If I’m looking for drama, a Money and Finance web forum is not my go-to. In fact, a Money and Finance web forum is not a place I ever go to at all. But several years ago, I stumbled upon a post by a woman who asked an innocent enough question: “Stay-at-home moms: What do you list as your occupation on your tax returns?”
A virtual hurricane of responses commenced. Replies from the well-meaning non-trolls ranged from homemaker to household manager to housewife to unemployed or N/A.
One said, “Stay-at-home-mom makes it sound like one’s whole existence is based on being a baby factory. Housewife makes it sound like caring for the husband is one’s whole world. Homemaker reflects the pressure of up-keeping….”
Another woman said the word homemaker reminded her of Betty Crocker.
Some people had surprisingly stronger–and ridiculously mean–opinions, like the one who said, “Seriously, since you bring in ABSOLUTELY NO INCOME AT ALL, what difference does it make what you call yourself????…Call yourself whatever you want—not a single soul cares.”
And then there was the brief, yet oh-so-patronizing, response: “You’re not employed, honey.”
Whooee! As you can imagine, I have a few strong opinions of my own about those awful comments. And as you also could have guessed, I asked a bunch of moms about their own job title preference. Their answers ran the gamut from simply mom to stay-at-home mom to homemaker to domestic diva, and—my favorite: slay-at-home mom.
This is not an episode about justifying or validating any given career choices for mothers, so I’m not going to spend time making those arguments or responding to the trolls from the intro. I’m just going to start with a few assumptions:
1. Whatever you call it, taking care of children and managing a home full time is a valid career choice, not just a default and not unemployment. It is hard work. It provides real financial returns for a family.
2. Of course, this career is also a valid option for fathers, which is increasingly more common.
3. Women and men who have additional employment also take care of children and manage their homes.
4. Each family, each mother, and each father has the right to choose what works best for them in any given season. Ideally, this choice should be free of judgement from others.
Now that we’ve laid that foundation, let’s talk about what this episode is about: nomenclature. We’re going to look at the history of what we have called this profession of taking care of children and managing a home and family, and we’re going to examine the pros and cons of some of our options.
Does it matter what we call ourselves? That’s a question I’ve been asking for the three years I’ve been working on this episode. It’s like I plucked a daisy and I keep going back and forth. Does it matter, does it not? Does it matter, does it not?
To some people, including my own mother, it doesn’t. When I asked her, she said,
I don’t care what the heck they call me. I’ve had a lot of people that get offended when they’re called certain things, but I’ve never gotten offended by anything anyone called me. I just know that people don’t mean to offend, and I’m happy to be a stay-at-home mom or a domestic engineer, whatever they want to call me. I just love my job.
But to other moms I interviewed, it matters very much what you write down on that form in the doctor’s office, or what you tell people at a party when they ask you what you do.
As a lover of precise language, I tend to agree with them. So I asked dozens of moms and dads what terms they preferred. I researched the history of words like housewife, homemaker, and stay-at-home mom. I listened to podcasts about the topic, and read and pinned dozens of articles, looked up equivalents in different languages, and even tried my hand at the German art of making up compound words like “kinderguide.”
I vowed that I would not rest until I found—or coined—the perfect word. I had strict requirements: it had to be gender neutral, especially since more and more men are choosing this career path; it had to encompass both taking care of kids and managing a house; it had to have a good social media abbreviation; and no hyperbolic or twee euphemisms allowed.
However, in my search for the one right word, I forgot the main premise of How She Moms. There is no one answer. We each get to choose the job title that we like best. And we may decide to use different job titles for ourselves in different social and professional situations.
So instead of me choosing for you, let’s talk through some of the options and then you can choose for yourself what word or words you want to use, in true How She Moms style.
1. Housewife
Let’s start with the historically oldest term for a person whose primary occupation is to manage a home: housewife. The first recorded use of this term was in 1225, although it was first pronounced more like husewif or hussif, and sometimes even shortened to hussy until that word sashayed off to live a scandalous life of its own in the 1600s. The literal translation means house woman, although there are some historical examples of the term hussif being used for men who run a house as well as women. Interestingly, the word husband translates to house holder, not house man, since of course we know that historically the man was legally the only one who was allowed to own property in many cultures. In the U.S., for example, women weren’t allowed to own property until 1848 and the law wasn’t widely recognized until the early 1900s. A 2019 study by the World Bank Group found that 75 world economies still restrict women’s rights to hold property to some extent.
