You spend endless days, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, mending clothes, ironing, gardening, watching day time TV, doing school runs, looking immaculate, hosting, socialising and dutifully catering to your husband and kids. You should feel proud, accomplished (as far as being a woman goes), content even, but some how you don't feel any of these emotions. Instead you feel dissatisfied, unappreciated, invisible and worst of all, trapped. Your kids always seem to have a never-ending batch of laundry for you to attend to, they ask why you don't go to work like James or Sarah's mum (whom they fondly refer to as superwoman), they much prefer the odd days you order a KFC Family bucket meal to the beautiful homecooked dinners you spend hours preparing and they hate that you are always all up in their business (what business?? lol). Then your husband expects you to be submissive and a real life version of the women portrayed in the movie, The Stepford Wives (based on a satirical thriller novel by Ira Levin, set in the fictional suburb of Stepford, Connecticut). All these demands, combined with your need to maintain some kind of control over the only part of your life you feel your input matters, the efficient running of your home, leaves you undeniably disgruntled and yet you are amazed by the positive life changing results of Channel 5's documentary, Obedient Wives which basically glorifies your every day life.
As I handed in my security card on my last day at work just a few weeks ago (ahead of business school in September......since a LOT of people are asking lol), I was dizzy with glee at the prospect of guilt-free late nights doing absolutely nothing productive, attending to things I never quite had the time to do, like live my life lol. But I never quite knew my free time would be spent mentally drawing up grocery shopping lists, doing house chores (no thanks to my severe case of OCD) and just generally morphing into a modern day Stepford Wife. Admittedly, my friends and I have discussed in detail over the years about the ideal marriage situation (i.e. to be a housewife or a working mum) and I always swayed more to the housewife school of thought, but over the last few weeks, I can tell you, both are equally demanding. Some women manage to seamlessly run their homes and maintain ambitious careers, but in my opinion, they either get a LOT of help or eventually suffer from a premature midlife crisis. In the Channel 5 show which put the Surrendered Wives movement (based on the idea that men can't change, so women need a radical re-think in order to preserve romance in marriages........a woman wrote this ish!) on the map, women were asked: 'Which do I want more: to have control of every situation or to have an intimate marriage?' (who said the world doesn't revolve around men??)
Furthermore, it was established that career women find it very hard to come home and be feminine, loving and soft and caring - they just come home with this boss attitude instead (hmm I concur), concluding that for women who wanted to have it all (i.e. happy marriage and successful career), the quote "You catch more flies with honey, not vinegar", holds true. So I asked my male friends for their opinion and in a bid to seem modern and open, they all attempted to describe their ideal marriage situation but the not-so-shocking truth was, they all ended up describing a woman that didn't look much different to a 1950's Stepford Wife or the 2000's Surrendered Wife. The bottom line is men want to be served and admired by their wives, but what do we want? Well judging by all the conversations I've held with my girlfriends over the years, women generally want to be provided for. So why can't we all get on with it and drop the labels (career woman/StepfordWife/Surrendered Wife and whatever else). Besides as noted on http://www.stepfordwives.org/, to serve a man is not a cookbook, it's a pleasure! (Amen to that lol!)
