A homemaker handles household responsibilities as his or her main daily activity. While not an occupation in the traditional sense, as it is not usually undertaken for monetary remuneration, a homemaker may work full-time to maintain the home environment. The term emerged as part of the 'politically correct' movement. The occupation is typically taken by one adult of a household, such as a parent of a child unless all working age individuals in the household work full-time. If the homemaker is part of the family, a female homemaker is usually termed a housewife, and a male homemaker, a househusband. The domestic consumption work[1][2] of homemakers provide goods and services directly within a household, such as cooking meals, childcare, household repairs, or the manufacture of clothes and gifts. Common tasks include cleaning, cooking, and looking after children.
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In contemporary history, "househusband" is a term used to describe a male parent who is the main caregiver to the children and is the homemaker of the household. The role of housewife is that of a female homemaker who is the main caregiver to the children. Historically, gender roles in world civilization see the private parenting responsibilities going to the housewife, while the public social parenting responsibilities are carried out by the father. In recent years, these roles have become less separate and well defined in Western cultures. The homemaker foundations are cooking, textiles, pottery, storage, manufacturing, music, language, medicine, and teaching.[3]
Housework is not always a lifetime commitment; many, for economic or personal reasons, return to the workplace. In previous decades, there were many mandatory courses for the young to learn the skills of homemaking. In high school, courses included cooking, nutrition, home economics, family and consumer science (a.k.a. F.A.C.S) and food and cooking hygiene. This last one may underlie the tradition that a homemaker is portrayed wearing an apron. More recently, most of these courses have been abolished, and many youths in high school and college would be more likely to study child development and the management of children's behavior.
The method and function of housework are different in the industrial world and in other countries, with the balance of convenience, labor-saving devices and easier methods being in the industrial homemaker's favor. The reason for this is that mechanical invention has been applied extensively to different tasks of the home. Inventors have developed mechanical labor-saving devices not only for the shop and office, but also for the home. There are, on the market, thousands of household tools, devices and equipment for every domestic need. It only remains for the homemaker to choose between them.[3]
Another reason for the great supply and demand for household labor savers in the industrial world is that the homemaker has to face the increasingly complex problem of scarce domestic help. With cheap labor, the need for the mechanical replacers of labor, or "mechanical servants," will not be keenly felt, however, the majority of homemakers perform their own household tasks. It is to this class of homemakers who are actively concerned in domestic work that the labor-saver and improved modern tool most appeal. The homemaker's time and effort are worth conserving by every means. Homemakers should therefore, be eager to buy and use all the household tools which will save her strength and time and liberate her from household drudgery.[3]
While some homemakers are "handy" with tools, the fact remains that most homemakers are unfamiliar with the different principles involved in mechanical tools and devices. The homemaker, however, is called to have knowledge of the principles of applied mechanics. Courses in school physics unfortunately leave a student with little practical knowledge that can be applied to domestic equipment. The gaining of knowledge concerning domestic tools may lead the homemaker to purchase good quality equipment, which may assist in saving time and labor.[3]
Most modern-day houses contain sanitary facilities and a means of preparing food. A kitchen is a room or part of a room used by the Homemaker for cooking and food preparation. In the West, a modern kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets. Many homemakers use a microwave oven, a dishwasher and other electric appliances. The main function of a kitchen is cooking or preparing food but it may also be used for dining and entertaining.
Cooking is the process of preparing food by applying heat, selecting, measuring and combining of ingredients in an ordered procedure for producing safe and edible food. The process encompasses a vast range of methods, tools and combinations of ingredients to alter the flavor, appearance, texture, or digestibility of food. Factors affecting the final outcome include the variability of ingredients, ambient conditions, tools, and the skill of the individual doing the actual cooking.
The diversity of cooking worldwide is a reflection of the aesthetic, agricultural, economic, cultural, social and religious diversity throughout the nations, races, creeds and tribes across the globe. Applying heat to a food usually, though not always, chemically transforms it, thus changing its flavor, texture, consistency, appearance, and nutritional properties. Methods of cooking that involve the boiling of liquid in a receptacle have been practised at least since the 10th millennium BC, with the introduction of pottery.