But I digress.
Most of the historical uses of the term housewife are pretty positive, with some notable exceptions that should remain historical (see hussy). But now the term housewife is generally considered outdated. Even before the tv series, the term “housewife” smacked of desperation, inferiority, and servitude. J.K. Rowling saw it too, adapting it to poor Dobby and the other house-elves, enslaved and desperate for a sock to call their own.
I know I said I was going to share both pros and cons, but I don’t really see many pros about rehabilitating this outdated term.
2. Homemaker
The term homemaker came on the scene in 1876. It puttered around for a while, until gaining traction in the 70s, especially when my new hero, first lady Betty Ford, started advocating for it. Here’s an excerpt from an interview in a 1976 issue of Good Housekeeping, written by a woman with the unique name of Winzola McLendon.
She writes, “As First Lady, Betty Ford is very concerned about the lack of appreciation for the role of women as homemakers — a word she likes better than housewife “because that’s what you are doing, making a home.” It’s a concern she shares with her husband. Earlier this year, President Ford told a group of Future Homemakers of America, “I regret that some people in this country have disparaged and demeaned the role of the homemaker…homemaking is not out of date and I reject such accusations.”
Betty puts it another way, “Homemakers are the backbone of our society. They’re the ones who influence young people. Family culture is the very beginning of everything.”
But Betty didn’t take sides. She made it clear that a woman should be free to choose either a career outside or inside the home and should be respected for both. She says,
“We have to take the ‘just’ out of ‘just a housewife’ and show our pride in having made the home and family our life’s work… What’s this about the liberated woman being a career woman?… A liberated woman is one who feels confident in herself and is happy in what she is doing. A woman who is satisfied with her life at home is just as liberated as a woman with a career outside the home. What is important…is that a person has the option to decide the direction of her own life and that she makes that decision herself, without pressures restricting her choice.”
Way to go Betty!
The rest of the article is fascinating and well worth a read, especially the part where she talks about potential options for compensation for homemakers. I also loved the part where it talked about Betty doing cartwheels and handstands with her kids’ cub scout troop.
Interestingly, while the term homemaker felt like a forward-thinking name to Betty Ford and her contemporaries, it has taken on some of the same stigma of the term housewife in our era.
Another drawback to the word homemaker is that at least culturally, it puts more emphasis on domestic skills like cooking, cleaning, and perhaps home aesthetics than parenting.
Brooke Romney is a mother of four boys. For years taking care of them was her full-time gig, until they all started school. Now she writes part-time as well–often about motherhood—and very beautifully, I might add. You can find her writing at brookeromney.com. As someone who shares my love for words, I wondered how she felt about the word homemaker.
If anyone had to say that I was a homemaker, I would be failing because I am less good at the homemaking things. But, I am really great at the motherhood things. So I prefer being identified by my role as a mother. Homemaker is less of something that I feel like I am called to do, and motherhood is something that I feel very called to do. Now, I’m a working mother, and I really identify with both titles because both include mother.
Kendra Hennessy is the host of one of my favorite podcasts: “Mother Like a Boss.” The tagline is: “Making fun out of mom life and putting reluctant homemakers back in the driver’s seat of motherhood.” I loved episode 128 of her podcast, entitled “Why we need homemaking now more than ever.” In these clips from that episode, she shares how she has grown to fully embrace the term homemaker and why she is on a mission to rehabilitate it, and get rid of the notion that it’s an old-fashioned concept.
In that episode, she shares how she has grown to fully embrace the term homemaker. When people used to classify her someone who teaches homemaking skills, she thought:
I’m not teaching people how to shop for candles and throw pillows and make the best tea sandwiches for their friends. I had always come up against those myths, those lies about what homemaking was, and I just sort of believed them. But when I really started to dig in to what Mother Like a Boss was all about and what I was teaching, I realized, “This is what homemaking is.
So here’s how Kendra defines homemaking:
Homemaking is cultivating the space–not the rooms, the space: the physical space, the mental space, the emotional space, and all of those spaces that are carried with us when we leave the home.
