Every time I hear a man complain that women are “too masculine” because we work, I laugh. Women have always worked, especially Black women. The image of the 1950s housewife that men want to resurrect was never real. It was Cold War propaganda, built by Madison Avenue and the Department of Defense to sell the nuclear family as a weapon in the cultural war.
In reality, more women were employed after World War II than during it. That so-called golden age of stay-at-home wives was an invention, not a lived truth. And if you go back even further, history shows how systematically women were stripped of resources and forced into dependence.
Books like Caliban and the Witch document how enclosures of public land cut women off from food, income, and community. The witch trials weren’t about sorcery — they were about land grabs and silencing independent women. Many who were accused were widows or unmarried women who owned property or made a modest living on their own. It was state-sanctioned theft dressed up as morality.
Take the story of Giles Corey in Salem. He refused to enter a plea when charged with witchcraft because he knew conviction meant forfeiting his land. He was pressed to death over three days, repeating only “more stones,” but his silence meant his property stayed with his children instead of the state. Even in death, he outwitted a system designed to strip families of what was theirs.
The pattern is clear: whether through propaganda, enclosure, or accusation, the goal has always been to control women’s labor and resources. Independence was made dangerous, even fatal. And still, women worked. We have always worked. The myth of docile, dependent women is just that — a myth created to mask how much was stolen from us.
