Get ready for a new WAHM moniker to hit the cyber streets. Are you ready for this? If you work from home online you’re not just a WAHM, you’re a … oh I can hardly get the words out … er, you’re a “mousewife.”
At least according to the UK syndication Mail Online. Too bad they don’t cite the “study” they’re referring to, though I can’t tell who actually coined the term “mousewife.” I have a feeling it wasn’t the people who did the study.
Not that I’m one to get all up in arms about a name. Even “WAHM” (work at home mom) still gets a pretty bad rap and I used to take issue with it myself. Then I realized that uh, I AM a mom and I DO run a business from home. Duh. Just don’t talk to me about promoting this fact to my marketing clients because why the hell should they care? (Whoops, tangent …)
So, if you want to call me a mousewife, I guess I’ll have to suck it up and live with that nickname too.
Maybe what bugs me about the housewife association is that I plain old hate it. My mom called herself a housewife and I hated the term then. I hate it now because it implies something of an era that’s come and (hopefully) gone.
In my mind, a housewife defines herself by all things domestic. That’s perhaps not a bad thing for some women and it certainly didn’t seem so for my own mother, at least at the time. But personally I can’t bring myself to say “I’m a housewife.” It paints such an incomplete picture of who and what I am.
I’m a mother. I’m a business woman. And yeah, I have to clean the toilets sometimes. But my husband is a father, a business man and yep, he cleans toilets too. Does he call himself a househusband when people ask what he does?
Um, no.
When people ask what I do, I say I run a marketing consulting company from home.
When people ask what we “do,” when we introduce ourselves at a party or a networking event, we don’t describe our domestic duties or our domestic titles for that matter. The women of Generation X–the WAHMs I know online and off–describe what they do for a profession, for a living, for money. And somewhere in there they will say they have children including how many, how old, etc. etc.
So we do parenting. But the WAHMs I know would never call themselves mousewives.
Or maybe the article was talking about someone else. I hope so.
About this Alpha WAHM Blogger: Karri is the Alpha WAHM who owns this joint. She also happened to write the book. 