In perhaps the best post from that web forum I talked about in the intro, one dad commented, “As a stay-at-home dad for the past 12 years I was on the phone the other day with my friend the stay-at-home dad of 9 years and I told him I was bringing back dignity to the word homemaker. He went on and on about websites and marketing and the like, and I told him no, that defeated the whole purpose. I meant to bring dignity to homemaker simply by being a homemaker, not making an entrepreneurial endeavor out of it. I used to like “house spouse” but the novelty of that has worn off. Why invent “house spouse” when homemaker is already gender neutral?”
3. Stay-at-Home Mom/Dad
The term stay-at-home mom cropped up in the 80s and gained popularity in the 90s, as a way to differentiate them from moms who chose to work outside the home. Herein lies the problem for me—it artificially polarizes the two types of moms, especially at a time when the distinction is blurring.
My friend Scott Lunt, doesn’t like or use the term stay-at-home-dad. He says, “It seems a little too simple or dismissive—mainly because that’s not all I do.”
Many moms and dads, including myself, stay home with their kids but also work at a side gig. And because of technology that didn’t even exist in the 80s, many work in home offices and become work-at-home moms or dads. Now that’s confusing.
With all this nuance, it feels like we’re finally outgrowing all-or-nothing distinctions like stay-at-home mom and working mom, although the crazy web forum I mentioned at the beginning of this episode proves that some animosity and polarization still exists.
It’s hard to hide my bias against the term stay-at-home mom, so I won’t. But I’ll be brief about it. Here are five more reasons I don’t like the term stay-at-home mom.
1. By pitting it as the opposite of “working mom,” it insinuates that the stay-at-home mom isn’t working hard.
2. It sounds like I’m a shut-in who never leaves the house. As a noun, the term stay-at-home, as in “he or she is a stay-at-home,” means someone who does not like to go to parties or events outside the home and is considered boring, according to the Cambridge dictionary.
3. It’s long and clunky.
4. Adding just one comma turns it into a command: “Stay at home, mom!”
5. The acronym for stay-at-home dad is literally SAHD.
However, one of my great joys in life is to find people with the opposite opinion, so I was delighted when I discovered that Brooke Romney, who we heard from earlier, prefers to be called a stay-at-home mom. Here’s Brooke again:
I was a stay-at-home-mom for most of my kids’ childhood. I have only considered myself a working mom for the last year and a half. I still work mostly from home, but I’m also out of the home speaking or attending meetings. Because I’ve had to be away from the home a lot more, it made me love that I was able to be a stay at home mom. I feel like it’s a privilege for anyone to be able to stay home with their kids. I know that privilege also comes with a lot of sacrifice, but I’m grateful. I stayed home with my kids and I helped create a really engaging and inspiring life for them. I was able to do a lot of that for myself in the process. I have no problem with the term. I love it.
This is something I had never thought of, but I love Brooke’s perspective, and it really made me rethink that list of biases against the term stay-at-home mom. This research was not going how I expected. Instead of narrowing down a job title by crossing off undesirable options, I was starting to like all the options.
Keira Greenhalgh, a mother of three, also likes and uses the term stay-at-home mom, but she feels like it could also use some rehabilitation.
I tell people that I’m a stay at home mom. I’ve been guilty of saying, “I’m just a stay at home mom.” I tried not to put that “just” in there. We hesitate to use that term with pride and without shame.
My friend Whitney Thomas recognized that the term stay-at-home mom reflects a greater cultural shift from the home to the kids.
Our mothers, generally, would have said they were housewives. They stayed home to take care of that house! We identify ourselves as a stay at home mom because we stay home to take care of the kids. We’ve become so child focused. We’ve moved from defining ourselves by our ability to keep our houses clean and have dinner on the table to accepting homework clutter on the kitchen table because children have become the focus rather than the home.
I also recently came across a modification for the term stay-at-home mom that I really like—just removing the word stay and calling yourself an at-home mom. I saw this in the description for The Mom Voice podcast.
And then there’s Adrienne Cardon’s twist on the stay-at-home mom title:
It’s interesting. I felt like I was a “stuck at home mom” at the beginning– like life as a stay at home mom was happening to me. I had my first two kids 18 months apart. They are curious children who kept me so busy. I felt like for a while I was tethered to the house. Some of that was because of baby napping schedules.
