Just what do housewives with nannies and cleaners do to fill time? Go shopping – and slowly mad, says our correspondent

(…) Married to a film producer and with slews of domestic help, she is part of a burgeoning class of women who neither work nor raise children. It is a group unrepresented in the “war of the mothers” (working v stay-at-home mothers), or any other war for that matter. They can’t beat their chest for the sacrifices made in the name of raising a family (because they haven’t), nor can they claim to have suffered for feminism (because they ditched the day job as soon as they got hitched). They simply fall into a big societal crack.

“Women who delegate everything enter a really nasty place, where they are not working and they are not with their kids,” says Harriet James, a writer and mother of three. “They fall into a kind of vegetative state where life is all about which shade of eau de nil to paint the walls, or what canapé to have for a dinner party. They’ve subcontracted everything else, so the day’s decision becomes where to go for lunch. I see all these rich women who drop their children off at nursery so everyone can see them, but it’s the nannies who do the pickup because the mothers are all out shopping.”

Thus the phenomenon of our time is not women with too much to do, but women with too little. They have degrees and CVs, but are now chained to Agas that they don’t even know how to use. These ladies meet their future husband at university or the office, but, at some point, decide to give up on their career, usually because they will, sooner or later, slow down to reproduce, while their husband continues working and gets the top job. So the women enter a world of designer domesticity. (…)

What fuels the madness is the fact that the less the Merc Mother does, the more endangered her relationships feel. These women believe they maintain a toned body and full diary to keep their husband interested, but ultimately, they become unfulfilled, lifeless and at risk of being removed (or replaced with a younger and cheaper model), without any practical impact on the running of the household. I know several men who dumped their idle wife, but kept the nanny and nothing much changed.

Men, it seems, are becoming less sympathetic with wives who appear to do nothing, or have nothing to talk about. Simply being an appendage is socially unacceptable. I hear more and more men apologising rather than boasting about their nonworking wives. One male friend even threatened to move back to Denmark so his wife would have to return to work. “Here, it’s okay to do nothing, but there, it’s just not,” he says.

My friends who stopped working to raise their children without the help of a nanny were the first to start their own companies, return to school or do charity work when they got older. They never lost their confidence or experienced any sort of meaning gap (if anything, mothering teaches you great life skills, such as patience). Maybe these women would find inner joy tomorrow if they gave the shops a miss and fired the nanny.

Source: Times Online, UK
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