Homemaker versus housewife: It\\\'s still a man\\\'s world

A lady in her mid-sixties started the conversation with me while we both were waiting at JFK airport in New York. We were to catch a plane for Baltimore. She was a repeat complainer type. At least three times she mentioned how the aviation services in America deteriorated since her own golden days. Our flight to Baltimore was delayed first by 30 minutes and after a while by 45 minutes. As we both were idling away time she was haranguing about what should be done by the American consumers to put up a fight against the monopoly of the service providers. She was boasting about her husband's job and his singular contribution to her family. She does not work for any extra income as her husband wants her to be home full-time. At one point, I intoned: "So, you are a housewife, aren't you?" No sooner had I uttered the word "housewife" than her eyes seemed popped out of her head. "What do you mean by housewife, gentleman? I am a homemaker." That was the day I had learnt a lesson on how to talk about a lady's career and how safe it was to keep your mouth shut from asking 'EPQ', an abbreviation for 'embarrassing personal question'. 'Housewife', almost an extinct word, has nowadays been replaced by 'homemaker', a word that has been newly coined to a great satisfaction of homebound married modern ladies.
My Facebook friend Khan Tamjid Ahmed the other day posted a nice anecdote titled "My wife doesn't work", where a husband converses with a psychologist. The psychologist wanted to know how the husband and his wife did spend their time in the waking hours of day and night. The psychologist asked the husband: "What do you do for a living?" The husband answered: "I work as an Accountant in a Bank." The psychologist enquired: "Your wife?" The answer was: "She doesn't work. She's a housewife only." In response to every question as to how his wife did spend her time home the husband every time emphasized "my wife doesn't work" and when pressed to explain how his wife did pass time without any work the husband had to say: "Well, she wakes up at around 5-00 in the morning because she has to clean the house first before making breakfast; she has to take the kids to school in the morning before going to the kitchen market for shopping, then comes back home for cooking and laundry." At the end, the psychologist asked: "In the evening, after you go back home from office, what do you do?" The husband replied: "I take rest, because I'm awfully tired due to all-day's work." "What does your wife do then?" "She prepares meals, serves us dinner, cleans the dishes, mops the house and then takes our kids to bed." At a footnote of the anecdote was the question: "Who do you think works more?
The above anecdote describes the picture of a housewife living in an urban area, probably in a developed country. If we try to paint a picture of a routine day of a housewife of a middle-class family living in our country, especially in the rural part, the painting must send a viewer, living in a developed country, with a huge culture shock.
It is impossible to imagine the burden of the daily chores a housewife in a village has to partake in unless you live with her family. Neither is it possible on the part of a Bangladeshi housewife living comfortably in a city to make a mental picture of what her counterpart in a village has to undergo everyday. A city housewife with her home equipped with a refrigerator, a kitchen fitted with a sink, mixing faucets providing hot and cold water, and a washing machine with a dryer is in a heaven compared to a farmer's housewife whose daily work is no less strenuous than that of a yoked pair of bullocks tilling her husband's cultivable land. Such a village housewife doesn't mind to be called a house-worker or even a house-slave, let alone called a homemaker, if only her husband could appreciate her contribution to the family and not beat her on flimsy grounds like why, for an instance, the rice for dinner is a little excessively boiled.
A farmer's housewife in rural Bangladesh gets up at 4-00 in the morning. Her day starts with her straightening up the beds, sweeping the house and the yard to keep them out of dust. Early at dawn, she has to milk the family's goats and cows and send the milk to the market. She has to feed the cows, goats, hens and pigeons. She takes her bath and starts preparing the morning breakfast. After preparing and serving the breakfast, she goes to the 'ghat' (a landing stage on the bank of a pond or a canal) where she washes clothes and dishes. Then she comes back to clean the kitchen and the cattle sheds. By the time when it is almost late morning she has to start preparing for lunch by cleaning, cutting, and washing vegetables and fish (if any). She has also to take care of a garden in the backyard where she has to do the planting, weeding, and watering. She prepares cow-dung cakes for fuel. Till late at night she drudges on. Such is her life. Such is her destiny only to toil for her family for free on only consideration that one man was kind enough to marry her and provide her with one or two meals a day and the least possible clothes.