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Housekeeping by the homemaker is the care and control of property, ensuring its maintenance and proper use and appearance. A home is a place of residence.[4] In a private home a maid or housekeeper might be employed to do the housekeeping. Housework is work done by the act of housekeeping. Some housekeeping is housecleaning and some housekeeping is home chores. Home chores are housework that needs to be done at regular intervals,[5] Housekeeping includes the budget and control of expenditures, preparing meals and buying food, paying the heat bill, and cleaning the house.[6] Outdoor housecleaning chores include removing leaves from rain gutters, washing windows, sweeping doormats, cleaning the pool, putting away lawn furniture, and taking out the trash.[7]
Housecleaning by the homemaker is the systematic process of making a home neat and clean. This may be applied more broadly that just an individual home, or as a metaphor for a similar "clean up" process applied elsewhere such as a procedural reform. In the process of housecleaning general cleaning activities are completed, such as disposing of rubbish, storing of belongings in regular places, cleaning dirty surfaces, dusting and vacuuming. The details of this are various and complicated enough that many books have been published on the subject. How-to sites on the internet have many articles on housecleaning. Tools include the vacuum cleaner, broom and mop. Supplies such as cleaning solutions and sponges are sold in grocery stores and elsewhere. Professional cleaners can be hired for less frequent or specialist tasks such as cleaning blinds, rugs, and sofas. Professional services are also offered for the basic tasks. Safety is a consideration because some cleaning products are toxic and some cleaning tasks are physically demanding. Green cleaning refers to cleaning without causing pollution. The history of housecleaning has links to the advancement of technology.
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Laundry refers to the act of washing clothing and linens, the place where that washing is done, and/or that which needs to be, is being, or has been laundered. Various chemicals may be used to increase the solvent power of water, such as the compounds in soaproot or yucca-root used by Native American tribes. Soap, a compound made from lye (from wood-ash) and fat, is an ancient and very common laundry aid. Modern washing machines typically use powdered or liquid laundry detergent in place of more traditional soap. Once clean, the clothes have been wrung out — twisted to remove most of the water. Then they were hung up on poles or clotheslines to air dry, or sometimes just spread out on clean grass.
Washing machines and dryers are now fixtures in homes around the world. In some parts of the world, including the USA, Canada, and Switzerland, apartment buildings and dormitories often have laundry rooms, where residents share washing machines and dryers. Usually the machines are set to run only when money is put in a coin slot. In other parts of the world, apartment buildings with laundry rooms are uncommon, and each apartment may have its own washing machine. Those without a machine at home or the use of a laundry room must either wash their clothes by hand or visit a commercial laundromat.
A clothes dryer is a household appliance that is used to remove moisture from a load of clothing and other textiles, generally shortly after they are cleaned in a washing machine. Most dryers consist of a rotating drum called a tumbler through which heated air is circulated to evaporate the moisture from the load. The tumbler is rotated relatively slowly in order to maintain space between the articles in the load. In most cases, the tumbler is belt-driven by an induction motor. Using these machines may cause clothes to shrink, become less soft (due to loss of short soft fibers/ lint) and fade. For these reasons, as well as environmental concerns, many people use open air methods such as a clothes line and clotheshorse.
Laundry starch is used in the laundering of clothes. Starch was widely used in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries to stiffen the wide collars and ruffs of fine linen which surrounded the necks of the well-to-do. During the 19th century and early 20th century, it was stylish to stiffen the collars and sleeves of men's shirts and the ruffles of girls' petticoats by applying starch to them as the clean clothes were being ironed. Aside from the smooth, crisp edges it gave to clothing, it served practical purposes as well. Dirt and sweat from a person's neck and wrists would stick to the starch rather than to the fibers of the clothing, and would easily wash away along with the starch. After each laundering, the starch would be reapplied. Today the product is sold in aerosol cans for home use.
Homemakers that follow predictive maintenance techniques determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to predict when maintenance should be performed. This approach offers cost savings over routine or time-based maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted. Homemakers that follow preventive maintenance methods ensure that household equipment and the house are in satisfactory operating condition by providing for inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures either before they occur or before they develop into major defects.
