Isn't Her Grace Amazing! The Women who Changed Gospel Music
Finding Margaret Fuller

Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead

The notion of “housewife” evokes strong reactions. For some, it’s nostalgia for a bygone era, simpler and better times when men were breadwinners and women remained home with the kids. For others, it’s a sexist, oppressive stereotype of women’s work. Either way, housewife is a long outdated concept—or is it?

Lisa Selin Davis, known for her smart, viral, feminist, cultural takes, argues that the “breadwinner vs. homemaker” divide is a myth. She charts examples from prehistoric female hunters to working class housewives in the 1930s, from First Ladies to 21st century stay-at-home moms, on a search for answers to the problems of what is referred to as women’s work and motherhood. Davis discovers that women have been sold a lie about what families should be. Housewife unveils a truth: interdependence, rather than independence, is the American way.

The book is a clarion call for all women—married or single, mothers or childless—and for men, too, to push for liberation. In Housewife, Davis builds a case for systemic, cultural, and personal change, to encourage women to have the power to choose the best path for themselves.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals the profound ecological impacts of roads, which stretch over 40 million miles across the globe. While often overlooked as mere infrastructure, these roadways pose significant threats to wildlife, resulting in the deaths of a million animals daily in the U.S. alone, and disrupting natural habitats in ways we are just beginning to understand.
  • In Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the lives of four women navigating love, choices, and regrets during the pandemic. Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer, reflects on her past relationships while her friends face their own struggles, revealing the complexities of happiness and self-awareness in a beautifully crafted narrative.
  • Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time.
  • In Shishmaref, Alaska, new seawalls are constructed while residents navigate the many practical and bureaucratic obstacles to moving their entire island village to higher ground. Farther south, inland hunters and fishermen set out to grow more of their own food–and to support the reintroduction of wood bison, an ancient species well suited to expected habitat changes. First Nations people in Canada team with conservationists to protect land for both local use and environmental resilience. In Early Warming, Alaskan Writer Laureate, Nancy Lord, takes a cutting-edge look at how communities in the North–where global warming is amplified and climate-change effects are most [...]