It's Time to Pre-Order My New Book, HOUSEWIFE!
(And, yes, there's a wee bit of gender identity stuff in it, too)
![Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead by [Lisa Selin Davis]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee481242-dfa9-4f95-8eef-53b32cc6ea6a_331x500.jpeg "Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead by [Lisa Selin Davis]")
People! Please pardon the interruption and shameless self-promotion which is, sadly, integral to professional writerdom these days.
Somehow during my time in the gender rabbit hole these last few years, I wrote another book! It’s both a social history of the American housewife and a look at how the archetype is woven into public policy and private lives. HOUSEWIFE: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead, includes stories of Paleolithic huntresses; radical, militant Depression-era housewives rioting in the streets; a socialist utopia for working moms that briefly existed; government-subsidized and architecturally-enshrined gender roles; very happy “traditional” housewives (who are, in fact, a historical anomaly); trans widows whose husbands didn’t become housewives upon transitioning (and one who did); and much, much more! It is about the changes we need to create a family-friendly America and allow women (and men) to stay home or work full-time, or some combination—more structural change to go with the 20th century’s cultural changes.
I know many of you support me here financially, and I am so eternally grateful for that. If you can find it in your heart/wallet to also pre-order a book, my gratitude will extend! If you can’t afford it, please ask your local library to pre-order. And for those of you in the media, we’re working on setting up podcasts and other appearances for March, when the book comes out.
Many, many thanks to you all.
Lisa
Well, I will say this to the objections: The subtitle is a little tongue-in-cheek. I write about stay-at-home dads and shifting gender roles and all kinds of things in the book, but in the end, it is about how we had cultural change without structural change, which left us ladies hanging. And it argues that the archetypal image of the housewife—an archetype I trace and explode—is being that. But sometimes it's funny! Writers don't have a ton of say in the cover or the title or subtitle, and sometimes are asked to take out entire chapters that don't jive with the mainstream publishing paradigm. Still, I learned a lot working on this book, and am really excited that when I write a book about the youth gender culture war, I will be beholden only to truth, and not publishing politics.
This is relevant to so many discussions I’ve had with other moms my age recently. I might be able to suggest this for my book club (and sneak in some gender identity critique under the radar perhaps?)!