The stigma of being a housewife

When the Swedish journalist Peter Letmark tried to track down a housewife for a series on 21st-century parents in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter recently, he failed.

“Housewives,” he explained, “are a near-extinct species in Sweden. And the few who still do exist don’t really dare to go public with it.”…

When it is no longer socially acceptable to be a housewife — or homemaker, in modern American parlance — has feminism overshot its objective?

In the 1950s, women were expected to stay at home, and those who wanted to work were often stigmatized. Today it’s mostly the other way round, pitting women against one another along the fault lines of conviction, economic class and need, and, often, ethnicity.