Nobody likes to be called ‘housewife’

ASURVEY showing just over half of women loathe the term “housewife” has mopped up a raft of headlines and ignited what Mrs Merton used to call “a heated debate”. You might have been seduced by the outpouring of indignation into thinking something new is going on. Actually I clearly remember my mother in the 1970s declaring in tones of cut glass crystal: “I cannot stand being referred to as a ‘housewife’. Dear Lord, I may be many things but I am most certainly not married to a house!”

My mother, for reasons known only to herself, preferred to be called “a lady of leisure” yet her frustration with the term housewife revealed a much deeper impatience with the limitations of what should have been an idyllic existence.

They married in 1959 on the generally accepted basis that my father was the hunter-gatherer and my mother the fragrant adornment. In fact he hunter-gathered so successfully she was able to engage what was then referred to as a daily help, an au pair and a gardener to fiddle about with our petunias.

My mother was not shackled to the iron-mangle, on her knees polishing the front steps or eking out mince in a hundred different ways.