I don’t know that I would call myself a stay at home mom. I want to do everything. I have done jewelry design and call myself a jewelry designer. I have been a writer, I have been a graphic designer, and a poet. I want to absorb all of these titles. So yes, I do stay home with my children. I am their primary caretaker. But because I’m so ambitious and want to do it all, I think I’m a stay at home mom who wants to be a get out of the house mom. I’ve landed in the sweet spot between constant, chaotic movement and being home. I would brand that as the slay at home mom.
Another thing the stay-at-home prefix has going for it is that it’s the easiest of all the terms to apply to both moms and dads, which is important. And in a big breakthrough for all of us with this profession, Linkedin recently added the job titles stay-at-home mom and stay-at-home dad as one of the options in filling out an online resume.
4. Domestic Goddess/Diva/Engineer
In 1989, Roseanne Barr introduced the world to the term domestic goddess, one of many tongue-in-cheek euphemisms for the job of mothering, like domestic diva, domestic engineer, mother-in-chief. They’re usually well meaning, and some moms get away with them better than others. They can be funny in casual situations, but not necessarily what you want to put on your resume.
5. Home Manager
The next option is home manager. This is a reasonable and maybe less arts and craftsy replacement for the word homemaker, but it does feel a bit impersonal. It is a good description for the job though, and I like it better when paired with caregiver, as in: “I’m a caregiver and home manager.” This also seems like the best option for representing the job on a resume—it could launch a good conversation about how your experience might be relevant to the position you’re applying to.
6. Caregiver/taker
The next term never occurred to me as my job title until I read an article by the always thought-provoking writer and mom, Meg Conley.
One day as she was sweeping her kitchen floor and listening to an interview of then presidential candidate Andrew Yang, he gave her the word she was looking for. She says,
“I nearly dropped the broom when Yang spent a quarter of the interview talking about the value of care taking…. Yang wasn’t pandering to stay-at-home parents. He was preaching their good word, acknowledging their real, economic value…. I cried in my kitchen. Someone saw my work.”
She goes on to say,
“I, a perpetual stay-at-home-parent, have been given words I never had before. I call myself a caretaker instead of ‘just a mom.’ I feel less embarrassed about the work I do every single day. I recognize that what I am doing hasn’t removed me from society—it’s a crucial part of building it.”
This movement to recognize the economic value of the work moms do seems to be gaining momentum, including the work being done by the Marshall Plan for Moms—a plan that would compensate moms for their unseen, unpaid labor. It’s something I hope to explore in more detail in a future episode.
But I digress again. The point here is that the term caregiver or caretaker is another possibility, although caregiver more commonly refers to someone who takes care of the elderly or people with various disabilities or medical conditions. And caretaker sounds like someone who manages facilities or gardens.
Also, side note, isn’t it weird that caretaker and caregiver mean essentially the same thing, yet taker and giver are technically opposites?
7. Home economist/family scientist
The next two terms aren’t really viable in real life, but I thought it was interesting to look at the academic equivalents.
When colleges first started including home economics courses and even majors, it was a big coup for the legitimacy of household work. Eventually, though, it took on a negative or light-weight connotation and most colleges have transitioned to the term family science instead.
Unfortunately neither translate well into job titles. It sounds weird or pretentious to tell another mom at the park that I’m a home economist or a family scientist.
8. Full-time mom/dad
In my limited and unscientific poll, the most common term dads with this job used to refer to themselves was full-time dad.
Interestingly, this is not a popular term for moms at all. In fact, every mom I mentioned this title to objected to it, on the grounds that all moms are full-time moms, whether they have another job or not. It’s not a hat you hang up at the door to the office.
9. Professional mom
I briefly considered the term professional mom, because when taken literally, it could mean one who considers motherhood her primary profession, but it feels like another euphemism, or like you’re trying too hard to make a point.
10. Mom
And then we have simply, “mom.” It may be kind of vague to answer “I’m a mom,” when someone asks what you do, but it is enough.
This is what my friend Rachel Beckstead writes on the form at the doctor’s office.
When I’m talking to someone who asks what I do, I say I’m a mom or a home mom. Most of the people I talk to understand what a mom does. Those who truly understand what a mom does, understand that it’s not just a little job, and it’s not always easy.
