Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead
If you’re in need of a cathartic read that distills the anger and exhaustion of America’s overburdened mothers and wives, this is not the book for you ... Davis sticks to the experiences of heterosexual married women, which means that many contemporary domestic arrangements go unexamined ... Housewife tries to do too much and accomplishes less than it could. Davis could have made a convincing case with fewer historical detours and more contemporary stories ... As for the “what to do instead” promise of the subtitle, she doesn’t really have a good answer.
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A profoundly confused book, frequently contradictory and always intellectually undercooked. It would be generous to say that it has a thesis ... The book’s inconclusiveness seems more like the product of a rushed writing job than of a sincerely felt ambivalence ... If the book is light on familiarity with feminist critiques of housewifery, it is also somewhat lacking in critical engagement with the housewife’s contemporary boosters ... Poorly researched and incoherently argued.
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Compelling, well-researched ... Provocative and skillfully written, Housewife is a clear-eyed cultural appraisal of "women's work," and the high a price women pay as working mothers
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