The Young Housewife

In 1916, William Carlos Williams wrote against the backdrop of World War I. Significant battles occurred, such as the Gallipoli Campaign, in which the last of the British troops were evacuated from Gallipoli and the Ottoman Empire prevailed over a joint British-French operation to take Constantinople. In the Erzurum Offensive, Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire, but later at the Battle of Wadi, the Ottoman Empire would defeat British forces. However, during this time, Williams was working as a physician, practicing medicine by day and writing at night.

Williams held rich and varied views of women, and his poetry was often sexually charged. Women’s roles at this time were quite diverse, but none of them received much-deserved praise or significance from or in society. “The Young Housewife” is an observation of the male domination that founded domesticity during this period. Because “The Young Housewife” is a commentary on the sexism and oppression experienced by women during Williams’s time, the feminist movement in 1916 is significant to the poem. In February 1916, Emma Goldman, an anarchic political activist, was arrested in the United States after lecturing about birth control. In the same year, Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, and Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, even though New York law at the time prohibited contraception. Sanger’s work set the foundation for the organization that would become Planned Parenthood.

In addition to these major movements of thought and politics, fashion was also changing as a result of the war and the changing cultural atmosphere. Williams nods to these changes in fashion in Lines 7 and 8 of “The Young Housewife,” where the speaker notes the housewife is “uncorseted” and tucks “stray ends of hair.” In Europe in 1916, women were moving into the workforce to take the jobs of the men who were called to war. Corsets and other highly restrictive clothing were hardly appropriate for the intense manual labor of factories, plus there was a shortage of the steel used to create the boning in corsets, as the steel was needed to make machinery and artillery for the war efforts. Hairstyles were also becoming shorter, softer, and simpler. American fashion has always relied heavily on the tastes and trends of France, Italy, and England, so American women were also beginning to ditch the corset and embrace less fitted clothing and looser hairstyles even before the U.S. entered the war. The housewife in the poem reflects these fashion changes, though perhaps timidly since the speaker describes her as “shy” in her “uncorseted” state (Line 7).