to answer diffidently "Nothing really" because they have been made to feel inferior and because the joys and challenges of domestic life are unorganized and unmeasured. Except for a philosopher or a poet, such inner rewards are hard to put into words, and therefore hard to preserve on a cold morning when the toast burns and the child is crying. For centuries, men have told their wives that such problems were not very important, but the novelty is to be patronized by other women for "not doing anything really." Kathy Mertz, who enjoyed serving as a Cub Scout den mother in North Barrington, Ill., particularly resented a newly emancipated part-time secretary who periodically called on her to act as chauffeur for her child. Says Mertz: "She kept telling me that I ought to be 'doing something worthwhile'! What I was doing was giving her child care."

In a success-oriented society the cumulative effects of such treatment can be demoralizing. One of the few women so far trying to do anything organized for the millions of housewives is Jinx Melia, 40, who last year joined four other women in founding a national organization to give homemakers more status. Named for Martha, who did the household chores while her sister Mary listened to Christ expounding his wisdom (Luke 10:38-42), the Martha Movement so far has nearly 4,000 members in all 50 states and several foreign countries, and Executive Director Melia just returned last week from a fund-raising tour through the West. Among the organization's projects: short-term child-care and resource centers near supermarkets and hot lines for counseling housewives with critical problems.

Melia now lives in Burke, Va., with her engineer husband and two sons, aged 5 and 3, but before she quit to care for them she was a $15,000-a-year teacher in New York City. When she decided to go back to work again after a couple of years, she found herself applying only for jobs in the $8,000-a-year range, for which she was overqualified. This was not because of professional rustiness, or the need for more time at home, or even because teaching jobs were hard to find. Says she: "I had devalued myself. I had become a victim of the process that makes a homemaker feel she is worth nothing and her role as creator of the next generation is not important."

During the past twelve years Arlene Rossen Cardozo has been interviewing and advising women with children, first in Cambridge, Mass., then in Minneapolis, where she now lives with her husband, a professor at the University of Minnesota, and their three