The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the unpaid labor of housewives and compares it to low-wage employees who trade job security for fair pay.
Germaine Greer's quote sheds light on the often-overlooked role of housewives as unpaid workers, drawing a parallel between their situation and that of employees who accept lower wages for job security. While housewives contribute significantly to the household, their lack of compensation and job security mirrors the precarious existence of the lowest paid workers, highlighting issues of economic dependence and the stigma attached to both groups when they find themselves without support.
In practice
In a discussion about gender roles in modern society.
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
Men, I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation. … Gender equality is your issue, too. … I've seen young men suffering from mental illness, unable to ask for help, for fear it would make them less of a men—or less of a man. I've seen men made fragile and insecure by a distorted sense of what constitutes male success. Men don't have the benefits of equality, either.
As women get more powerful, they get less likable. I see women holding themselves back because of this, but if we start talking about the success-likability penalty women face, then we can do something about it.
American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!
I do not think that the lives of women of my generation, as a class, were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time.
Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
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