the.com/housewife
Unpaid CEO of a company that owns no stock and pays no dividends to her.
means A married woman whose full-time unpaid work is managing a home and family — cooking, cleaning, childcare, and all the logistics that make a household run.
from Straightforward compound of 'house' plus 'wife,' recorded in English since the medieval period, back when 'wife' simply meant 'woman' (as in 'midwife' or 'fishwife') rather than specifically a married one. Curiously, the same word, spoken differently as 'hussif,' narrowed in meaning to a small sewing kit a woman kept — pins, needles, thread — showing how tightly the word bound women to domestic upkeep even in its spinoffs.
- term origin
- recorded since the 1300s, literally hus plus wif
- economic value
- unpaid labor would add trillions to GDP yearly
- usage shift
- now often reclaimed, sometimes ironically, on social media
- global pattern
- women still do far more unpaid care work worldwide