Home maintenance involves the diagnosis and resolution of problems in a home, and is related to home maintenance to avoid such problems. Many types of maintenance are "Do it yourself" (DIY) projects. Maintenance is not necessarily the same as home improvement, although many improvements can result from repairs or maintenance. Often the costs of larger repairs will justify the alternative of investment in full-scale improvements. It may make just as much sense to upgrade a home system (with an improved one) as to repair it or incur ever-more-frequent and expensive maintenance for an inefficient, obsolete or dying system. For a DIY project, also useful is the established limits on time and money investments before a repair (or list of repairs) become overwhelming and discouraging, and less likely to ever be completed.
Homemakers that have a lawn responsibility adhere to seasonal lawn care practices, which vary to some extent depending on the climate zone and type of grass that is grown (whether cool season or warm season varieties). Various recognized method used by homemakers in lawn care are observed in any area. At spring or early summer, homemakers seed, sod, or sprig a yard when the ground is warmer. Summer lawn care by homemakers have lawn mower at high cutting for cool season grass, and lower cutting for warm season lawns. At the autumn time, lawns are mowed by homemakers at a lower height and thatch buildup that occurs in warm season grasses are removed.[8] Homemakers do add sandy loam and apply fertilizer, containing some type of wetting agent. Cool season lawns are planted in the autumn with adequate rainfall. Lawn care in the winter is minimal, requiring only light feedings of organic material, such as green-waste compost, and minerals to encourage earthworms and beneficial microbes.
Household management by the homemaker is the act of overseeing the organizational, financial, and day-to-day operations of a house or estate. It differs from housekeeping, which consists of the physical maintenance and cleaning of a house.
Household purchasing refers to homemaker's attempt to acquire goods or services to accomplish the goals of the household. Though there are several households that attempt to set standards in the purchasing process, processes can vary greatly between households. Typically the word “purchasing” is not used interchangeably with the word “procurement”, since procurement typically includes other concepts. Home makers decide the market goods that the household will buy, such as the groceries which have been bough at a grocer's.
Another important purchase handled by homemakers is the power source used for appliances. Home or other building heating may include boilers, furnaces, and water heaters. Compressed natural gas is used in rural homes without connections to piped-in public utility services, or with portable grills. However, due to being less economical than LPG, LPG (Propane) is the dominant source of rural gas for natural gas-powered ranges and/or ovens, natural gas-heated clothes dryers, heating/cooling and central heating. The amount of usages is determined by factors such as natural gas prices.
Homemakers manage household workers or "domestic servants". The "servant problem" is due to the fact that people formerly engaged in household service have entered industries and prefer these conditions with high pay and freer hours to the more confining conditions which govern housework at present. Even with normal industrial conditions, there is every indication that service for the home will be increasingly more difficult to obtain — and also to keep. It is therefore worth while for any employer of household labor to study the "servant problem,"[9] understand its causes, and particularly give attention to the relation and attitude between the homemaker and any employee an individual may engage.[3]
In sociology, household work strategy is the division of labour between members of a household, whether implicit or the result of explicit decision–making, with the alternatives weighed up in a simplified type of cost-benefit analysis.[1][2] It is a plan for the relative deployment of household members' time between the three domains of employment:
Household work strategies may vary over the life-cycle, as household members age, or with the economic environment; they may be imposed by one person or be decided collectively[10].
A homemaker is a person whose main job is to take care of their own family home and children. Both men and women can be homemakers, but traditionally the job of homemaker has been done by women.
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Because it has been the traditional job of a woman to be a homemaker, a woman who spends most of her time caring for the family home has been called a "housewife". This word is not used on government forms any more, because it is "gender specific language". (A gender specific word is one that tells whether a person is male or female, for example: "Headmistress" is gender specific, "School principal" is not.) From the 1970s onward, gender specific words are regarded as discrimination. The word "housewife" is still used in ordinary speech. If a man is the main homemaker, then the word "househusband" is used for a joke. The word started being used in the 1970s to show that gender specific language could sound silly. Other terms that started being used in the late 1900s are "housegoddess", "homeprofessional" and "home and family facilitator".
For many thousands of years, men have been thought of by society as the main "breadwinners" in families. This means that it has been the job of men to do work that either hunted food, grew food or earned money to pay for food, while the women have cared for children, prepared food for eating, cleaned the house, and made and cared for clothes.
