from a women’s magazine in the 1950s It’s taken me almost a year to address the change from “The Solitary Arc” to “Pristine’s Good Housemaker Adventures”"How exactly is this website a “Good HomeMaker” page?” I have often been asked. I don’t fancy myself any different from many transgirls when it comes to the dream lifestyle. Why is it that transwomen have this desire to return to the 50s, where men were men and women were women? I guess it’s the clear demarcation. Oh I admit it! I love it when men tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about and proceed to explain it all. (A bit on that tomorrow). There’s nothing quite as delicious as feeling like a daddy’s girl and letting the man take care of business. I too, would want nothing more than to be a Stay-at Home wife, to be taken care of, and be protected by a strong loving man. I mean, doesn’t every girl? (No matter how little they want to admit it publicly)

The distinction one has to make is that this has got nothing to do with feminist politics at all. Having minored in Gender/Women Studies at Douglas College in Rutgers, I think I have some idea of what I am talking about. To be the obedient 50s wife is a creative choice. It is a decision to recreate and live in a diorama that Stephanie Coontz has termed “the way it never was.” It has been well-documented that the portrayal of the 50s housewife was a sociological invention to redirect women back into the homes once the men returned from war. How else would they free up the traditional male jobs occupied by the women during wartime? The Harriets and June Cleavers were fictitious cosmologies that instructed women to return to their Levittown homes. Betty Friedan gave that detour a name.

The difference here is that there is a choice. Now I can’t speak for any other trans women. But I’ve had good jobs, a good paying career, and the freedom to pursue whatever occupation my heart desired. Of freewill, I left all that behind and am choosing (a work still in progress) the occupation of stay-at-home wife. As a gauge of how far removed this concept is from a woman forced to return to the home (or in my case, the popular association to the docile, submissive mail-order Asian bride), I can actually recreate the entire setting without a husband or a man. It’s something I have only recently realized. Of course, it would be far better to have someone to dote on, wave off at the beginning of the workday and greet at the end of one.

In Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, there is one passage that tolled like wedding bells:

It turned out that the whores of The Curtain were the most old-fashioned and conventional women in Jahilia. Their work, which could so easily have made them cynical and disillusioned (and they were, of course, capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors), had turned them into dreamers instead. Sequestered from the outside world, they had conceived a fantasy of ‘ordinary life’ in which they wanted nothing more than to be obedient, and yes – submissive helpmeets of a man who was wise, loving, and strong. That is to say: the years of enacting the fantasies of men had finally corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of hearts they wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all. The added spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all into a state of high excitement…and in a thousand ways enacted the dream-marriage they had never really thought they would have.

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