After hearing the sad news of the death of singer Marianne Faithfull on 30 January, I turned back to listen to some old music, and of course the classic The Ballad of Lucy Jordan. But amid this search, I came across this curious review of the song – Bad Poem, Great Song. I confess, the fact that the song was written by a man (Shel Silverstein) was a surprise, but what was curious was the link made to feminist anti-housewife rhetoric of the 1970s.

“The song opens with a brief, dismissive limning of the housewife’s life … then slides into the kind of snide anti-housewife sentiment that seemed to come so easy in the 1970s. Feminism—the notion that as a woman, you could shape your own destiny—and the male embrace of the new sexual ethos combined to create a social order where freethinkers and liberated ladies were at the top, and women burdened by kids and chores were at the very, very bottom.”

I was struck by both the bitterness of the commentary (“I can’t tell you how angry I get when I think about Silverstein writing this song, with his beard and his sandals and his Playboy contract”), and also by how much that debate is the stuff of history with barely an echo in current culture.

Ok, I live in a middle-class political ghetto, but I don’t think I know any women who aspire to be a housewife or expect to be simply a housewife– indeed, quite the contrary, those who have kids turn themselves inside out to maintain employment outside the home. Further, any critique of housewives I recall of late come less from feminism than from business and a neoliberal-informed government which seeks to make everyone a productive worker (and consumer) [and which refuses to recognise housework, care work or raising children as either productive or as work – PhD-land again!]. Indeed, even advances like paid maternity leave are premised on the child-based absence from paid work being a temporary interruption to “normal” working life.

So, has the consigning of Lucy Jordan “housewife” to history been a triumph of feminism in putting women into the public sphere? Or even a truce built on recognising that women should be able to do what they chose? Or something else?

I wish I could say it was a clear triumph and pay tribute to the often-maligned generation of second-wave feminists who did so much to change work and family relations. I was lucky politically in that when I was first learning politics, some of the experienced activists who mentored younger activists were agitators of that second wave – and many of the women I have been lucky enough to know with were a product of that feminism, albeit changing over time.

But while I recognise the ground-breaking work of that (and other) generations of feminists, I am not sure the changing fate of a Lucy Jordan can be simply put down to either a victory of feminism or a truce and re-valuation of household labour. I suspect it has as much to do with changes in the economic base:

• the influx of capital into the housing market and the asset price inflation which now requires two wages (or more) to pay a deposit and mortgage (and live the dream),
• the relentless market drive to consume more (and in more areas of life),
• a shift of the minimum wage from a family wage to singe person’s minimum, and
• a neoliberal positioning of people as first and foremost economic rather than social agents.

In our modern economy, for most women there is little choice but to be workers rather than “simply” / “only” housewives.

I know that sounds like an economic determinism that robs people of agency (and generations of feminism of their victory), but I suspect the old man of political economy might see it as an example of a dialetic relationship between the economic base and the political/cultural superstructure. Or perhaps, in a less structural framing, a suggestion that the outcome of all political action is mediated by a range of economic and social forces. Without feminism Lucy Jordan may still be trapped, but without broader changes in economic forces, the outcome of that feminism would have been different.

It is perhaps not only men who “make history, but not as they please” – but the broader socio-economic forces mean that most people still don’t get to ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in their hair.