A. Translate the text and express your attitude toward the following assessment of homemaking.

As my wife was out of town last weekend, I had to cook and make sure that the little ones were warmly clothed, that they spent some time playing outside, that they got baths, picked upafter themselves, and so on. In short, I took over a series of chores, many of which I would have performed even if my wife had been home. But I didn't have to plan anything, schedule anything or fit anything into an overall design. I didn't have to see to my children's overall nutrition; I only had to see that they weren't too bored and didn't tear the house down. What I did was episodic, a combination of housework and babysitting. What my wife does is part of an on-goingenterprise: homemaking. Here is an executive role, though neither she nor I had ever thought to describe it as such. Most "traditional" husbands – whatever jobs they work at – are likelier to be ignorant (perhaps deliberately so) of homemaking skills. Homemaking may involve as much a sense of mystique for these husbands as outside work holds for their wives. Men of all classes are increasingly likely these days to help out with the chores, or even take over for a spell,as I did last weekend. And if we aren't careful, we come to believe that we can do easily everything our wives do – if we can only survive the boredom of it. The men who work at professions spend an enormous amount of time doing the mirror image of what their non-career wives may be chidedor even openly criticized for doing. They talk on the phone a lot (perhaps about business, but they often aren't doing business). They hold staff meetings or unit meetings that are hardly different from coffee klatches. A business lunch with a client for whom you have no specific proposal at the moment is not vastly different from a gathering of homemakers in somebody's kitchenette. The main difference is that a man gets to call all these things "work." One reason for the difference is that the details of homemaking are far more visible (to the spouse) than the details of work done outside. As a result, husbands often not only devalue their wives' work but also feel perfectly free to questionthe wisdom of what they do as part of that work. Wives generally know too little about their husbands' work to question any aspect of it. None of this should be taken as a proposal that women be kept out of the labor market. There are women whose talents are so removedfrom home and hearththat it would be criminal to encourage them to become homemakers. There are women who need to earn income, for reasons ranging from fiscal to psychic. Women, who choose careers outside the home, or who have no choice but to pursue careers, ought to be free to do so without any discrimination of any sort. But there are also women who seek outside work primarily because they know their homemaking role is undervalued, by their husbands and by themselves. There is nothing intrinsicabout producing income, on the one hand, or nurturingchildren and managing a household, on the other, that would lead to a natural conclusion that income-production is of greater value. The opposite conclusion would appear likelier, as in the distinction between worker and queen bees, for instance. But worker bees don't claim sole ownershipand discretionover what they produce: they work for the hive. It would go a long way toward changing the onerousworking conditions of homemakers if we could learn to think of family income as belonging to the family, not primarily to the person who happens to bring it home.

прибирати   безперервний     на деякий час     докоряти   занижувати цінність ставити під сумнів     далеке від домашнього вогнища   притаманний виховувати     одноосібне право власності повноваження обтяжливий

B. Answer the questions:

1. What are the responsibilities and skills of today's homemakers?

2. What do they contribute to happy family life?

3. What is your own attitude toward homemaking?

4. Do you think society's current attitude toward homemaking is likely to change in the near future?

Exercise 26. Make up dialogues between:

a) a lady who thinks that homemaking is an art and her husband who considers it a series of more or less unpleasant chores;

b) two men who believe respectively that a decent family life is impossible without: 1) a good homemaker; 2) a competent breadwinner;

c) a sociologist advocating the opinion that the marriage partner who doesn't produce income should be the fiscal dependent of the one who does and his colleague who argues against it;

d) a mother who thinks that a non-career wife can never be happy and her daughter who is engaged to a rich man and is going to become a homemaker;

c) two feminists who consider any mentioning of homemaking as a woman's occupation a survival of the male-dominated world.

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