ABSTRACT
Given the women’s insecurity about marriage as discussed in the previous chapter, I wanted to know why the housewives left the labour market and how they experienced this change. The housewives were mostly a younger cohort of women in comparison to the working mothers of the previous chapter and their children were therefore also younger. They also had a network of kin but because of various circumstances (including differences in residential locales, the close spacing of their children) they had not tapped into them in order to continue being employed. First, I wanted to know if the old Western bourgeois family ideal of a male breadwinner and a female housewife had been imbibed by the Bidayuh through exposure to the mass media. This question was prompted by Alison, a housewife in my study, who constructed motherhood and domesticity this way.