Chantel Allen, a life coach at chantelallencoaching.com and host of the Living and Loving your Life Podcast, agrees:
I don’t know why we’ve strayed away from being identified as a mom. You can put the little other things on there, but why is it so bad to state, “I’m a mom.” Being a mom is different for every single person. I think that’s what’s so beautiful about it. Everybody’s job description of a mom is going to cater to the place that they are in their lives.
The danger with using mom here is in the tendency to say “just a mom.” Celeste Davis, a beautiful writer, fell into this trap.
I used to say, “I’m just a stay at home mom.” Stay at home moms aren’t as valued. You go to a dinner party and everyone has interesting careers. They get to you, and you say you’re a mom. No one says, “Wow, tell me more about that!”
This is such a good point. And I’ve thought about it often since talking to Celeste about this. I think most people who struggle with a follow-up response when you say you’re a stay-at-home mom are not just jerks who dismiss you as uninteresting. I think they struggle to continue the conversation because it’s an occupation that tells them nothing about you or your interests.
Most other job titles give a natural segue into a follow-up question. “Oh, you’re a doctor or lawyer. What’s your specialty?” Or “You’re a teacher? What grade do you teach? I will never forget my third grade teacher….”
If you say you’re a stay-at-home mom, I guess the obvious follow up question would be to ask about your kids, but no one wants to get cornered into an hour-long conversation, complete with pictures and braggy stories of little people they’ll probably never meet. And you don’t want to talk about your kids on your night out either. Beyond platitudes about the importance of motherhood, or how hard the job is, there’s no natural cue for a follow-up question.
So my new MO is to talk about both my job and my interests—something I want to talk about that gives a clue into who I am. I’m a stay-at-home mom and a writer. I’m a homemaker and a podcaster. I’m a mom and a cyclist or amateur musician or hiking enthusiast.
Which brings us to the last option we’re going to talk about.
11. Something Else!
When someone asks us what we do, we don’t have to answer with work! Why are we so focused on how people work or make money, anyway? How much more interesting would it be if instead of asking “What do you do?” when we meet someone, we asked “What do you like to do?” I’ve actually started doing this, and it is way more interesting, and tells you a lot more about the person you’re getting to know. Maybe we can start a movement and all start opening with this conversation starter.
But you don’t have to wait for people to ask the right question. You can just interpret the question “What do you do?” as “What do you like to do?” and answer accordingly. Don’t let imposter syndrome get in the way here. You don’t have to earn money doing something or even be very proficient in something to claim it. If you like to paint, claim the title of painter. If you like to build things, call yourself a woodworker. And if you write poetry, like Adrienne Cardon, by all means, call yourself a poet.
I felt really uncomfortable calling myself a poet for a long time. I would say, “Oh, I write poetry.” But I wouldn’t give myself the label of “poet” because I thought I hadn’t earned it. I had technically been published , but I still felt uncomfortable with the label, “poet.”
I met a chef who was launching a TV show. I asked him how he got started in cooking. He said he had no formal background. He did not go to culinary school. He was having some of the same imposter syndrome I had been feeling. I asked him how he had gotten to that point. He told me he went to a party where he would debut himself as a chef for the first time. His solution to his imposter syndrome was so beautifully simple. He bought a chef’s jacket and got his name embroidered on it. He showed up to the party with his name written across the lapel of his jacket and all of a sudden he saw himself as a chef and became a chef. He now has a TV show as a chef. The turning point was deciding to label himself.
I love this image of just putting on the jacket. I hope it helps you think of what jacket—real or metaphorical—you can put on. Adrienne is getting more and more comfortable in her poet’s jacket—or is it more of a turtleneck? In fact, you can hear Adrienne’s poetry for yourself in episode 71, How Adrienne Collaborates with Her Great Grandmother.
My intent when I started researching for this episode was to find one fabulous answer. A new term or a revitalized old term that we could all proudly adopt.
But I suppose all this research has mostly helped me come around to my mom’s way of thinking—maybe it doesn’t matter all that much what my job is called. Maybe it’s fine to have lots of options, for different situations. In fact, maybe it’s kind of cool that there isn’t one term that can adequately encompass everything I do, because I get to just describe myself however I want.