In societies where people are hunters and gathers, for example the traditional society of the Australian aboriginal people, it is the men who do the hunting of animals for meat, and the women who do the gathering of other types of food such as grain, fruit and vegetables. One of the reasons is that a married woman usually had children and babies. It is much easier to gather fruit with a baby on your hip than to hunt a fast-moving animal. Even in a society where homes were very simple and people did not own very many things, men and women did different jobs.
In rural societies, where the main work is farming women have also taken care of gardens and animals around the house, and helped men with heavy work whenever a job needed doing in a hurry, usually because of the season.
Examples of the heavy work that a traditional "housewife" (homemaker) in a rural society would do are:
An urban societies is when most people live in towns and cities. In urban societies, since ancient times, most men did work that earned money. They worked in factories, shops, banks and other businesses as well as churches, schools and the town council. It was seen as the job of a woman to be a "housewife" (homemaker).
But often, what really happened was something different. Often, if a family had a business, then not just the husband but also the wife would work to make money in the business. This has been happening since ancient times.
Every society always has some women who never marry. They might stay at home and do housework for other family members, or they might work outside the house like a man. In many urban societies, there has not been many jobs that a woman was allowed to do. In modern society there are still strong traditions about the jobs that women do.
In the 19th century (1800s) more and more women began to stop being homemakers and began to do jobs that men usually did. At this time many big factories were set, first in England then in other countries as well. Thousands of young women went to work in factories.
Other women, like Florence Nightingale stopped being housewives and did dirty dangerous jobs, even though they were rich and did not need to work. A famous surgeon called James Barry is believed to have been a woman in disguise. (She would never have been allowed to go to medical school.) Even though things like this happened, in most families where there was a husband and wife, people thought it was the job of the husband to earn money and the job of the woman to be a "housewife" (homemaker). Women were often very proud to be a good homemaker and have their house and children spotlessly clean, their husband's shirts neatly pressed and tasty meals to eat every night.
In the first half of the 20th century (1900s) there were two big wars (World War I and World War II) that were fought by men from many countries. While the men were at war, their wives went to work to keep the countries running. Women, who were also homemakers, worked in factories, businesses and farms. At the end of both wars, many men had died, and women kept doing many of these jobs.
By the 1960s there was still an idea that it was alright for a woman to work and be a "career girl" (which was what they called a young woman with a well-paying job) until the woman got married, when she should stop work and be a "housewife" (homemaker). Many women in the 1970s believed that this was not treating men and women equally, and that women should do whatever job they were able to do, whether they were married or not.
At this time, when more and more women had good educations and were able to earn a lot of money, in some families (usually if there were young children to care for) the husband would be the person that was the homemaker. (See above:The term "homemaker)
In the late 20th century, it became harder and harder for a family to live on the wage of a man who has just an ordinary job. Many women who are mothers cannot stay at home and make homemaking their first job. Nowadays, in many families where both the husband and wife do paid work, both partners share in the "housework" and caring for the children. In other families, there is still a traditional idea that housework is only a woman's job, so that when a couple get home from work, it is only the wife who works in the house, while the man takes a rest after his day's work.
The job of a homemaker is to take care of a family and the place where the family lives. The usual things that a homemaker does are:
  | AtHomeDad.org - Resources for Stay At Home Dads - AtHomeDad.org | The Stay At Home Dad Oasis - Resources, Information, Connections, and Community for involved dads. |
| | The New Homemaker - Welcome to The New Homemaker! | The New Homemaker |
| | FlyLady - FlyLady.net: Your personal online coach to help you gain control of your house and home |
| | Martha Stewart - Recipes, Cooking Tips, Home Decorating Ideas, Crafts, Gardening, Food and Dessert Recipes, and Entertaining from Martha Stewart |
| | Slowlane.com Stay At Home Dads" - Slowlane.com Stay-At-Home Dad Stay At Home Father Resource |
| | The excellent wife. - Amazon.com: The Excellent Wife: A Biblical Perspective: Martha Peace: Books |
| | Playing House: Homemaking for Children - Playing House: Homemaking for Children |
| | The Retro Housewife - Retro Housewife - Putting pride back into the housewife! |
| | Grahini a Indian House wife - Housewife, Indian Housewife, House Wife, Gruhini, Indian Girl, Desi, Grahini the Woman: For Women Who Want To KNOW |
| | Feminist Housewives - Suspended Account - By Arvixe |
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