ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the notion of the 'housewife' and her relationship to the home through an examination of selected popular, social science and the author informants' own representations. It situates the housewife as both a gendered icon and a lived identity in relation to the social, cultural, material and sensory contexts she inhabits. To understand the status of the housewife it is crucial to acknowledge contemporary discontinuities between theoretical uses of binary dichotomies, the traditional discourses embedded in cultural representations, and how continuities and change are constructed by individuals and constituted in the diversity of everyday lives and actions. The traditional housewife and her knowledge are critiqued, abused, elevated to the supernatural, and lived out as the everyday gendered experience of many contemporary women. The chapter indicates some of the ways in which Spanish and English men and women have situated the housewife as a gendered cultural icon.
