Housewives... I’ll miss them even more than white rhinos

SHE has gone the way of the northern white rhino. There is one stuffed, already, in the Natural History Museum, inviting millennials to marvel. ‘My God!’ gimlet-eyed young women exclaim. ‘How could she stand it? Having to iron tea towels, and make dinner, like, EVERY night. To have to rely on a man for money. To put children first. To never, ever see the light of day. The monotony!

‘Home was a cage in a zoo, really, wasn’t it? No life at all. She really is better off extinct.’ Well, maybe one day… In the words of a new survey of 2,000 women, the term housewife is now an ‘embarrassing relic’. A staggering 86 per cent of women believe their expectations have entirely changed in one generation.

We need a high salary, not polished brass, to feel accomplished, while almost half responded that having a job makes them feel more fulfilled than their mothers ever did.

But are we fulfilled, really? Or have we been duped into thinking equality means never, ever having a moment to ourselves? To be surrounded by chaos which, let’s be honest, is the typical modern-day family home: rotting food in a fridge that hasn’t been cleared out since 2002, unpolished shoes, a pile of ironing, unmade beds, a crowd of filthy wheelie bins outside the front door which, of course, has an unwashed step. Technology was supposed to save us, but has it really? Can Alexa, Amazon’s robo-assistant, put on a duvet cover?

I certainly didn’t want to emulate my mother who, beyond being a dinner lady, never had a paying job; she didn’t even have a bank account.

She spent her days wrestling with laundry, cooking everything from scratch and gardening (we ate an awful lot of runner beans). She would save the ironing for after we’d gone to bed, and if she ever did sit down, she invariably had a ball of wool in her lap.

But she never complained. My dad didn’t, either, about having to provide for seven children and a wife, as well as perform manly tasks. It was the natural order.

As a teenager, unaware of how hard the job of running a home actually is, I was never grateful. I used to berate her: ‘You might as well live in Iran!’

But my mum knew her job was important: there wasn’t a single afternoon when I got home from school that she wasn’t there.

Has the workplace made us as fulfilled as we were promised? Are we happier? If we had the luxury of a wife at home, I’m sure that might be the case.

AS IT is, we are peddled propaganda, the lie that we can rustle up a fantastic meal from our store cupboard in our designer kitchen, by the likes of supermum Nadiya Hussain. Problem is, she just makes us feel even more inadequate: who on earth has fresh ginger in their store cupboard? How, seriously, does Nadiya find time to put on eyeliner and lipstick, let alone knot that headscarf?

I don’t have children – I aborted the adoption process when I realised my then husband would leave everything to me; it was hard enough making him buy cat biscuits. And I

CREDIT where it’s due. September Vogue features plus-size (read, normal) model Tess McMillan – she has 45in hips – over ten voluptuous pages. Gorgeous! Next stop, the cover. wonder how on earth mums manage both work and making sure the fridge is full, beds clean, homework done, husband stroked.

Something has to give, and it’s not just the kids’ waistline from too many ready meals and takeaways. Our peace of mind is in pieces: we even compile to-do lists while we’re having sex.

But now that the housewife has hung up her Marigolds (it annoys me that young women are so chippy about chores, as if they are somehow ‘above’ them), I doubt she could ever be cloned, Jurassic Park-fashion.

The tsunami of Cosmopolitans and Instagram postings of Farrow & Ball interiors and columns in the liberal press by angry women whose husbands have left them have warped our minds, making us believe the only respectable life is one of being a slave to a salary, not a home-maker.

A career and a pristine, welloiled home could have worked, if only we hadn’t let men off the hook – of course, there are exceptions – and taken on the yoke of domestic service as well. Instead of looking down on the job of being a housewife, we should give her a round of applause.