Our rural housewives, who perform unpaid work,are unsung; nobody ever cared to make an appropriate monetary value of the work done by such hapless women. If only we could estimate how much had to be paid to a worker for the same job done by a rural housewife the figure, at least, could help us realise the importance of rectifying the discrimination which homebound women in our country face, from before their birth until their death.
The Bangladeshi women have made enormous gains since the country's liberation in 1971. Women, mostly teenagers, have joined the workforce in large numbers in different labour-intensive industries, especially in the readymade garments sector. Women have been politically empowered too; they have now better job prospects and improved education. New laws have also been made to protect their rights.
But, nobody bothers about a huge population of housewives who are silent. They never will chant slogans on the streets and there is no union or a bargaining agent to fight with any authority on their behalf. Housewives' economic input to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is not discussed in any economic forum; neither their contribution has ever been mentioned in our national budget. I have utterly failed to find anywhere any statistics on the Bangladeshi housewives' direct or indirect economic contribution to the nation. While families somewhat recognise their role, housewives remain hidden behind the curtain far away from the spotlight of national debates. They are given little or no social or economic importance, and are perceived non-essential. While the work done by men is widely acknowledged and most men are considered as economically productive, women who are engaged in full-time household work are classified as economically unproductive.
Housewives in rural areas are responsible for most of the post-harvest work in addition to maintaining home, livestock, poultry, and kitchen garden for which they are not paid. Housewives in cities too are similarly unpaid. If they were paid perhaps the price we pay for food grains and other stuffs would have been a little higher, but then the GDP would also have gone up simultaneously to a great extent.
Part-time maidservants in Dhaka city are paid on individual task basis for at least Taka 500 per task. Usually four tasks are performed by those hired part-timers for a monthly wage of around Taka 2500: daily laundry for, say, five pieces of garments, washing 12 pieces of dishes and utensils, sweeping and mopping 1000 square feet of floor and preparatory kitchen works like grinding spices, readying vegetables and fish or meat etc., usually leaving the cooking part for the housewife to perform.
A typical urban housewife performs at least 25 additional tasks, I have counted, like shopping in the kitchen market, cooking, taking kids to school, ironing dresses, readying beds, serving foods, going to banks for paying bills, supervising jobs done by servants and workers, etc. and, of course, taking special care of her husband.  
If we consider the lowest wage rate, a housewife in Dhaka city performs household jobs worth at least Taka 10,000 a month and a housewife in a rural village Taka 5,000, yielding an annual figure worth perhaps a few hundred billion US Dollar or maybe 50 per cent of our GDP.
A homemaker in the West ((left) and a housewife in Bangladesh.
Emancipation of women is a slogan heard aloud around the world. The human rights groups shout whenever they hear about plights of women. Our government is also working to bail out the disadvantaged women from the curse of poverty. The World Bank and NGOs are financing projects with a view to helping our rural housewives attain a bit of economic self-reliance. Thousands of women have been empowered, earning their families' bread and butter thanks to micro-credit programme pioneered by Professor Yunus, the Nobel Peace Laureate.
Yes, widows and poor women have of late learnt how to do business with a small amount of capital and make a u-turn in their fates. Many housewives, too, quit their home management and had meteoric rise to fame in their chosen careers outside their homes. Once housewives, many are now businesswomen. Some of them have become justices, secretaries, lawyers and even jet pilots. Housewives have also turned into politicians. And housewives-turned-politicians also became prime ministers of our country. But, they are very few in number.
The problem is it's still a man's world where respect for the dignity of housewives is a fledgling experience. Many men in our society today are hung up on the old traditional role of the husband, and a wife is still portrayed as a housewife of the 19th century.
Even a working wife, who is also a housewife when she is home, contributes more to her family, while her husband rarely contributes his equitable share in terms of money and labour. Of course, a reverse scenario is also there, though not so common, where a working wife earns and saves in her personal bank account and does little household chores, while her husband has to defray all the family expenses incurred, and do all the housekeeping jobs from babysitting to cooking.
We have been nurtured in an environment where mother was always the faithful housekeeper while father did all of the bread-earning work outside of the home. Mother took care of the kids, dishes and house-keeping while father was out there bringing home the paycheck. "Dad's world was always more important than Mom's." But the time has arrived when the father should think: "If my home is my castle and I am the king, my wife is the guardian of my castle and she is the queen. She is the homemaker, not housewife; she is the home-economist, not the home-servant."
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