If you’ve ever watched an episode of Bravo’s addictive but infuriating reality franchise, The Real Housewives—and if you’re like me, you’ve watched plenty—you may be wondering: Where are the housewives?
The show’s first installment, The Real Housewives of Orange County, debuted in 2006, piggybacking off the success of the ABC dramedy, Desperate Housewives. But The Real Housewives, with its interchangeable “stars” (when one leaves, or when a cast needs a shake-up, there’s always another “housewife” waiting in the wings), and its seemingly inexhaustible reserve of city-sites (by my count the franchise is up to seven), has taken on a life of its own, continuing to generate buzz while its fictional predecessor has faded into irrelevance. Consequently, the show and its cast members, who are routinely referred to in the media as “housewives,” seem poised to redefine the term.
As any loyal viewer of The Real Housewives knows, each season follows five or six well-heeled (but never well-mannered!) women as they shop, quarrel among themselves, and, increasingly, hawk their books, jewelry, and—worst of all—pop songs. By my count, about half of these women are married; this is a fluctuating statistic, to the delight of the show’s producers, I imagine. A few, like Vicki of Orange County, have bona-fide careers, while only a handful of the women on the show roughly fit the profile of a housewife, which the Oxford American Dictionary defines as “a married woman whose main occupation is caring for her family and running the household.” Even these women are disqualified, however, when one considers that their main occupations are not running their households, but appearing on The Real Housewives (for which they are paid).
The housewife as a meaningful category is a relatively recent phenomenon, a creation of the Industrial Revolution. Most of us associate housewives with the 1950s, the period following World War II when women were sent back to the home to make room in the workforce for returning GIs. This era’s vision of the housewife was immortalized in countless television shows and movies, and even as the period recedes in memory, its imagery remains potent, continuing for many to define the standard against which all other ideas of the family are measured. (Think of the schizophrenic 2004 update of The Stepford Wives, whose creators seem to have been incapable of imagining a Stepford where the women do not appear to have stepped out of the pages of a 1950s magazine.)
During a telephone interview, Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University who has written about women’s changing roles in the family, said that America’s affluence during the 1950s is responsible in part for its subsequent idealization. “It is also part of the backlash against working women to constantly go back to that period as the ideal way for women to live and for children to be reared.”
Despite the era’s perceived devotion to a traditional family model—in fact, it was a subject of some criticism even then—domestic work in the 1950s never enjoyed a status equal to that of “men’s work” (read: paid work) outside the home. “There was always the stigma of being ‘just a housewife’,” says Gerson. With Betty Friedan's diagnosis of “the problem that has no name” and the second wave of feminism, “housewife” became synonymous with monotony, suburban anomie, and of course, desperation. Between 1967—when Herbert Gans identified malaise as a female rather than a suburban problem in The Levittowners— and 2005, the proportion of “traditional” families, defined as those in which the husband, but not the wife, works outside the home, declined by half, from 36 percent to just 18 percent, according to the Department of Labor. Women’s greater (though by no means equal) access to the workplace was accompanied by yet further devaluation of the housewife.
But these days, housewives are back! Or so you might think watching Jill, Tamra, Nene, and Teresa embrace the title as if it were an honorary doctorate. At first blush, all of these warm and fuzzy feelings about housewifery (if in name only) may seem like your run-of-the-mill, “postfeminist” return of the oppressed; yet another attempt to rehabilitate the term, and to restore to the housewife an elevated status that she never really had. But restoring dignity to beleaguered housewives hardly seems to be part of Bravo’s agenda, and the show’s cast-members seem to embrace the title for a very different set of reasons. Nowadays, Gerson observes, “the notion of the housewife conjures up leisure and privilege. It’s only a very wealthy woman who can afford to not have a job. It’s this new form of conspicuous leisure at a time when people are working harder than ever.”
In The Real Housewives, where the title is bestowed willy-nilly on every woman in sight, the word “housewife”—preceded by the word “real,” no less!—has no real referent in the world. Andy Cohen, Bravo’s Senior Vice President of Original Programming and Development (and host of the delicious post-Housewives chat show Watch What Happens: Live), has speculated that viewers are attracted to the camp appeal of the term. Gerson agrees that “people don’t really describe themselves as housewives anymore with a straight face. It comes with kind of a wink and a nod.”
If the women of the series embrace the title, it is presumably because they have determined that it is safe, neutralized by irony or by its distance from their actual life circumstances. But unhinged from any tangible meaning, “housewife” has become a free-floating signifier, available to any number of associations—many of them negative—that the word can be expected to elicit from the educated and affluent viewership that Bravo routinely boasts.
Trailing its cultural baggage behind it, The Real Housewives’ nonsensical title promises to deliver to us women who are “just housewives”— and shows us something much worse. This label, applied indiscriminately to every woman on the show, implicates all of us as well. “What bothers me about it,” Gerson says, “is that it places women in kind of the same old bag, even if they’re single and even if they’re working.” In the end, the show's title is only an anachronistic—if insidious—come-on, a prelude to the show’s real subject: a non-stop spectacle of self-aggrandizement, conspicuous consumption, and above all, bitter catfighting, that can only undermine women's hard-won gains. So why do we love it? And what does that say about us?
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